Executive General Manager of Football, Charlie Gardiner spoke to Sam Edmund and Adam Cooney on AFL Trade Radio today ahead of the official AFL Trade Week, which begins on Wednesday. He also provided an update on Lance Franklin who has his sights set on Round 1, 2021.

See below key quotes from the interview. You can listen to the full interview here

 

On the Club being active in trade week:

"We don’t typically broadcast what we are doing around this time of year but we are not envisaging at this stage that we will be significant participants in the trade period. We would like to think our improvement next season would come primarily from within with our emerging young players. The challenge for us is to bring on that development as quickly as possible."

 

On areas to be looked at:

"It’s been well documented that we would like to bolster our ruck stocks, to provide support to Callum Sinclair with Sam Naismith obviously going down with an ACL injury last year. We would like to secure an established ruckman and Kinnear and his team are talking to clubs to see what we can do in that space.

"We would like bolster our scoring ability and bring in another scoring option, they aren’t easy to find. We do think we have got some developing players in that regard so if it doesn’t happen we wouldn’t be too disappointed but if it did happen we would certainly look at it."

 

On Port Adelaide’s interest in Aliir Aliir:

"Aliir is contracted, he is a required player at the Club. Port Adelaide has expressed an interest but it hasn’t gone any further than that and we haven’t entered into any significant talks, there’s nothing going on there as far as I am aware."

 

On Tom Hickey

"Kinnear and his team have spoken to Tom but he is just one of a number of players that we have spoken to. We haven’t kicked off any meaningful discussions about Tom."

 

On the AFL Draft

"We would like to go to the draft with pick 3. We haven’t had a pick in the draft that high for some time. You always like to improve your draft hand if you can but at the moment we haven’t planned that out. There’s still a fair way to go until the draft."

 

On Lance Franklin’s progress for Season 2021

"He’s continued to trained through the break and is working really hard. He is as keen as ever to get back after what was a really disappointing 2020. He has a long way to go in terms of getting himself resilient and durable given how much footy he has missed but he is right up for the challenge as are our fitness and medical team and he will be a big part of what we do next year. The challenge is getting the work into him over the summer, we have a very scripted program for him to hit that end of March timeline and Round 1 next year, that’s what we are all aiming for."