What a terrible start to the season for the donors, not in the least bit helped by the Easter weekend and my complete lack of availability to actually look at team sheets. Seriously Mr AFL, why organise the first round of the season for the Easter break – its nearly as stupid as having an opening round over two weekends.


I think its best to start from the beginning, it seems like a logical place. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived an ogre…. Wait a minute….

Season 2016 for the donors started with a couple of polls as to who we want in our team, and a few random suggestions from some of the donors themselves. Thanks to all who contributed to the initial make-up of the team. We were torn on a pure GnR strategy, or a mid-pricer per line strategy, but that became clearer when we found out that after the first couple of passes at team selection, we have around 12 positions remaining to select, and only $1M available – an impossible scenario. The lack of obvious rookies didn’t help either way.


After a few days of messing around before I went AWOL, the donor team for round 1 2016 came to look like the below, which wasn’t changed during the round…

Defence:

H Shaw, B Houli, R Laird, J Weitering, M Brown (Ess), M Hartley – M Adams, A McDonald-Tipungwuti

Midfield:

N Fyfe, P Dangerfield, G Ablett, D Wells, C Mills, C Oliver, S Kerridge, C Petracca – C Menadue, J Clayton, A Davis

Rucks:

T Goldstein, M Gawn – D Wyatt

Forwards:

D Martin, L Dahlhaus, M Barlow, A Hall, J Stringer, D Rioli – J Schache, B Kennedy


This team, and the way we selected the lineup, gave us a measly 2,002 points for round 1, with a ranking of 84,809. Is there anyone out there who didn’t beat that??? We’ve given away a lot of ground already, so it’ll be catch-up from here on out!


The team was selected as listed above, with AMT the defence emergency covering Hartley, and Menadue the mid emergency covering Petracca. Clearly there’s a few holes and donuts that may need to be covered over the next couple of weeks with some correction trades. Our VC was Gazza, but as I mentioned, I was not available to make any loophole changes or anything, so captain Fyfe stunk it up real bad for us this week!

In all, without considering other players who could / should have been named, we missed quite a few potential points. Swapping Adams for Brown down back would have netted us an extra 40 points. Captain Danger instead of Fyfe would have given us an extra 101 points. Kennedy on field up forward instead of Rioli would have given us an extra 76 points. That’s a grand total of 217 potential points that went missing due purely to selecting the correct players (never mind better initial player picks). Our terrible 2,002 points could have been a much more respectable 2,219 points.


Please join us in the donor forum to help make some rage trades for round 2 – or atleast plan the next couple of weeks’ worth of correction trades!