Adelaide can narrow down its first selection in the AFL National Draft to a handful of players, says National Recruiting Manager Hamish Ogilvie.

The Crows will enter Thursday night’s draft early in the second round (No.23 overall), making it difficult to pinpoint exactly which players will still be available. However, Ogilvie said the Crows had a “rough idea” as to the talent likely to be on offer at their first pick.

“I think we can narrow it down to four or five players, but you don’t want to hold to much faith in that because the draft can be unpredictable,” Ogilvie told afc.com.au.

“I think the top six is set, it’s just the order of those players. I don’t think there’ll be more than one or two surprises in the top 20. We’ve done plenty of works on all the guys that could be there, so we’re ready for whatever scenario presents itself.

“It’s not the draft to try to be too tricky in … we’ll keep it simple. We’ve done the work and the research, so we’ll order the players up in a list and take the best ones available at our picks.”

The Crows will have their second, and final, ‘live’ pick at No.46.

The Club also holds selections at Nos.76 and 86, but these will be used to confirm the promotion of rookie defenders Rory Laird and Kyle Hartigan to its senior list. There are likely to be only 60-odd ‘live’ picks in this year’s AFL National Draft, not including those reserved for rookie promotions and father-son or academy players.

Clubs, including the Brisbane Lions, Gold Coast and St Kilda, won’t play any further part in the draft after round two. Ogilvie said this could work in Adelaide’s favour, adding the draft would be harder to predict from pick 25 onwards.

“I think a lot of clubs being out of the draft early is a bit of a bonus for us,” he said.

“To me, No.46 still looks like a reasonable pick. By the late-second and start of the third round, every club will have some different blokes on their list, so I’m confident we’ll be very happy with the player we get there.”

The Crows have bolstered their list for 2014 by adding forwards Eddie Betts and James Podsiadly, and elevating rookies Laird and Hartigan. Bernie Vince (traded to Melbourne), Graham Johncock (retired), Aidan Riley (delisted free agent, Melbourne), Ian Callinan (delisted), Richard Tambling (delisted) and Nick Joyce (delisted) are the players missing from the 2013 senior list.

Ogilvie said the Club didn’t have any glaring holes in its playing squad.

“With only two picks, we’ll just pretty much go on talent,” he said.

“There aren’t a lot of talls in this draft and the best ones will probably go reasonably early, but it doesn’t really affect us because we’ve got a good balance of players on our list already.

“It would be a bonus if we could get some outside run and speed because we weren’t able to address that in the trade period, but we won’t deviate from our list just to get it.”

A number of players from South Australia’s Under-18 Championship-winning team are tipped to find AFL clubs on Thursday night. Ogilvie said he expected the majority of the Croweaters to be snapped up in the first half of the draft.

“I think a lot of the SA boys will be taken in the top 30,” he said.

“Aside from James Aish and Matt Scharenberg, who are the standouts, the SA boys are very hard to split. They’re all outstanding young men and high quality players, who have been exposed to senior footy. You’d love to have them all, but it’s not possible.”

The Crows only acquired pick No.23 last month after Vince moved to Melbourne in the trade period.

Ogilvie said his recruiting team had prepared all season to have a pick in the top 30.

“Nothing really changed for us because we’d always planned to try to get a better draft pick. It was just a matter of how we were going to do that and that obviously wasn’t easy. We pretty much knew we weren’t going to be able to get a pick inside the top 10, so we planned for 11 onwards,” he said.

“We still did all the work we would normally do.”

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