Adelaide delisted Brett Turner on Saturday despite the midfielder spending just four and a half months at the club.
Turner failed to breakthrough for a senior game after being taken at pick No. 4 in the mid-season draft in July, but SEN’s Michelangelo Rucci feels he deserves more of an opportunity to prove himself.
While the Crows have told Turner they’d consider re-drafting him as a rookie next month, Rucci believes the Crows need to commit to the 25-year-old who deserves more time to prove he has what it takes at the top level.
“They would want to, wouldn’t they?” Rucci said on SEN SA Breakfast.
“It’s a bad look to take a player out of the SANFL, not play him and then dump him six months later.
“I can understand Brett would’ve had great experiences at Adelaide, but with the personal changes that he made to his professional life, he deserves more than six months.
“I understand how clubs get caught in this space where they have to remove three from the list to have three picks, that’s all a bit of a procedural thing.
“But that would want to be more than, ‘We’ll look at you in the pre-season draft’, that needs to be a commitment to pick him up as a pre-season or rookie draftee.
“That shouldn’t be in question.”
SEN’s Andrew Hayes expected Turner to be offered an extension after a strong SANFL finals series where he averaged more than 25 disposals from three games.
“From what we heard with where the contracts sat was that they were going to purely judge Brett Turner purely on his (SANFL) finals form,” Hayes said.
“He was excellent, so it’s a tough situation.”
Turner averaged 24 disposals and 1.5 goals from his four SANFL games with Glenelg before being picked up by the Crows.