Crows Recruiting Manager Hamish Ogilvie says the Club has started to narrow down its first selection in next month’s AFL National Draft.

Adelaide currently has pick No.9 in the national meet, which will be held on the Gold Coast on Thursday, November 27. However, this number could change when Free Agency compensation is awarded.

The Crows have not held a pick inside the top 10 of the draft since 2007-2008 when they selected star midfielder Patrick Dangerfield and now-GWS defender Phil Davis, both with No.10.

The 2014 draft pool is considered to be very even outside the top handful of players. Ogilvie said there wouldn’t be a huge difference between the players selected mid-to-late in the first round.

“I don’t think there’s much in it. The player at six and the player at 17 might could be exactly the same. The player at 14 might be better than someone that’s picked at seven or eight. There’s not a lot in it at all,” Ogilvie told AFL.com.au from the Draft Combine in Melbourne.

“You’ve got to cover them all, because we don’t know which one is going to get through or which two or three might get through to us. There’s probably like 15 to 17 players in the mix there at pick nine or 10, whatever it ends up being, so you cover all of those pretty well.

“Those guys in that mix that you talk about sort of in pick eight to pick 14, we’ve already interviewed once or twice … those guys I spent a lot of time with them in London (on the AIS-AFL Academy Tour), so we’ve done a fair bit of work on them.”

Adelaide has identified a defender, ruckman and outside speed as areas of need, but Ogilvie said needs were unlikely to be considered strongly at the Club’s first pick.

“It’s always the best player. The most talented player that comes through there is probably the one you’re going to look at. Needs don’t really come into it there you’ve just got to take the talent,” he said.

“You look at guys like ‘Danger’ and people that have been picked in that range, Brodie Smith and Daniel Talia, they end up really good players. So you can’t muck around with that too much.”

Club recruiters have spent the week at Etihad Stadium, assessing the results of testing at the AFL Draft Combine. Ogilvie said interviews conducted with players during the four-day event were also critical to the recruiting process.

“We were last here last (Wednesday) night, we were last here the night before, and we were in here at eight doing interviews this morning (Thursday). We’ll get through around 30-35 interviews this week,” he said.

“In some cases, we’ll be done after this with some of those players. We won’t need to do any more, and then we can look at where our late picks might be and start to focus in on those. But around 35 players we’ve already done in a fair bit of detail.

“And that’s about reports, psych reports, data, testing and the GPS guys reviewing some of the areas where they have the knowledge in and then they present to us.”