Bulldogs’ General Manager of List & Recruiting, Sam Power, provides an update on day one of the 2022 Continental Tyres AFL Trade Period.

Rory Lobb

Rory’s clearly contracted, so we obviously understand Fremantle’s position. He’s indicated he’d like to join us if a deal can be done – his partner moved to Victoria during the year so he’s keen to get over here to be with her. We’ll keep having discussions with Freo, but at the same time he is a contracted player so it’s hard to go into too much detail.

I won’t speculate on the finer details of any discussions had, but at the moment Freo’s position has always been really strong that he’s a required player there. We’ll continue to be respectful and have conversations where we can.

Liam Jones

We anticipate (that deal getting done) in the next 24 hours. Whether that’s today or tomorrow - we’re obviously getting paperwork prepared.

He’s really excited – Liam’s a fantastic guy. He’s obviously played a lot of really good football over his career, and particularly in the last few years. We’re bringing in someone who we know can play really well as a key defender. It’s an area of the ground we’ve been really keen to address.

There’s also what Liam offers on a personal level – he was in the leadership group at Carlton for the last few years, and showed significant growth in that area as well. It’s not only about what he can bring on-field to our defensive stocks, but also his maturity and experience he can bring to our relatively young group.

Zaine Cordy

We’ve been in constant dialogue with his management – now that he’s an unrestricted free agent, he’s obviously entitled to look around and see what’s there. We’ll continue to have discussions over the coming trade period.

Josh Dunkley

We clearly wanted to keep Josh and offered him a long-term contract that we thought was really compelling. He’s a fantastic player which was shown this year as our best and fairest winner, so was someone we clearly worked really hard to keep and wanted to keep.

His desire is to get to Brisbane if he can, so we’ll work in good faith with Brisbane to hopefully reach an outcome. Understandably, with how highly we value Josh and the player he is, we’d expect adequate compensation for what he’s displayed over the course of his career.

On uncontracted players

We’re in constant dialogue with the managers of Mitch Wallis, Josh Schache and Stef Martin, so we’ll assess everything throughout the next nine days. I think you see a lot of Clubs now need to maintain flexibility to be prepared for any scenario that may come up in the trade period.