mal wrote:Absolute bulls..t , the most dumbest, ridicoluos, absurd, stupendous, draconian
and degrading AFL/SANFL rule which does not permit poor WILLETTS from being
able to play for Glenelg this week.
The star Glenelg defender played about 15 games for the bays and then played
about 3-4 games for Port Power.
Yet some players qualify after playing 3 games during the year and playing
nearly all year for the AFL teams.
CRAPP!
From a big picture point of view I actually do not mind the fact that they are not playing becasue it allows us to get game time into our players. Realistically we are not (and hopefully for the boys sake too) going to see much of Logan, Willets & Douglas next year, so we need to ensure young blokes such as Austin, Redden, Lally etc get an opportunity to experience league footy and learn more about the caper for when they play next year. More senior players such as Sundqvist, Allan, etc get more game time too. The more games our players play as a unit the better they will be long term, provided we can keep them at the club i.e not off to play country footy & ammo footy. Even better one of the young blokes may play a blinder and it helps them get picked up which means $$$ so we can get another recruit or develop our club off the field i.e. gym equipment
I don't want to sound defeatist or preparing myself for failure but if someone had told me at 7:35 pm on the 31/03 this year that we can fast forward to rd 23 now and you will be 10 & 9 and playing for a finals spot in the last game I would have said yep no worries I'll take that after the last six years the Glenelg Footy Club have experienced. I thought this year we would win about 7-8 games, play so good footy in patches but our worst would see us non-competitive against the top 3 clubs. However we have been much more consistant and even but have been exposed for lack of depth. Lack of depth can be overcome by giving more opportunity to your lower rung players which is what will occur this Saturday with no Hinge, Willets, Logan and Douglas available.
However now that we are in this postion I sure as hell want us to win and believe we can provided we play four quarters of hard committed footy.
But I'm more than happy to cop a loss (competive one mind you not a soft loss) if it means in the long term the players that will wear the guernsey next year got more experience playing pressure footy and learn from the game so that they have a better understanding on the effort and application required to play consistant yeaar in year out finals footy.
The long term aim of the Glenelg footy club and its supporters is to return to a consistant year in year out finals competitor like we were when I was growing up. The last thing i want is for us to make the finals like we did in '99 and then go backwards and have to rebuild again.
Consistent long term development built on a solid foundation or a core group of players who are Glenelg players first and formost. The AFL listed players are important but they are the cream on top of your club not the bread and butter core of long term continued success like we saw with centrals in the early 90s as they slowely developed and Sturt in teh mid to late 90s as you saw them develop from mid '96 on to playing a GF in 1998.
However go you mighty TIGES this weekend!!! Eat 'em alive...
One thing you can say about us this weekend if we win is that we haven't brought a finals spot buy spending big coin on ex-AFL players
Damn crash, there were a lot of good threads I contributed to. 
