We had a great week in Fantasy, coupled with one or two hiccups, but fell short of a near-perfect Brisbane outfit.
Despite 360 points from captain Tom Rockliff and plenty of strong performances on every other line, we were beaten by 189 points.
Levi Greenwood’s late withdrawal didn’t help, particularly when we didn’t have midfield cover and Steve Johnson continued his hot and cold form with a score of 58 (albeit Ryan Crowley-affected). Still, great games from those two wouldn’t have guaranteed a win.
We’re now a game and percentage off top spot, so even if we win our final three games, we’d need a miracle to overtake the Lions. One more win will see us finish a respectable second.
Our opponent this week
This week we play the Eagles' Fan Team, who we've beaten comprehensively on three occasions. The gap between both teams has actually widened on each occasion, with our most recent victory in Round 16 being a decisive one – 600+ points.
For starters, we only share 3 players (amazing at this time of the year). David Swallow, Dayne Beams and Patrick Dangerfield are on both lists, but that means all of Rockliff, Josh Kennedy, Luke Parker, Dustin and Stefan Martin and Brent Harvey are all unique players for us. They still have Gary Ablett as captain too.
With Steve Johnson in doubt, our priority will be making sure we have a reasonable emergency player to cover any late withdrawals, and avoid a situation like we encountered last week.
Trade decisions
Our cash reserves are low and we don’t have many players on the bench who are performing, or in a cash-cow-sell position.
Tim Broomhead and Ben Brown top out at around $200k in terms of bench value, but they are also the only two of our eight reserves who are actually playing on a semi-regular basis.
We could trade Steve Johnson, on the chance that he’ll miss this week’s game, but at $540,000 he’s not exactly at top dollar (Barlow, Lewis or Priddis are possible replacements).
Alternatively, we could look to move Andrew Swallow for someone we think can give us a little bit more over the final three rounds, but at $450,000 our options are limited (Swan, Murphy, Ebert, Gaff for example).
The best play might be to do a double downgrade while we don’t have to worry about whether we’ll get a league win, hope that Johnson plays and look for some decent cover next week.
