AFL draft regrets — which stars could have been at your club?
BUDDY a Tiger, Nathan Fyfe at Carlton and Joel Selwood in brown and gold. Jump in our time machine and see who could have been at your club.
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THERE is a popular genre of fiction known as alternative history.
The idea is to imagine how events might have panned out if things had transpired slightly differently at a key historical turning point — for example, if the Vikings had successfully colonised North America.
The results are of course pure speculation, but they shed some light on how we arrived where we are.
The same exercise can be applied to AFL recruiting, with interesting — and often painful — results.
How would Paul Roos’ line-up look now if Patrick Dangerfield, Nic Naitanui, Dustin Martin, Rory Sloane and Jack Darling were running around in Melbourne colours?
They could all have been Demons if recruiters had called out different names on draft night.
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Melbourne famously chose Jack Watts over Naitanui with pick 1 in 2008 and Tom Scully and Jack Trengove with their first two selections in 2009, allowing Richmond to snap up Martin with pick 3.
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Nine clubs somehow passed over Dangerfield in 2007 as he slipped to Adelaide at pick 10 but Melbourne paid the biggest price, using pick 4 on Cale Morton, who is now on the AFL scrapheap.
Also in the club’s catalogue of recent draft failures are Jordan Gysberts — taken with pick 11 in 2009 while the likes of Nathan Fyfe (pick 20), Allen Christensen (40) and Taylor Duryea (69) were all available — Addam Maric — pick 21 in 2007, one before Scott Selwood — Lucas Cook — pick 12 in 2010 while Jack Darling was on the table — and the disaster of 2008 when Melbourne used picks 17 and 19 on Sam Blease and James Strauss. Rory Sloane went to Adelaide with pick 44.
But the Demons are not the only club with skeletons in the draft closet. In fact, a close look at every team’s draft history reveals untold storylines of what might have been.
Richmond fans don’t need reminding they could have had bookends of Lance Franklin and Matthew Pavlich, but chose Richard Tambling and Aaron Fiora instead. Less while known is the decision to recruit battler Luke McGuane with pick 36 in 2004, then watch West Coast call out a blonde forward named Mark LeCras. He would make a handy foil for Jack Riewoldt in the Tigers’ forward line today.
We should point out we are not having a crack at the players involved — it’s not Scott Gumbleton’s fault Essendon took him at pick 2 in 2006 while Travis Boak and Joel Selwood were available.
And the recruiters themselves aren’t always to blame in what is far from an exact science. St Kilda wasn’t to know Luke McPharlin would play 238 games at full-back when the Saints overlooked him in favour of Caydn Beetham (37 games) in 2009.
And the Saints were one of 17 clubs to miss out on Luke Parker, taking Jamie Cripps (now at West Coast) and letting the Swans pick up one of the bargains of the draft at pick 40.
Here’s our pick of your club’s “be kind, rewind” moment when recruiters might have done something differently if they had their time over.
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Originally published as AFL draft regrets — which stars could have been at your club?
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