How Low Can They Crow: Matt Turner runs the rule over Adelaide’s recruiting over the past 10 years
Every club has its draft skeletons – and there are plenty of things recruiters can’t foresee. But only GWS, Gold Coast and North Melbourne have had more first-round picks than the Crows in the past decade.
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Plenty of people in AFL circles will tell you every club has draft howlers and trades they want to take back.
They also say recruiting is a five to seven-year process.
“That’s why a lot of recruiters survive forever because it’s bloody hard to analyse how they’re going until years later and then it gets a bit lost in time,” a player agent who did not want to be named told this masthead.
Adelaide’s head of talent, Hamish Ogilvie, has been in his role since 2012.
The Crows’ other main recruiting decision-maker, Justin Reid, has been the club’s list manager for more than nine years.
Along with the late Matt Rendell and David Noble, they were architects of a squad that became a premiership contender and reached the 2017 grand final.
But Adelaide’s recruiting and list build is now in the spotlight because of the club’s slump from finals contender to mid-season strugglers.
Of the 76 players the Crows have added over the past nine years, just one – captain Jordan Dawson – has made the All-Australian team while at the club.
Dawson and ruckman Reilly O’Brien are the only Adelaide best-and-fairest winners.
The Crows have picked 14 players in the national draft’s first-round during the past decade – ranking behind only expansion clubs GWS (28) and Gold Coast (25), and battlers North Melbourne (16) – yet there remain questions about their depth and top-end talent.
Some people this masthead contacted this week remained optimistic about the Crows’ squad, believing it not to be as bad it as critics would suggest.
Others mentioned how it was easy to be an expert in hindsight in a difficult job of predicting how players would develop.
Most agreed notable mistakes over the past decade had played a key role in Adelaide’s underwhelming 4-1-9 start to this year.
TOP PLAYERS LEAVING
Adelaide started the decade by recruiting four All-Australians over a two-year period – the problem was two of them received their blazers while playing for other clubs.
The quartet was Eddie Betts, Matt Crouch, Charlie Cameron and Jake Lever.
Luring Betts from Carlton – when David Noble was Adelaide’s list manager – was undoubtedly one of the Crows’ biggest recruiting successes.
Betts made three All-Australian teams in the tricolours and was instrumental to the club’s surge to the 2017 grand final.
But in the aftermath of losing the premiership decider to Richmond, fellow small forward Cameron and intercept defender Lever left the club.
Cameron has made two All-Australian sides and reached one grand final at Brisbane, while Lever earned team of the year honours, as well as a premiership medal, at Melbourne in 2021.
Two years before their departures, superstar Patrick Dangerfield left West Lakes for Geelong.
“They’re big names,” former St Kilda and Hawthorn list manager Chris Pelchen said.
“And not coincidentally, they’re exactly the types of players Adelaide needs now.
“Charlie Cameron is the opportunistic forward, Lever the versatile defender, Dangerfield the big-bodied midfielder.
“Their losses have cruelled them because they’ve created (list) holes.
“Every club will lose some players but they lost more than other clubs, which means something isn’t right.
“Either the TPP (total player payments) structure has limited their ability to retain players or there’s a cultural issue, or they’ve fallen out with someone.”
Alan Stewart, who was a senior recruitment officer at the Crows for 13 years until 2017, said the departures of Lever and Cameron were massive.
“Losing blokes around 20, 21 who are good players are hard to replace because they were all going to be in your premiership side,” Stewart said.
“I think if Danger continues in our team, on that journey, we win a flag.”
FIRST ROUND QUESTION MARKS
An interstate club’s recruiter looks at three drafts as missed opportunities for Adelaide.
In 2016, the Crows took speedy midfielder Jordan Gallucci at pick 15.
The Victorian was axed after 27 games.
Adelaide was reportedly close to taking 2023 All-Australian ruckman Tim English instead.
In 2018, the Crows selected wingman/halfback Chayce Jones at pick 9 and small forward Ned McHenry at 16.
They had interest in Port Adelaide jet Zak Butters and AFL.com.au’s phantom draft had him landing where Adelaide snared McHenry, but the Power ensured he never got that far.
The interstate club’s recruiter said the Crows selected Jones and McHenry “a bit ahead of where other teams predicted them to be”.
Jones has played 89 games and placed eighth in their best-and-fairest last season.
