1. Inglorious beginnings

These days it feels as though fans put much more effort into scouting and analysing prospective draft picks than many actual club recruiters used to in the early days of the draft. From the inaugural draft in 1986 until well into the 90s, “lottery” would have been a more apt description for the cattle call that was the national draft.

Poor old Richard Lounder was taken by Richmond at number one in the 1987 draft and has no doubt spent the rest of his life saying “yes, that Richard Lounder” when he introduces himself to people. The South Australian booted four goals in an impressive debut but managed only three more games for the Tigers in 1989. He returned home to Adelaide not long after, tired of footy and destined to be the butt of jokes on football forums and quiz nights for the rest of his life. For his part he held no grudges against the media or fans, but later claimed he would have benefitted from modern day “support structures” to adjust to life in Melbourne, not to mention working a 40 hour week on top of his football commitments. Draftees now don’t know how good they have it.

Likewise, Geelong’s prized number one pick in the 1990 draft, Stephen Hooper, made little impact after crossing the Nullarbor to pursue his AFL dream. He did later take Basil Zempilas out in a WAFL ruck contest though, so all was not lost. The following years’ number one pick and fellow Western Australian John Hutton also failed to catch on in the big leagues. The Claremont spearhead only put together 36 matches for Brisbane, Sydney and Fremantle and holds the rare distinction of being moved on after his debut season. Maybe Jack Watts hasn’t had it so bad after all.

Without the benefit of sophisticated junior pathways, video analysis and draft combines, recruiters came up with some howlers in the Draft’s first decade. Names like Anthony Banik, Todd Breman, Jody Arnol, Brendon Fewster, Rory Hilton and Danny Roach are destined to live on in the imaginations of football fans, immortalised in unintentional comedy.

2. The ones that got away

If there is nothing more frustrating than unfulfilled talent, there’s an extra serving of pain for football fans when early draft picks are spurned on a wayward talent.

For decades St Kilda seemed to be a magnet for this type of player and their number nine pick from the 1999 draft, midfielder Caydn Beetham, was no exception. Picked amid the tumult of Tim Watson’s short-lived reign as Saints coach, Beetham had pace, physical presence and a booming right boot. Following St Kilda’s sacking of Watson and his high-profile replacement Malcolm Blight, Beetham knocked back a lucrative offer from Collingwood during his second season. By the end of season three a black-eyed, broken-nosed Beetham called a meeting with new coach Grant Thomas and quit the game for good, citing a lack of passion and a desire to live the life of a normal 21-year-old. He’d hardly been embracing a professional lifestyle anyway, constantly chafing at the attempts of senior players to ease him in to the big time. Saints fans were left to ponder an unfulfilled talent, but also what might have been had they taken some other players still on the board when Beetham’s name was called. Robert Murphy, Darren Glass, Paul Chapman and Cameron Ling were stars elsewhere.

Likewise, it was all meant to be different for the Western Bulldogs and their number four selection of 2002, tall forward Tim Walsh. Held back by a spate of injuries in his first two years with the Dogs, Walsh finally made his senior debut in 2005. It was the first and last senior outing for the prized pick and by the end of the 2007 season he was gone. Players like Jarrad McVeigh, Andrew Mackie and Jared Rivers, all taken after Walsh, were thriving.

Most clubs have had similar bad luck stories, the Dons with 1996 bust Daniel McAlister, the Dockers with Ryley Dunn, Eagles forward Andrew McDougall, the Dees with Luke Molan and Chris Lamb, North utility David Trotter, Adelaide talls Fergus Watts and John Meesen, plus the Blues with much-maligned defender Luke Livingston. Towering above them all in more ways than one, was there any bigger miss than Adelaide-turned-Carlton bad boy Laurence Angwin?

3. A series of Deebacles

Melbourne supporters hardly need any reminding of the dire state the club has found themselves in over the last few years, but through a combination of bad luck, bad management and questionable player development, they’ve had some decidedly average takings from the last half decade of drafts. They’ve also provided ample evidence that a club cannot work its way out of trouble with priority picks.

