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The Gold Coast Suns are a lost cause

6th August, 2017
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Suns players walk from the field during the Round 5 AFL match between the Gold Coast Suns and the Adelaide Crows at Metricon Stadium in Carrara on the Gold Coast, Saturday, April 22, 2017. (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
Expert
6th August, 2017
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There is a small but not insignificant chance that football is broken.

Saturday night saw a brand of football so cataclysmically bad that you had to wonder whether there would be lasting repercussions. Last week in this space, meaningless football was celebrated. This week, meaninglessness lost hard.

North Melbourne versus Collingwood was one thing. A very bad game between a very bad team and a less bad team. TV commentators headed to the refuge of ‘so bad it’s almost good!’ Radio commentators were more sincere, settling for ‘so bad it’s really bad’.

But North had their momentous win last week, and Collingwood, it turns out, are kind of okay. The real debacle was out West.

The Dockers weren’t culpable for the buffet of bad football that was served at their home ground. They were fine, and have developed into an oddly ‘fine’ team. Nat Fyfe is back, and magnificent, and with David Mundy, the Hill brothers, Lachie Neale and others, they have a surprising amount of ‘fine’ players, competent and classy workers who can somewhat efficiently punish bad football.

The Gold Coast Suns love punishment and they adore bad football. They are either an utter disgrace or masochists who need to be helped. On a broken Saturday night for football, the game’s most broken team played at their most shatteringly woeful.

Gold Coast is a catastrophe. This is no longer quiet, or okay. They are heading towards their seventh straight losing season. Since their inception, a ‘winning season’ has remained nothing more than idea, something reserved for others to experience. After finishing 15th and 16th the past two seasons, they sit in 15th again this year, two wins from 14th. Nothing has changed.

Gold Coast Suns AFL 2017

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

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Ineptitude has remained nauseatingly constant. Against Fremantle, they looked like coach Tony Shaw’s worst Collingwood teams, unable to hit unpressured 20-metre passes, kicking over the heads of players wide open in the corridor, and just generally looking like they were all drunk or disinterested or both.

There does not appear to be any plan. Somehow, the Suns won the inside 50 count against the Dockers yet had 13 fewer scoring shots. Time and time again they would blaze away into ‘attack’, without a prayer or a teammate in sight, purple guernseys outnumbering Gold Coast players three to one, often three to none.

Failure is everywhere on the Coast. The Suns have not drafted or recruited well. Either the coach is clueless, or the players are unsalvageable. Rough diamonds have not been found or moulded, and star players have either regressed or stagnated. Tom Lynch is a sad, lost footballer.

Careers go to die at Metricon Stadium. No culture has ever been created, with hired guns recruited instead of leaders.

The Gold Coast, while the sight of some of his most breathtaking achievements, is a stain on Gary Ablett’s legacy. Perhaps it’s not his fault. Not every player should have the burden of building a club from nothing, setting high standards and inspiring everyone who walks in the door. Not every player is capable.

It’s unfair, but these are the standards that Ablett will be judged by. That is the price you pay for being the greatest player of the past two decades. And what he has delivered the Gold Coast is a remarkable individual and an utterly broken collective, one that does not appear to know how to put itself together for a first time or any time.

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