McHenry has featured 70 times at AFL level, lining up in five SANFL games since the start of 2023.
In 2019, key position player Fischer McAsey became the Crows’ highest ever selection to that time, at No.6.
McAsey quit the AFL in January last year, 10 games into his career, citing a lack of passion to make it at the elite level.
The next seven players taken in 2019 who were not academy tied were: Hayden Young, Caleb Serong (both Fremantle), Sam Flanders (Gold Coast), Kysaiah Pickett (Melbourne), Will Day (Hawthorn), Miles Bergman (Port Adelaide) and Cody Weightman (Western Bulldogs).
Pelchen said the Crows would acknowledge internally but probably not publicly that their first-round picks as a whole had been disappointing.
“Every club has their draft skeletons,” he said.
“I’ve been associated with picking players who don’t perform to the level you expect or injury curtails their career or you get a player like Fischer McAsey who decides to give it away.
“They’re things you can’t foresee but they hurt you when they’re first-round selections.”
A player agent said: “Good clubs do well with their first couple of draft picks and if you do that, you build up your talent base”.
“Jones and McHenry seem to be good blokes and work hard, but they’re small blokes and if you’re that small, you need to have something really special to be drafted early I reckon”.
Adelaide actually entered the 2018 draft with three top-20 selections but traded one (pick 19) to Carlton, along with a 2019 first, for the Blues’ 2019 first-rounder.
The interstate recruiter was baffled by that decision.
“Carlton want to come up and get their guy (Liam Stocker) so you’ve got all the bargaining power,” he said.
“They had no reason to offer Carlton their first as well.”
Ultimately, from four first-rounders Adelaide ended up with Jones, McHenry, McAsey and Luke Pedlar.
The Crows traded down from pick 4 to 6 to get McAsey and acquire a 2020 first-rounder from GWS, which they used on Pedlar.
“So between McAsey and the pick swap, they burnt two first-round picks for nothing on the list,” the interstate club’s recruiter said.
Stewart used to always have flag teams in mind when he was helping create the Crows and Port Adelaide’s squads.
“Building a premiership list requires astute recruiting, smart trading and the ability to make hard decisions along the journey,” Stewart said.
“First-round selections are gold and players picked should become 100-plus game players, and consistently display the attributes of a premiership player.
“Premiership teams of the past have always consisted of six to eight A-graders with the majority of these players being first-round selections.
“List management must continually assess these first-round picks or any player for that matter to ascertain whether they can or cannot fulfil the criteria required to play a role in a premiership team.
“If they cannot, this is when hard decisions are made to trade or delist them.”
Stewart compared the Crows to Fremantle, saying both teams appointed coaches – Matthew Nicks and Justin Longmuir respectively – before a team reset for 2020.
Adelaide had since gone bottom, 15th, 14th, 10th and was 15th entering this round, while the Dockers had finished 12th, 11th, sixth, 14th and were now seventh.
“I still see Fremantle’s list trending in the right direction, but I see Adelaide’s as having flattened out,” Stewart said.
“I think there needs to be some hard decisions about the list because I think they’re treading water.”
STRANGE CALL
Adelaide made a difficult call in 2022 – on mid-season draftee Brett Turner.
He was recruited from Glenelg on a six-month deal in June, then axed 136 days later without playing an AFL game.
The Tigers were disappointed and Turner told this masthead at the time he felt “led down the garden path”.
Reid said then that the club was upfront with the 26-year-old.
“Is that (six months) enough time and is that fair at times for the individuals? Maybe not,” he said.
“But we need to make hard decisions … to try to improve the list.”
The interstate club’s recruiter recalled being very surprised at how it unfolded.
“It felt a little like Brett Turner was used as a pawn – ‘if (Matt) Crouch goes, at least we’ve got a back-up here’ – then he was discarded (after Crouch stayed),” he said.
“If you’re contending for the top four, you bring in a guy like that as cover, but in a rebuild phase, it made no sense.
“You take a 19, 20-year-old.”
Mid-Season Draft recruit Brett Turner talks about his first month as a Crow and what his goals are for the rest of 2022.#weflyasone#crowsshowpic.twitter.com/4HO8qD4yn8
— The Crows Show (@TheCrowsShow) June 26, 2022
COMPARISONS TO PORT
The majority of Adelaide’s experienced recruits this past decade have had a South Australian flavour.
