CARLTON coach Brett Ratten expects Matthew Kreuzer to play a significant amount of football for his baby-faced Blues side next year. He also hopes the young ruckman is the club's last No. 1 draft choice in a long time.
While Ratten considers his side very much a work in progress, he said the club was determined to move at least four spots up the ladder in 2008, after a four-win season clinched Carlton its third top pick in a row.
Blues recruiter Wayne Hughes decided Kreuzer would join Marc Murphy and Bryce Gibbs in the No. 1 club because he was a competitive player with huge endurance, who played football like an enthusiastic "two-year-old in a sandpit".
"If I'm up here next year I might be in a bit of trouble," said Ratten, after the Blues opted for the 199-centimetre Northern Knight over his teammate, Trent Cotchin. "I reckon Wayne might be, too.
"We think next year's a real stepping stone for us as a club. We'll probably have the youngest team in the AFL, and we need to make the right steps forward. But we also need to get out of the bottom four and make some real progress up that ladder. That will be our aim next year."
Hughes, who eased Kreuzer's mind with a visit to his house on Wednesday night, said while the choice between him and Cotchin was a difficult one, he believed he had picked the best player.
"It wasn't an easy decision. We showed our executive match committee about 15 minutes of footage of both players last Tuesday, just so they were aware of how hard the decision-making process is," he said. "In the end you actually have to make a choice, it wasn't different last year and it wasn't different the year before.
"As I described to the match committee on Tuesday, I thought this young fella plays footy like a two-year-old in a sandpit.
"You see too many young fellas these days who, by the time they get to this age, they don't actually want it kicked to them. Matthew's not like that, he wants it every minute of the game."
Kreuzer, who will start training this week and seek the immediate advice of Murphy and Gibbs — a former teammate in the AIS-AFL Academy — said he planned to push for an quick start in his new team. "It's been my dream ever since I was little, to run out there," he said. "I'll just have to see how the pre-season goes and how I fit into the team. I can't wait to get down there."
Cotchin, drafted at No. 2 by Richmond, has similar plans, but will have to rehabilitate the ankle he broke during the Knights' preliminary final before pushing for his own beginning.
The Tigers' football director, Greg Miller, said the club had had its eye on the midfielder since January, when Cotchin, an "inside/outside player who can play all parts of the game", trained for a week at Punt Road as part of his AIS-AFL scholarship.
"It was a tough decision. We obviously looked at Cale Morton as well, and thought that the two of them were outstanding footballers, but we've known Trent for the whole year," Miller said.
"He spent a week with us in the AIS program in January, so we had first hand knowledge of what sort of a young man he is."
The draft in order
No. Name
1. Matthew Kreuzer (
11. Patrick Veszpremi
22. Scott Selwood
27. Andy Otten
40. Christopher Mayne
49. Mitchell Farmer
55. Mark Johnson
61. Jaxson Barham (
