As I said, 18 players for 1,727 points in round 13, with some exceptional scores and some terrible disappointments. Our round ranking was 17,597 while our aggregate score is now 26,110. This gives us an overall ranking of a somewhat terrible 17,365...

How did we get ourselves into this you may ask (or you may not, knowing full well that I'm going to discuss it anyway), well, here's the team breakdown.

Defence
J Gibson 89
K Kolodjashnij 82
J Hamling 72
A Saad 70
B Smith 64
A Oxley 51
Bench of H Shaw 0 and J Lever 0.
Six scoring players down back, and not a decent score between them. Gibson was just short of his average, Kolo hit his average, recent recruit Hamling beat his average as a rookie, Saad was quite a way short, Smith has been a huge disappointment all year, while Oxley may have signed his sell notice” with that performance. It'll be nice to have Cheater back in the side (please don't quote me on that!)

Midfield
N Fyfe 138 (VC loophole 276)
L Parker 130
D Beams 126
P Dangerfield 114
J Kennedy 114
S Pendlebury 107
P Cripps 82
Zeroes of J Steele, J Selwood, J Nelson, and J (no, T) Dumont.
We bit the bullet, swallowed our pride, admitted our mistake, brought Fyfe in, put the VC on him, and ran with it when he scored 138 points! Now we understand what everyone's been going on about all year. We kept looking for Permacap, and when we didn't find him we went with the (not so) dependable one, which might explain why we've been burnt for much of the season. The rest of our mids were also quite promising this week, but with a fairly cookie-cutter midfield we didn't really gain much. Even Cripps with the tag to score 82 points was pretty good.

Ruck
None of them bothered to turn up this week. Goldy said he's been putting in the hard yards all season and just wanted to put his lanky feet up - we agreed, and even let him keep the captaincy for the week. NicNat went fishing, apparently. While Cox has been MIA since the AFL draft (its a wonder we even selected him since we haven't even used his DPP).

Forward
D Swan 107
Daylight and Night-time...
M Bontempelli 78
D Martin 62
L Franklin 54
T Mitchell 49
Zeroes of J McGrath, R Gray, and M Clark
Swan was good. Bonts was terrible, and will probably only hold his place in the side next week because we'll have higher priorities. Dusty had one of his was he even playing” games. Titch seemed to reinforce the theory that he and JPK can't play well in the same side. Meanwhile Buddy decided that one week off wasn't enough, so he got himself suspended for another (atleast he didn't grope anyone!)

No lost points as we only just scraped a team together. It'll be nice having a full team again. I personally still don't understand the logic of the byes, but thats a whole different discussion.

Trades
You might have noticed a new name or two in our side this week. That Steele bloke stands out like a sore thumb doesn't he? To fit him in though, we had to upgrade to some bloke named Fyfe. I honestly don't know much about him, so hopefully he can hold down a spot in the side for a couple of weeks...
After three weeks of byes, we only made 4 of 9 possible trades. CEY, Newnes, Kamdyn, and McKenzie made way for Duckwood, Hamling, Fyfe, and Steele. In just these last three weeks we're 706 points ahead, and $168,400 better off with these four trades. We can't be too unhappy with that. Newnes to Hamling was a big backwards step last week, with Newnes finally pulling his finger out, however the trade options that the downgrade opened up to us are worth it.
For the season, we're now a total of 2,413 potential points better off with all of our trades, and we have an extra $493,200 to our names because of our trades. Points wise, thanks to injuries (which you'd never wish upon anyone) our most successful trade has been Bartel to Swan, where we're 863 points ahead. On the flip side, and also thanks to injuries, our worst trade has been Wines to Smith, where we're 127 points behind. I guess the lesson here is that sometimes sideways is really good, other times its really bad.

Towards Round 14
Back to a full team, maybe... Bloody Franklin hurts us up forward, where its going to take a trade to get out of a donut assuming Clark doesn't get up. Otherwise we should be good, only looking at the positives of upgrades to get ourselves closer to a complete team.
Come and join us in the Donor Forum to help decide how to cover Franklin, and if Oxley gets the chop or not...