Carlton Head of List Management and Recruiting Stephen Silvagni has spoken in depth about where the Blues are at three years into their rebuild.
The Blues have only won one game this year, but Silvagni says the club is still completely focused on the plan they set in place three years ago when they brought coach Brendon Bolton to the club.
“We’re really confident in our build in relation to our list and obviously we’ve got to be patient, we’ve had 42 list changes over three years,” he told the AFL Nation pregame show.
“We’re really confident with what we’ve brought through the door in terms of our youngsters, but having said that we know that we’re going to need to add to that, right at the minute what’s really hurt us is we haven’t been anywhere near our best team out there.
“We came out three years ago and said we were going to attack the draft and we did that.”
Silvangi explained Carlton was a team that never prioritised the draft before the current regime.
Previous first round draft selections in Matthew Watson, Blaine Boekhorst and Josh Bootsma highlight that fact.
“Before three years ago, Carlton never embraced the draft, never embraced the draft – we’ve gone to it the last three years and that’s where you go get your talent,” Silvagni said.
“I can’t remember Carlton ever doing it where you’ve got multiple picks in the first round.
“If you have a look at what our build is about, 2009-2015, I think there’s five players left on our list out of those drafts – Levi Casboult, Ed Curnow, Sam Rowe, Nick Graham and Patrick Cripps.”
The Carlton premiership player explained that block of poor drafting has left the club with a hole on its list.
“That’s where the difficulty sort of sits at the minute, with that core of 22-28 age group, we really haven’t got a lot of quality players in that age group to carry out young kids through,” he said.
Silvagni explained this is the reason Carlton has loaded up on players from other lists.
“With 42 list changes, you can’t possibly go to a draft and pick 11 18-year-olds in one year and the difficulty we’ve had over the three years is our ability to trade for other players because we just haven’t had the stock on our list,” he said.
“We needed to get some recycled players in and that’s been our difficulty. Have all those recycled players worked, no they haven’t, but a lot of those players themselves, yes we expected some to play AFL, but when you bring a whole heap of youngsters in, you can’t send a VFL team out there with 15 18-year-olds.”
Looking to the back-half of the year, Silvagni believes Carlton fans will continue to hold the faith because the club hasn’t changed its message in three years.
“The reason why I think fans are keeping the faith is we went out with a clear plan three years ago and we have not waivered,” he said.
“Yes, we’d like to win a number more games, but as long as the fans understand what we’ve sent out there and what we’re trying to do, I think they’ll be happy.
“I think if we can get a fit Jarrod Pickett going and even a Matthew Kennedy who comes back after an ankle injury, we’ve got Caleb Marchbank out, Tom Williamson was probably our best performed youngster last year, won’t play at all this year and Marc Murphy hasn’t played a lot either.”