Selected by the Dees with pick four of the 2007 draft, it all should have panned out OK for Cale Morton. A Larke Medal winner for the best player at the National Under-18 Championships, Morton looked the ideal modern footballer. Tall and boasting incredible endurance, the Dees banked on him developing into a decade-plus star but something went seriously amiss. He never seemed to put any weight onto his spindly frame, was in and out of the Demons side and drew attention for all the wrong reasons. The cause of frustration to fans and coaches alike, Morton would seek new pastures at West Coast after five seasons and 73 games with the listless Demons.

In Morton’s wake came one of the most heavily scrutinised number one picks in draft history, 196cm Brighton Grammar Golden Boy Jack Watts who was billed as a potential Messiah for the struggling club. To say it has been a rough road since would be the biggest understatement of draft history, but with a fresh start under new coach Paul Roos, Watts might yet go some way to placating his legions of knockers.

Then there was 2009’s number one (priority) pick Tom Scully, who was given the honour of wearing Ron Barassi’s famous number 31 but became so unenthused by what he saw in his first two seasons with the Dees that he packed his bags for Western Sydney and a lucrative pay day. On his return to the ‘G in opposition colours, Scully incurred the venomous wrath of angry fans and salt-of-the-earth private schoolboys alike.

By 2010 the Dees had taken key position prospect Lucas Cook at number 12. The beanpole forward didn’t break through for a senior game before receiving his marching orders at the end of his second season at Demonland. That their supporters have maintained their sense of humour through such a painful period is actually quite remarkable.

4. The TV event that failed to set hearts racing

In keeping with the dismal showings of many first-round picks in the early stages of draft history, the biggest day in the calendar for AFL hopefuls was not deemed worthy of a TV production in its formative years. That started to change at some point in the 90s, when the league decided that the televised drafts of the US sports leagues could work just as well for them. The problem was that they kept the event’s look and feel of a particularly dreary insurance industry seminar, as though the cameras weren’t even there. To say that the productions that resulted failed to capture the imagination is an understatement.

The Seven Network’s 1999 draft telecast at least provided the world with one of the great unintentionally hilarious YouTube clips, which remains a great way for Tigers supporters to keep things in perspective. By 2007, the league still favoured the nondescript backdrop of a conference centre and rows of awkward, pimply teenagers sitting and waiting for their name to be called out. There were tears of joy and fear from worried parents about to pack their sons off interstate, but the stifled atmosphere of formality usually triumphed over anything genuinely entertaining.

In recent years the league has moved towards an event more in keeping with the NFL/NBA tradition, so top picks now come up on stage to receive their club jumper from their new coach as perennial draft analyst Kevin ‘Shifter’ Sheehan gives the lowdown on each prospects strengths and weaknesses. Yep, it’s an absolute riot.

5. The Terror of being a Tiger

So things have turned around for the Tigers of late. They’re finally back playing finals and starting to believe that the club could get back to where it belongs. With that in mind it’s a little bit mean-spirited to remind them of their inglorious moments at the draft table, but no-one could deny how plentiful they’ve been.

The source of the most long-standing anguish at Punt Road was the 1999 decision to take lightly-framed South-Australian midfielder Aaron Fiora over key-position prospect Matthew Pavlich. To be fair to the Tigers, the draft’s history at that point was littered with the delisted corpses of tall forwards, but in the following decade they’d watch Pavlich develop into a bona fide star of the competition while Fiora became an unfortunate emblem of a disastrous period in the club’s history. Booed by his own fans and struggling to move out of Pavlich’s All-Australian shadow, Fiora was gone after five years and 78 inconsistent outings for the Tigers.

For Richmond’s number four pick at the 2004 draft, the realities of being taken before a genuine superstar were perhaps even harsher. Richard Tambling was on a hiding to nothing for most of his six-year stay with the Tigers as the man the Hawks took in his wake, breathtaking tall Lance Franklin, became the star forward of the competition. His fortunes could not have contrasted any more with that of dual-Premiership Hawks star; as Franklin signed an eight-figure, nine-year with Sydney at the end of 2013, Tambling was being delisted by his second club Adelaide without fanfare and is destined to be remembered as a byword for the Tigers’ years in the wilderness.

