my journey to fantasy

for those of you that have no idea what this blog is about, go here.

Firstly, I am very aware that my team is SA heavy. There are several reasons for this. At the outset all my SA decisions are quite fair: Joel Pillar is a very valid second pick. Alec Deslandes, as I have previously stated, is probably the most underrated, hardworking, D getting player in Australia. And I didn't realise Cupcake counted.
After that though, i pretty much just ran out of good interstate players that I wanted. The selections were done pre-nationals which was a big disadvantage to me, having only played one nationals previously. Excuses aside, my team still rocks, as I will now elaborate on.

My selection process: very little thought was put into O and D lines initially, and only a little bit more on getting handlers and recievers. Good players can play anywhere, so my general plan was to pick up the next best player available the whole way through. For some of these I made mistakes, but nothing drastic.

As the second selector, and knowing that The Gack would get snapped up first, I essential got to choose the best current player in Australia. Several names come to mind, but Jonno Holmes' ability to lead a team and his individual performance, recently displayed at the World Games, is second to none. 13 picks later I got another chance and thought Joel Pillar a steal. His skills as a player is often under great debate, but allow me to stroke his ego: 10 years or so under his belt, one mixed and mens season at worlds, world games squad both times, coach and captain of every high level/successful team coming out of SA and can lift a team to victory. Even with his injury at the last world's he was still one of the highest stat getter for dingos, and I've seen him shut down the best of them. Just stop him from making rash decisions and you'll be fine.

I'm not sure if it was because he was in Brazil or somewhere at the time, but I was pretty stoked I managed to take Owen Shepherd as well. Also a World Games player (from '05), the man is a D machine and a very solid handler which frees up my first two picks into the field. I felt I needed another set of good hands though, and my recent experiences with Cupcake with Smurf and U23 told me he could do the job. Another brilliant mind on defence as well, and suddenly my starting D line was unbeatable.

As all the big names were quickly being taken, I had to start rationalising my decisions to get the players I wanted. From the outset of this draft I planned to get Alec at somepoint and knew that already someone should have lapped him up, but for some reason he is always overlooked. I took a gamble, put him on hold, and went for Andrew Jackson, or AJ. Although he was probably picked a little too early while other great players still floated about, his drive and energy, not to mention d's, impressed me along with the rest of Australia at last years nationals, and I didn't think it would be long till he was gone.

I have now made 6 selections, and the last 12 were to be chosen two at a time. I stuck with my strategy: pick the best you can think of remaining. Unfortunately I started to struggle with interstate names. I picked up a few good looking U23 kids and the best of SA and called it a day. Probably my biggest weakness in my final decisions was that a) I don't look like I know much about anything, which is only half true, and b) i foolishly picked players that have been out with injury for far too long. Still, both Robbie and Phil have(or would have) walked onto the aus U19 and U23 teams respectively, so they must still be considered up there.

I will continue with a look at my O and D lines in the next blog.