SA Footy

After a post from another forum member I have begun to wonder if West Adelaides list this year is as good as the list that they had last year?

Last year by this time of the year the club had managed five wins yet trailed away at the end of the season. Currently the club sits with one win on the board.

Former coach Wayne Weidemann is coaching at Phos Camden, has an 8 win 2 loss score and his side is top of the A2 Ladder.

My thoughts are that people perhaps rate VFL recruiting a little higher than may be a good idea. West recruited heavilly into the best VFL players that they could find and it would appear that a number are struggling to meet the standard of the SANFL. Not to say that wont change in the future though, yet for the first half of the season that has occured. Ex Westies player Salim Hassan has been good in patches yet not really back to his SANFL form as yet and the same thing about playing well in patches could be said of other players too. Cudpido and Brown are clearly high quality consistant players though.

Thoughts?

Sojourner, this time last year we'd won 2 games, not 5. (The last time we won 5 or more games in a season we made the finals.)
And we didn't recruit heavily from the VFL. There are 15 new players to the club this year, 2 were recruited from the VFL. One is out for most of the year injured and the other's been pretty good value and was our best against North last week.

[quote="Sojourner"]

Former coach Wayne Weidemann is coaching at Phos Camden, has an 8 win 2 loss score and his side is top of the A2 Ladder.

I think you'll find Modbury are top with 10 wins & 0 losses.

nickname wrote:Sojourner, this time last year we'd won 2 games, not 5. (The last time we won 5 or more games in a season we made the finals.)
And we didn't recruit heavily from the VFL. There are 15 new players to the club this year, 2 were recruited from the VFL. One is out for most of the year injured and the other's been pretty good value and was our best against North last week.

Let me take that back then

the bottom line is, our playing list, as a team, is not up to standard of sanfl. recruiting from the vfl was just another option that we as a club went down,lets face it, what we have done in the past certanly has not worked, another disipointing year for the west adelaide football club

If it doesn't change significantly then we will be in the same situation next year. There are too many players getting a game that just simply shouldn't be. Unfortunately we have recruited quantity not quality for too many years now and it is certainly showing with the results we are getting. We need to focus on getting a few quality people in and promoting the kids that show potential and suffer the losses for another season or two and build the side from getting good footballers and people over a number of years.

the trouble with promoting kids , is that if there any good, the afl snap them up,you can not blame them for going, but a club like ours is left with hugh holes to fill and then your back to square one again, it happened to westies back in 2004. clubs like centrals seem to hold the key to be able to mix that blend of youth and older players for so long,the results speak for themselves

AND here's me getting told that westies had a squad that should be top 3!!!! that was only last year........by a couple of westies supporters

mighty_tiger_79 wrote:AND here's me getting told that westies had a squad that should be top 3!!!! that was only last year........by a couple of westies supporters

Obviously ones who are not good judges of a good footballer . Also a bit of wishful thinking.

Another issue not really discussed here is that there are virtually no jnrs that have developed into SANFL league players.

They have either been good reserves players and not been quite good enough to go on with it or they have been AFL draftee's.

Not enough in between. Is that just bad luck or is it they way we have gone about junior development over the last 6-8 years? Rumor is that we have a few more league hopefuls in the juniors at the moment than we have for the past few seasons.

It is much easier to recruit non club juniors to your team if you already have a strong base of club juniors already in the league team. It's what Centrals have done so well for so long.

I would need a Glenelg supporter or two to verify this but looking at it from the outside, the bays resurgence seems to be based on a lot of local boys and some great key position imports.

At the moment most of our run of the mill players are imports which makes it hard to get anywhere.

Imports are great but we need to build our base on local, through the juniors, talent. The simple fact is there is not enough of them up to SANFL standard and until there is we are going to struggle no matter how good our recruiting is.

Lets hope the people that count down in westie land are recruiting for the juniors just as hard as they are for the seniors.