As a team, with only 18 players, the Donors did quite well in round 14. We scored 2,167 points, which had us placed at 2,567 for the round. Our aggregate score is now 28,277 with our overall ranking at 13,335.
As a further mark of respect, we gave the captaincy to Danger this week, and relegated Fyfe to the bench (which was all he deserved after a score like that!). Unfortunately we missed out on Pendles as VC, but a 149 from Goldy was more than enough to pull the loophole trigger!

The team summary looked a little like this:
Defence
K Kolodjashnij 143
L Hodge 119
H Shaw 110
A Saad 86
J Hamling 61
J Gibson 52
Bench of B Smith and J Lever, both with byes.
Gibson and Hamling were dropped from our score, while three tons, including a huge 143 from Kolo, was an excellent start for the side as we look through the scores. Definitely no complaints, although it was disappointing to see Gibson perform so poorly that his score was dropped - thems the breaks with defenders I suppose.

Midfield
S Pendlebury 184
JP Kennedy 143
D Beams 115
L Parker 110
P Cripps 77
J Steele 69
T Dumont 22
P Dangerfield 0 (C)
Bench of N Fyfe 89 (E), J Nelson 0, and J Selwood with the bye.
Well, you think Pendles is finally losing it, and being taken over by Fyfe as the permacap, when the old permacap comes back with a bang (Gazza with 124 thankyou very much!) while the new permacap turns up with a monster 184, and the bloke who supposedly replaced him does nothing more than an 89. What a round!
As I said, we missed Pendles as VC, but were happy to see JPK back in form, and Beams and Parker doing well. Fyfe came on from the bench, with his miserable score, while Cripps and his 77 was our lowest score of the round. Steele and Dumont got dropped by the wayside, while Danger, Ducky, and Nelson didn't contribute.

Rucks
T Goldstein 149 (VC, 298)
N Naitanui 108
Bench of M Cox 0
The VC on Goldy against a team who had no ruckman, but still managed to paste the Roos, was good enough for us to say a big no” to waiting out for Fyfe, and using the loophole. Once again NicNat provided excellent backup in R2, with another 100+ performance. Its hard to complain too much with rucks like these two, as I'm sure many other coaches are aware and enjoying.

Forwards
R Gray 123
D Martin 113
T Mitchell 105
T McLean 86
M Bontempelli 80
D Swan 78
Bench of J McGrath 0 and L Franklin 0.
All six of our forwards were used in our best 18, and with three tons it wasn't so bad. Titch and JPK appear to have learnt to play well together, maybe helped along by the fact that Lance and Tippet were sitting in the stands eating meat pies. The other half of the forwards saw new recruit McLean do really well for a rookie, while Bonts is really starting to take up space, and Swan had one of his effective games of footy for very little SC points. I'm still glad we paid less than $500k in SC cash for the bloke that Sydney shelled out $1m p.a. in real cash for... What ever happened to their no dickheads” policy anyway? That seems to have gone out the window over the last couple of years!

So once again, because of the bye, there was no missed score through selection, only captaincy. 35 points this week, but you still can't complain with nearly 300 points form just one player!

Trades
We made two trades this week. We decided that Clark and Oxley were both no-longer needed, and brought in Hodge and McLean. A doubly good trade, especially helped by Clark not playing, which put us 143 points ahead, and $64,500 better off.
Really hurting us is the fact that bloody Newnes has finally decided to pull his finger out, scoring ton after ton right after we gave him the flick! That trade from Wines to B Smith is still hurting us, this time not so much Smith's fault, but still. Another really big hit this week was Krak and Buddy, with the suspended one hurting us to the tune of Krak's 101 points!
On the positive side, trading Salem to Parker netted us a further 110 points, now at a total of 678 points, second only to the Bartel to Swan trade.

Looking towards Round 15
We're clearly a couple of bodies short of a fully upgraded team, and we're still carrying a couple of dud premiums and dud rookies. So come and join us in the Donors forum, to help shape another two trades for season 2015.