Of the 20 players to join the Crows directly from other AFL clubs since the end of 2013, 11 are local products.
West Australian Billy Frampton made a rare switch from rivals Port Adelaide.
The other eight who were not from SA were: James Podsiadly, Kyle Cheney, Luke Lowden, Paul Seedsman, Sam Gibson, Ben Keays, Ben Crocker and Tyler Brown.
Seedsman, an All-Australian squad nominee in 2021 whose career was cut short by concussion, and leadership group member Keays had been the two success stories.
Contrastingly, Port Adelaide has recruited 27 players from other AFL clubs over the past decade, including 16 non-South Australians, going hard at free agency.
Charlie Dixon, Aliir Aliir and Paddy Ryder were interstaters who became All-Australians at the Power.
“I go back to my time at Port and we made a deliberate decision to select players from outside South Australia in draft and trade from day one,” Pelchen said.
“I don’t think that focus has been as strong from the Crows.
“That approach has been maintained by Port Adelaide over the last 25 years, whether by design or opportunistically, and players from outside your club do notice it.”
The player agent had found Reid to be “obsessed with ex-South Australians”.
“I think the state thing is a bit overstated,” he said.
“These days if the money is good and contract is good most players will go anywhere because it’s about opportunity and lifestyle, and Adelaide’s got that to sell.”
Another player manager, who did not wish to be named, said his dealings with the two SA clubs were starkly different.
“Adelaide is more of a business and family club that like to do things the right way,” he said.
“I think they’re very aware of their brand and social impact.
“Port Adelaide make no apologies and is a bit of an old-school football club still, touching on their success, the Collingwood type mentality of us against them.
“And I think Port Adelaide is better at showing themselves over the Crows.
“Port is able to make players feel like they are part of something, whereas the Crows seem a little bit more like a machine.
“Port Adelaide also pays its good players really well, whereas I know Reidy splits hairs quite a bit.
“Adelaide lost Mitch McGovern because of that.
“They sometimes try to outsmart you and be a little too clever.”
The manager said while the Power tended to take bigger swings and target recruits who were more of a risk, Adelaide “likes to go for players like a Dawson and Rankine – nice guys seen as big wins”.
“They also draft a lot of the same type of player, rinse and repeat,” he said.
The former recruiting boss said the Crows’ trading had been more disappointing than their drafting over the past decade.
He said Adelaide typically had not gone into contract talks “with a number that’ll make your eyeballs turn”.
“They’re probably over conscious of not disrupting the list,” he said.
MISS DUSTY, GET GIBBS
Perception may be otherwise, but Adelaide has taken big swings, it just has not landed its desired targets.
The Crows had a serious crack at Richmond champion Dustin Martin in 2017 when he was coming out of contract.
They met him at his house in Melbourne and presented a massive offer of $11m over seven years, but Martin re-signed with the Tigers.
He went on to break Adelaide hearts on grand final day by winning the first of three flags and Norm Smith Medals.
The Crows chased Melbourne gun Clayton Oliver last year and West Coast star Elliot Yeo this season, and reportedly put a significant offer in for Sydney’s Errol Gulden before he stayed.
All three are non-South Australians, but the big fish they have been landing are locals.
Before Dawson and Rankine, there was Bryce Gibbs.
After getting knocked back by Martin and losing to Richmond, the Crows sought to bolster their squad and midfield by trading for the 231-game, 28-year-old Blue.
Adelaide, which narrowly missed out on securing Gibbs as a father-son draftee in 2006, cited Carlton’s “unrealistic demands” for why a trade fell through in 2016.
A year later, the Crows sent picks 10, 16 and a future second-rounder in exchange for the Glenelg product, the Blues’ 2019 second-round selection and their future third.
Gibbs managed just 37 games in three seasons at the Crows, getting limited opportunities under coaches Don Pyke and Matthew Nicks.
“It’s easy in retrospect, but what was interesting was they were so fixated on getting Bryce to the club that they just went even harder the second year,” Pelchen said.
“It was almost as if it didn’t matter what was needed to get the deal done that they would, almost as a statement, and it was clearly a mistake.
“Whether or not they felt some obligation or a point to prove, what they gave was way over.”
Stewart added: “The season prior, he might have been the missing jigsaw piece to help us win the flag”.
“When we got him, I think he was maybe tailing off with his career and we gave up far too much.
