General Manager of Football Wayne Campbell says the GIANTS will work to help Dylan Shiel, Rory Lobb
On Tuesday, Shiel nominated Essendon as his preferred club if a trade is to be done, following teammates Lobb and Setterfield nominating Fremantle and Carlton respectively.
Jeremy Finlayson could also be on the move with the defender given permission to speak to other clubs about a possible trade.
In a candid interview, Campbell told Damian Barrett and Terry Wallace on Trade Radio that the GIANTS are looking to get the right deal for the club and if they can’t, Shiel, Lobb, Setterfield
“We’d known this had been coming for a couple of years due to a lot of reasons and as it’s been documented we’ve got some salary cap issues that we need
“We’ve gone into this period knowing that we don’t have to trade all three and that all three are contracted along with and Jeremy Finlayson.
“We’d like to do the right thing by our player and we’ve had some good open and mature discussions with our players but at the same
“We need to get the right deal by the club or some of those players could be playing here next year.”
Campbell said the GIANTS’ salary cap squeeze was due to the exceptional quality of the players on their list, many of which have been at the club since its inception.
“It’s on the back of our list build,” he said, “people prior to me did a really good job in assembling some really good talent seven years ago.
“A lot of those players are coming into their prime in playing ability and earning capacity and we’ve probably got more of those than most clubs.
“We went and had a crack at guys like Shane Mumford, Heath Shaw, Ryan Griffen
“That’s added up to a situation that - we’ve known about for a couple of years - that we need to shed some players and that’s why we’ve been able to have good discussions with guys like Dylan and (his manager) Paul Connors and say ‘while you’re a free agent next year if he wants to go a year early, we’ll explore that as long as a deal comes back the other way’.”
While losing players of the
“We’re really, really confident that we’ve got the list to go forward, we know we had some players that were sitting in the grandstand that will come back,” Campbell said.
“It’s sad to see these guys going out, but we feel we’ve got a really good list that can contend for a few years.”
Meanwhile, Campbell has opened up on the possibility of Shane Mumford making a playing return at the GIANTS after a year in retirement.
“He’s been running around a bit, his foot was really bad at the end of last year and we had some advice from doctors that he not play on,” he said.
“He’s been our ruck coach and in one particular training session where he touched up all the rucks and we thought, ‘Oh jeez - we should maybe explore this’.
“There’s a fair bit of water to go under the bridge, but we’ll have a look at what happens over the next four-to-six weeks and we’ll potentially have Shane back on our list in 2019.”
