I reckon I’m almost at the end of giving players a write up for 2009 purposes. As I mentioned last week, pretty soon I’ll start casting my eye to next year. Given the season ending injury to Adcock all of a sudden there’s 40,000 teams looking for a new elite defender.

Unfortunately Adcock got injured early in the game, so he leaked $26K after only scoring five points. I can’t stress enough how important it is for players to get injured LATE in the game, if they must do so. Or at the very least, be like Hargrave’s teammate Daniel Giansiracusa and come back on to score a further 84 points before being ruled out for six weeks (THAT’S Dream Team commitment!)

Hargrave Anyway, as we’re all scrambling around the $350K mark for a defender, there’s plenty of really sweet options. Enright, Gilbert, Lockyer, Cornes, Carrazzo who is looking like his old self, or even Broughton. OK, so you could have got Broughts for about $250K cheaper a few weeks ago, but he’s a legitimate option being one of the few backmen averaging over 90 and one of the few Freo players with basic motor skills.

Enough preamble, because I’m putting the microscope on the only defender in the league to have scored four consecutive tons – Ryan Hargrave. Yeah, he costs a bit more at $381K, but it’s not unreasonable to think a lot of you will have $32K up your sleeve.

His recent form is probably the best of his career and the Bulldogs are getting a lot of their rebound through him. He’s a lovely raking kick and certainly loves putting it on the shoe. His kick:handball ratio looks great from a DT perspective. In seven games this season he has had at least twice as many kicks as handballs.

On top of that, the stats are there to say that he’s getting plenty of it too. In only four games has he been kept under 20 touches this season and on all four of those occasions he collected exactly 19, so he’s got a pretty consistent output.

It’s good to see Tom Williams back for the Doggies too, because this really frees Hargrave of defensive responsibilities and highlights his role as a linkman. Lake, Williams and Morris in the same back line allow Hargrave a bit more liberty to find space.

For this week I could have just as easily written about Paul Duffield as well. I really wanted to choose a unique player for the article and Duffield and Hargrave are similarly rare this year. Both players are only in about 10,000 teams, which is ridiculously low for the third and fifth highest averaging backs (second being Bowden and his touches for Coburg aren’t helping DT much at all, so bump those two up a spot). I chose Hargrave because I’m really liking his role at the moment.