Firstly, Elliott payed big bucks for Howell and Henry has now told him to piss off - why use Howell as an example of where the club is heading? It actually disproves your theory.
I look at the table and see Melbourne and Townsville in the top 3 which tells me "marquee" recruiting is not necessarily the answer to our problems. If memory serves the only "big" name Melbourne have recruited recently is Mick Crocker and Townsville managed to jag Thurston from the dogs reserve grade. Point taken we should have had Thurston, but thank Elliott for that one too in going for Jason Smith instead.
I think dumping Premier League and sweeping out surplus players (Howell, Raston, Williams, Rothery and Bickerstaff) is a good start. To be honest there was nobody really on the market this year who would have provided good value for money in the "marquee" stakes. O'Meley and Petro were high risk due to their age, Kite would not exactly have attracted bigger crowds or improved us a great deal and even King got offered ridiculous money from the ESL (and he's a grub anyway). Most of the other biggies off contract stayed put. Probably the only "big" target we could have gone harder for was M. Monas, and a $2m deal would have been bloody hard to beat.
Next year will be massive for us as far as recruitment and retention goes. Carney and Tongue are the two priorities no doubt. Weyman, Dobson, Milne, Goodwin, Campo and Purtell are all mid-rangers who will be playing for their futures. Logan, Best and Turner are coming to the end of their careers and then there's a stack of fringe FG'ers like Jones, Thurling, Kelly, Cross and Chalk who could go either way. Howell is definitely gone.
Blind freddy can see Henry and our management team are trying to rebuild this club using quality over quantity. 2007 was a chance for the coach to see what's cards he has in his hand and 2008 may just be the year to start the big plays - but it's not going to happen overnight. We've certainly put together an outstanding U20's squad and hopefully this brings us some nice surprises too.
Bay56 how can you whinge about cutting a guy like Rothery and in the same breath complain we have no money to attract the big names? ;-)