I was starting to get bored of writing about falling premiums, but let’s face it, there’s only two types of players you should be getting in by now. Premiums and cash cows. Those mid priced that I like are pretty well useless by now (by the way, the correct answers this year were Shaun Higgins, Nathan Krakouer and Sam Gilbert – great work if you had all three from the start!).

To start with, as some of you may noticed from the Live Scores page, I traded Lenny in last week. His average time on ground has been very low, hovering between 50-60% for his first three games. His scoring was respectable enough and as such he was leading the league in points per minute. Notably his scores weren’t high enough to drive his price up (in fact he went down about $20K) however he was showing signs of the Lenny we love. It’s just a matter of that TOG rising, which it has over the past couple of weeks – as have his DT scores.

Hayes His 130 against Port Adelaide looked good enough for me and I wasn’t too disappointed with his 100 against the Bulldogs when I brought him in. His break even last week was 85 if I recall correctly, so he only went up in price marginally this week. With an even lower break even score this week I can’t picture him being cheaper than he is right now.

Obviously any player you’re trading in at this price around this time will be someone you plan on keeping for the rest of the year, so if you think Hayes is a Top 6 midfielder for your team then now is definitely the time to jump on.

The thing I like about Hayes is that he racks up a lot of tackles, which are DT gold. Well, maybe not gold, because goals are better and that’s not something he’s particularly well known for. Apart from that he puts numbers in all of the columns and racks up plenty of touches.

The risk you take with him is probably injury related. He’s just that little bit older now and he plays a style of game that’s pretty high impact on the body (well, most of St.Kilda are this year!) so he might be susceptible to a bit of a niggle. He’s not been too bad on the injury front in the last couple of years after coming back from an ACL in 2006. In 2007 he missed three games and those who had him last year will recall the biggest tease of all time when he did his hammy just before quarter time against Freo on 75 points… 75 points before quarter time. Experts suggest he was definitely going to get the 300 he was on track for. He missed a game with that injury (well, one game and three quarters more specifically).

It is a risk/reward game though and I don’t think the risk on him is as big as the reward he could bring to your team. I’m on board and I know there’s a couple of DT captains out there considering what to do with Ablett (what to do with Ablett could be the topic of a thesis!) but if you do decide to trade him out, I’d have a look at Hayes. If you have enough trades in hand (I wouldn’t trade Ablett out with anything less than 14 remaining) Hayes could be a target that will average 100+ but at the same time leave you with plenty of cash to get Ablett back in the run home.