Michael Barlow has some serious concerns about Hawthorn heading into the upcoming season.
The Hawks had their first competitive practice game against Geelong on Thursday afternoon at GMHBA stadium and it wasn’t a great performance.
Albeit fielding a young line-up, Sam Mitchell’s side were belted by 85 points against a well-oiled Geelong side.
Despite missing some key senior players, Barlow is worried about the inexperienced side, stating that their lack of midfield depth is alarming.
“I don’t want to get too carried away at the end of February, but I do think they got the short straw being made to go to Geelong and play a side that’s red hot and it’s like they’ve just rolled out of bed off the back of a premiership and everything has just flowed back into normal transmission for the Cats,” Barlow told SEN WA.
“The Hawks are clearly a working process in terms of what their trying to do under Sam Mitchell but I just think their midfield mix, if you put their midfielders that went through their centre bounces in a line right now, a staunch AFL follower would be lucky to recognise them one or two of them.
“There was like the young Will Day, Josh Ward, Connor McDonald, Finn Maginnes, James Worpel – who is probably the most experienced hand in there and Jai Newcombe who came second in their best and fairest last year but he’s only really a third-year player.
“There’s alarm bells there around the ball, that’s where they got beaten up a lot just in contest and clearance, the more physical and mature bodies in the one on ones both at midfield and in the front and back half.
“It was boys against men at times. It’s never as bad as it seems, and they’ll go back to review and look at it and think ’85 points against the reigning premier on their home ground’ is realistically their starting point.
“If they can claw that back and probably get four to five wins across the year and aim to win a certain number of quarters whilst having a healthy enough percentage, and that sounds grim, but that’s probably the pass mark.”
Following Thursday's match against the Cats, Sam Mitchell provided some insight into how the Hawks will go about developing their list as they attempt to work their way through a rebuild.
“When I think about our list management strategy, what we want to achieve is to build our own internal premiership group that we can then add to,” he told SEN Breakfast.
“I think if you’re getting players in that are going to be your core, that makes it more difficult. You obviously pay a premium to get players out of clubs.
“What I’m really proud of, as far as our formal leaders for this group, most of them are home grown. Luke Breust, James Sicily, Dylan Moore and Mitchell Lewis are all Hawthorn drafted, Hawthorn developed and Hawthorn recruited.
“That gives me faith that our model around how we’re developing our players is improving. What we need to achieve is getting to a position where we have our premiership core group and then players think ‘okay I want a part of this’ and then they can come and fill the gaps, which we’ve seen a couple of times.
“In another two years time is when the free agency market will be more of a priority, rather than the draft.
“Last year we had an enormous amount of deals fall over, this year at least we had a few outcomes in Lloyd Meek, Karl Amon and Cooper Stephens.
“Two of those guys played yesterday, Cooper had a concussion so couldn’t play, but those two lads along with Fergus Greene have all added something to the group. We’ll get some real benefit from them now.”
Hawthorn will kick-off their 2023 campaign against Essendon at the MCG on March 19.