Gold Coast Suns coach Rodney Eade has revealed that champion midfielder Gary Ablett will spend more as a forward this season, despite the loss of Jaeger O’Meara, Dion Prestia and Michael Rischitelli.
Ablett, who is still recovering from surgery to repair his troublesome shoulder, was expected to be required once again in the middle of the ground in the wake of the departures of O’Meara and Dion Prestia, and the knee injury to Rischitelli, but Eade said that the dual-Brownlow Medallist will spend 60 per cent of game time in the front half of the ground.
“He’s done all his match-simulation, even though his shoulder isn’t right to do total contact, as a forward,” he told SEN Breakfast’s The Wednesday Crunch.
“I still think he’s a very good midfielder, but if he plays as a permanent forward, he’d kick 50 or 60 (goals), I would have thought.
“If you’re a defender on him, you’d be twitching like anything.
“His ability to read the ball and be in the right spot, is as good as I have ever seen.”
Ablett, who requested a trade back to Victoria at the end of last season for personal reasons, has handed over the captaincy to Tom Lynch and Steven May, but Eade said that he had held conversations about the role at the end of 2015.
“I’d spoken to him 12 months earlier about the captaincy, he questioned about having it in 2016, and I said that I still wanted him to be captain,” he said.
“We had a chat in August (2016) at his review, I asked him what he thought about the captaincy, and he said he thought the time was right to stand down.”
Eade conceded that it is time for the Suns to stand up and not be so reliant on the 288-game champion.
“We have to go past Gary…you can’t rely on one player – if you’ve got 22 players and you’re playing in a final – you can’t rely on one player. As good as he is, and as good as he was,” he said.