“Sometimes you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.”
Adelaide’s reward did not come from Gibbs but its pick trades.
Carlton finished last in 2018 and deals the Crows made with the two Sydney clubs led to them receiving selection 30 that year and 28 the following one.
Adelaide chose halfback Will Hamill and intercept defender Josh Worrell.
Worrell was having a breakout season until getting sidelined with an arm injury last month.
For the record, Carlton took the now delisted Lochie O’Brien with pick 10 and on-traded 16 with 40 to get Matt Kennedy from GWS and draft Tom De Koning.
The Western Bulldogs used 16 on Ed Richards.
THE HITS
Fox Footy analyst David King said post-game last week that injuries to stars such as Taylor Walker and Izak Rankine had highlighted the Crows’ lack of depth and matchwinners.
Pelchen was more glass half-full.
“While their last month has been extremely poor, I think it’s not as bad as those who are predicting doomsday for the Crows,” he said.
“I still think there’s upside with that list, I genuinely do.
“Riley Thilthorpe and Max Michalanney are going to be excellent players.
“Daniel Curtin can be an A-grade talent but the pressure will be on retaining him because he will be aggressively pursued by the WA teams.
“Josh Rachele has the ability to be an A-grader – he made such an outstanding start to his career, it was always going to hard to keep that up.
“So I agree with the general impression that they lack top-end talent, but it’s primarily in the 22 to 27 (age) bracket.”
Pelchen said while the club’s success with early draft selections had been below average, it had long done very well with other picks.
O’Brien, key defenders Nick Murray, Jordon Butts and Lachlan Murphy were rookies, Irish backman Mark Keane was a pre-season supplemental selection and Ben Keays and Mitch Hinge were delisted free agents.
The interstate club’s recruiter praised the selections of Worrell, Jake Soligo, Brayden Cook and said he loved Darcy Fogarty.
“Fogarty hasn’t always been consistent, but I think that’s been a bit of a by-product of their lack of midfield quality,” he said.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Pelchen appointed Ogilvie to his first recruiting role — as a Victorian-based part-timer with Port Adelaide in 1997.
He described Ogilvie, who joined the Crows in 2006, as a good, hardworking, well researched talent scout who did not leave anything to chance.
“He’s always easy to deal with,” Pelchen said.
“Justin is a tougher negotiator and that may come from having done more contract negotiations as a player manager.”
The former recruiting boss added: “I think Hamish has got a really good handle of talent, but Reidy comes from the management pathway where that part (negotiations) should be your one wood, but maybe it’s the opposite and agents are a little wary of it”.
While the Crows’ list build has come under scrutiny as a result of their poor form this year, the interstate club’s recruiter is steadfast it makes up only one aspect of what is unfolding at any team so cannot solely be to blame.
“It goes hand-in-hand with all clubs that when you talk about recruiting you have to talk about development and culture, they’re all important aspects,” he said.
“Recruiting guys will often go ‘the development guys aren’t doing their job’ but the development guys will say ‘well, you’re giving me shit players’.
“They’re both arms on the same body.”
WHERE TO FROM HERE
Crows coach Matthew Nicks has always publicly backed his squad.
He has made comments late in seasons along the lines of “I’d keep everyone if we could” and has remained confident this list can achieve success.
Ricciuto said this week the squad was “absolutely good enough” to play finals if it was healthy, given a string of injuries to the likes of Walker, Rankine, Crouch, Wayne Milera, Worrell and Murray.
Last month Ricciuto told this masthead: “I don’t think anyone was saying that (criticising the list build) last year when we were knocking on the door of the eight and I don’t think anything’s changed from that.”
Crows chief executive Tim Silvers had a different view, telling the ABC last Saturday that wins and losses showed the list was not good enough.
“We’ve got to find some pieces of the puzzle to help us take that next step,” Silvers said.
Pelchen believed the Crows should bounce back to contend for finals next season if they addressed a few key areas, including their midfield.
The interstate club’s recruiter said things could turn quickly.
“There’s not one recruiting manager in the history of the AFL that’s got every one of them right,” he said.
“Everyone’s got their first-round howlers and how well you’re going is a big determining factor in how much recruiting’s looked at.
“It’s not for the faint of heart sometimes to take on those roles.”
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Originally published as How Low Can They Crow: Matt Turner runs the rule over Adelaide’s recruiting over the past 10 years
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