The year after the Tambling selection, Richmond plumped for spindly East-Perth unknown Jarrad Oakley-Nichols with the eighth pick, Norwood tall Cleve Hughes at 24 and South-Australian Travis Casserly at 40 in one of their worst draft wipe-outs of all. It didn’t help that part-time recruiter Francis Jackson was sharing duties with football director Greg Miller, himself filling a variety of roles at the cash-strapped club, but Oakley-Nichols was a spectacular bust. Club legend Kevin Bartlett would later reveal that neither Jackson nor Miller had even seen Oakley-Nichols playing up close and were going off video tape of the junior when they called his name.

More misses blighted the Tigers through the 2000s, with names like Kayne Pettifer, Danny Meyer and Troy Taylor giving Richmond fans more grey hairs than reasons to cheer, but under the direction of Damian Hardwick and the now full-time Jackson, a series of fruitful recruiting campaigns and the judicious use of early picks has seen the club climb back off the canvas.

6. The curse of pick six

Even if you’re not particularly superstitious, you have to admit that there is something terrifying about the prospect of your team holding pick six in any national draft. Of all the hoodoos and curses of the past 30 years, it makes for some genuinely painful reading.

St Kilda’s 1987 selection, Michael Quirk of Myrtleford, faded into such astonishing obscurity that he doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia entry. The Saints weren’t alone in taking a dud with their first round pick, but they passed over Graeme Wright, Steven Tingay, Brendan Gale and Chris McDermott to select Quirk.

Geelong’s 1988 number six Ray Sterrett is probably known only to members of his immediately family and he was followed in 1989 by Mark Brayshaw. Brayshaw later took the post of Richmond CEO during the years in which the Tigers used their first round picks on Kayne Pettifer, Alex Gilmore (of zero games fame) and Danny Meyer, while also witnessing the aforementioned Tambling/Franklin howler. So even having a former number six pick on your staff may be putting your club at risk of draft calamity. Brayshaw is now on the North Melbourne board of directors. Their supporters should have some concerns about this.

Melbourne had two golden seasons from the mercurial Allen Jakovich before injury and diminishing returns got him the chop, but what followed over the next decade was absolutely dire. Sydney stepped up to the plate in 1991 with Paul Burton (zero games) and in 1992 it was Robert Pyman’s turn (40 games spread across five years and three clubs). Fitzroy kicked things into overdrive from 1993, with Trent Cummings (three wins from 27 games. Yes, three) and Robert McMahon (two games in three years and surplus to Brisbane’s needs during the merger) failing to catch on. Then came Saint Daniel Healy, who managed 38 fairly anonymous games.

1997s model James Walker was a fairly solid acquisition for Freo, playing 150 games and winning a couple of grand final sprints , but Carlton’s Murray Vance (five games that reinforced his status as a walking punchline), Lion-turned-Don Damian Cupido (where do you even start with a guy who Kevin Sheedy publicly banished to the Bendigo Reserves?), Roo Dylan Smith (delisted within three seasons that produced 11 senior games), much-maligned Bomber Kepler Bradley (who has reinvented himself to a degree at the Dockers but was a whipping boy for Dons supporters) and Dogs defender Tom Williams (cursed with injuries, he’s only managed 78 games in seven years) all failed to raise pulses.

In ’06 and ’07 the Hawks went back-to-back with Beau Dowler (sadly cut down by injuries) and Mitch Thorp (gone without fanfare after three years that yielded 2 games), solidifying the curse like no other. Since then, David Myers, Chris Yarran, Reece Conca and Chad Wingard have, to their own varying degrees, proved that things might be starting to turn around a bit. The less said about the luck experienced by Sydney’s 2010 selection Gary Rohan the better, but even he’s now back from injury and looking good.

And who is looking to dodge the bullet at number six this year? For the first time ever it’s the Pies. Fingers crossed.