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AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan’s “you can’t have everything” remark directed at the Sydney Swans is a massive insult in the highest order.
Considering what the club has achieved for the game in 20 years, it fails to acknowledge the hard work of Richard Colless and Ron Barassi, as well as Andrew Ireland and coaches Rodney Eade, Paul Roos and John Longmire.
All McLachlan has done is feed the grand Victorian delusion the COLA helped make the Swans successful, and not first class professional administrators, or second-to-none coaching and recruiting staff.
It makes a joke of the 2005 and 2012 premiership efforts. It makes a joke of the heartache the club had to overcome to get to where it is today. The COLA did not buy the Swans two premierships anymore than it lured Lance Franklin to the club.
Since the club’s last wooden spoon in 1994, in rugby league dominant Sydney, the Swans have been going from strength to strength, so why can’t the AFL let them go along as they have been?
Is it because of a great Victorians fear the Swans could potentially become the biggest AFL club in the country?
While unlikely, the potential is most certainly there, as the population of Sydney, the high level of Swans support and the massive corporate interest the club has been able to attract suggests.
The Swans have been a sleeping giant in Australian sport, they already have the most expensive jumper in the AFL, now worth $3 million alone, and if the club is able to capitalise during Franklin’s nine-year tenure with more premiership success, the jumper value should soar further.
However, rather than celebrate what the Swans have achieved, like 40,000 members for the first time in the club’s history, McLachlan seems to be happy with the idea of punishing them for being successful.
It’s as if the AFL are saying they were the reason why the Swans were able to sign Kurt Tippett and Lance Franklin. It is sending out mixed messages, and it doesn’t look good.
The Swans trade ban does not look good for the game, and it makes you wonder why both the AFL and the Swans would violate a player’s right to seek trades. McLachlan’s remarks are also proof the AFL is losing its marbles when it comes to the challenges the game faces in Sydney. Not only that, they undermine everything the game is trying to achieve there.
While the Swans may be tentatively well established, the AFL cannot take the club’s success for granted either.
The AFL has the problem of having one Sydney club being vilified for being successful, and perceived as wanting everything with handouts, while in the meantime, the other Sydney club has become like a loveless child, vulnerable to player raids with disgruntled kids wanting out.
The AFL appears to have no plan for what to do in Western Sydney. The Canberra written on the back of the Giants jumper suggests a “plan B”, and the AFL wonders why Lance Franklin possibly baulked at signing with GWS.
McLachlan’s belief the rivalry between the Swans and the Giants will escalate quickly is delusional. It is not like the West Coast Eagles and Fremantle Dockers, where there is a deep history of Australian Rules among genuine followers of the game, to make such a rivalry happen.
The dream of the Swans and the Giants somehow having the same intense rivalry the A-League has been able to conjure up between the Western Sydney Wanderers and Sydney FC is an illusion. It will never happen.
Sydney-siders don’t have the same natural love for AFL as they do for rugby league, and the A-League has proven football has always been a sleeping giant, especially in Sydney.
It seems the AFL does not understand the Sydney sporting market, and it appears to underestimate the NRL, its biggest rival.
The NRL, a well run organisation with a big war chest, are buoyed by the redemption the resurrected (now James Packer backed) South Sydney Rabbitohs have given the game. To go with that, the code’s big four of Western Sydney – Penrith Panthers, Canterbury Bulldogs, Parramatta Eels and Wests Tigers – all look set to be making sure they claim their territories.
Gillon McLachlan would be best served to take a much more sober look at the game in Sydney, otherwise the country’s most volatile sporting market could deliver the AFL a king hit it never saw coming.
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