With Darcy Lang choosing to ply his trade at Carlton signifying the start and end of North Melbourne’s Trade Period it is time to have a look and sift through the reasons for the lack of activity from a club that was so outward going in their chase for Josh Kelly and Dustin Martin.
The list of outs from the North Melbourne Football Club stands at six with the main players being Sam Gibson (Traded to Adelaide) and Aaron Mullett (Delisted).
These two players are big outs although self-inflicted and Mullett especially is an interesting one as they got rid of Brad McKenzie a few years ago in favour of Mullett which I did not agree with.
In regards to their draft position they did not improve that either. I was hoping as a North man that they would go the whole hog and look to get a number of picks in the first two rounds of the draft. This did not happen.
When Andrew Swallow was wanting to be with his brother at the Gold Coast I thought North would have jumped at the chance to offload him, even for a third-round pick but no.
Goldstein was not a genuine possibility of being traded due to his massive price tag. I was hoping quietly that he would be offloaded for a high second round to late first round pick.
North could have spent some of their “War Chest” money to pay a portion of his contract and that may have brought some more bidders to the table.
I remain optimistic for this No.4 draft selection. Hopefully we can see Paddy Dow slip to No.4 although I don’t hold out much hope.
We all now know that North have come out and said rebuild but with older players like Swallow and Goldstein in the side I don’t think this is very beneficial for the club going forward.
North’s major opportunity to accelerate their rebuild was this trade period but unfortunately couldn’t improve their draft position.
This time that North have in the end wasted hopefully won’t cause any major issues for them going forward.
A positive to take out of it was that they did not jump at the first opportunity of getting a player to make up for Kelly and Martin.
It showed that they are looking for a really special player and that does give me as a supporter some excitement for the future.
Looking at my updated team for 2018:
FB: Sam Wright, Robbie Tarrant, Marley Williams
HB: Luke McDonald, Scott Thompson, Jamie Macmillan
C: Ben Jacobs, Ben Cunnington, Mason Wood
HF: Nathan Hrovat, Jarrad Waite, Kayne Turner
FF: Jed Anderson, Ben Brown, Jy Simpkin
FOL: Braydon Preuss, Shaun Higgins, Jack Ziebell
INT: Ryan Clarke, Shaun Atley, Taylor Garner, Trent Dumont
It’s a young team and the likes of Paul Ahern and the draft picks to come after pre-season I’m looking forward to updating this team after draft night.
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