- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Well, one week of the AFL trade period down, and now the clock is really ticking with just four ‘business days’ of trading left to go – it all comes to an end at 2pm AEDT on Thursday.
Before we get onto that though, here’s a quick round-up of the deals done on Friday.
Jack Steele officially joined St Kilda as widely expected, for the price of a second-round draft pick. Seems like a reasonable enough deal, and Steele will be an excellent addition to the Saints.
Roarers were in near unanimous agreement that the Saints win the deal on our rate-the-trade poll – 83 per cent voting a St Kilda win.
Secondly in what will be remembered as one of the most bizarre deals done in history, Sam Mitchell officially joined the West Coast Eagles for a swap of late draft picks – No.54 and No.72 went with Mitchell to the Eagles, Hawthorn got No.52, No.70 and No.88 back.
Strong agreement to one side on this one as well, with 68 per cent of voters saying that the Eagles come out winners. It’s hard to argue with that – obviously there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge, but it’s not off the cards that Mitchell could win a fifth premiership there.
The Hawks also passed that pick No.52 onto Sydney and got pick No.57 back in return, finalising the Tom Mitchell deal from earlier in the week.
Opinion was a bit more split on this one with 45 per cent believing the Saints were winners, and 35 per cent voting in favour of the Hawks. For mine, it’s the potential of Hawthorn to drop a little next year and the value of their first-round pick to rise that makes the Saints big winners.
However, you can understand why the Hawks would pay up – pick 10 appears essential to their goal of snaring Jaeger O’Meara, and that’s one of the two big deals that, when completed, I suspect will set of an explosion of trading.
What’s being reported at the moment is that Hawthorn will trade pick No.10 and a player to the Suns and get O’Meara back in return. What’s not clear is who that player will be – they’ve got rumours of Jordan Lewis going to Melbourne and Billy Hartung and Ryan Schoenmakers going to Brisbane, but who is going to Gold Coast? We don’t know.
One option for the Hawks might be to make this a three-way deal, and ask the Lions to pass on Pearce Hanley to the Suns while giving the Suns pick No.10 and the two players mentioned above to the Lions. Just my own musing, but it could satisfy all three parties.
At any rate, both Hawthorn and Gold Coast have a few other trades pending this off-season and getting the O’Meara deal done will mean they move on to those. Don’t be surprised if there’s as many as five or ten deals that are finished up as a result of O’Meara moving, hopefully early next week.
It’s a simillar state of affairs with Carlton, Adelaide and Bryce Gibbs. It’s looking likely now that Adelaide won’t pass on a player to the Blues, simply because they can’t find a suitable player who wants to leave, and a trade along the lines of pick No.13 and a second-round pick – either Adelaide’s future second, or one acquired from another club for Jarryd Lyons – will probably be the deal.
That’ll allow Carlton to make a deal with GWS for Caleb Marchbank and maybe others, the Western Bulldogs to decide between offers from Carlton and North Melbourne for Nathan Hrovat, and then after that to officially acquire Travis Cloke from Collingwood, and then Collingwood to move on to picking up Will Hoskin-Elliott from GWS.
It’s all waiting to explode next week, basically! Clubs can’t lodge paperwork over the weekend, but they can announce trades and may do so.
There were two notable AFL trade rumours to pop up on Friday.
The first was that Marcus Adams after just one year in the AFL reportedly wants a trade home to Western Australia – but is happy to serve out his contract for 2017 at the Western Bulldogs, which looks to be the most likely result.
The second was that Todd Goldstein might seek a trade to West Coast, a proposition which seems utterly bizarre. There are a fair few rumours being spread around about why it might happen, none of them showing enough factual basis at this point to be worthy of being repeated here.
One last thing worth mentioning, the deadline for clubs to lodge free agency deals is this Sunday night, so we may see some movement on this front over the weekend.
Mitch Brown and Ricky Henderson are the players to keep an eye on. Both look likely to move but don’t have any clear suitors at this stage – so it’ll be either a surprise signing, or they’ll be left standing at the altar on Sunday night.
Zac Clarke is also weighing up his options but the belief at the moment is that he’ll choose to re-sign with Fremantle rather than accept a deal with cross-town rivals West Coast.