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Australia's Greg Inglis races away for a try. AAP Image/Hagen Hopkins/PHOTOSPORT
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to slightly enjoying the hysteria and frenzy created by the AFL’s recent brazen attack on rugby league.
But now though, with everyone on high alert and the battle lines drawn, ironically the AFL might end up being its own worst enemy.
In pledging its support for Essendon’s bid to poach Greg Inglis, the AFL is treading on dangerously thin ground and running the risk of completely alienating its own players.
The Greg Inglis situation is poles apart from Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau and funding his defection is fraught with danger for the AFL.
The smash and grab policy in its new expansion markets has been both brave and shrewd, marching into enemy territory the coup was well planned, extremely well funded and executed to perfection. It needed to be.
Fair enough, there was always going to be ridicule from some sections of the industry, however in this case, the potential pioneering impact has been too seducing for even the harshest critics to ignore.
The same can’t be said when it comes to Greg Inglis.
Two new teams, two new markets and two new high profile recruits. Money is money, but the exposure and publicity is invaluable and has landed the AFL an important minor victory in the long running war that is the battle of the codes.
This is big picture stuff and whether Hunt or Folau even play a game is irrelevant in the scheme of things anyway.
Apart from being incredible athletes in their own right, they are well and truly novelty recruits. The lure of Inglis is not.
If the AFL was to offer a similar promotional arrangement for Greg Inglis to switch to a Melbourne based club I can guarantee you right now they won’t be afforded the same autonomy from the current playing group, coaches and the AFLPA.
I wonder how big an impact this could potentially have ahead of next year’s collective bargaining agreement too? Why wouldn’t the players strike or demand far more than they would otherwise if the AFL keeps forking out bundles of cash to code swappers?
It just threatens to create an unnecessary divide, it totally makes a mockery of the salary cap, and fails to reward the elite players already playing the game.
The suggestion his indigenous background would help further promote the game baffles me a little too; the AFL has over 80 indigenous players already playing the game. Sure not many are from New South Wales or Queensland, but to use Inglis’ heritage as justification just isn’t going to fly on this one.
There’s no legal issue but it becomes an interesting moral one for the AFL. Any club can pre-list a player as an international rookie providing he had not been registered in a recognised AFL competition, but here in lies the problem, when the governing body is funding the move, the lines become blurry and the boundaries are lost.
This in a sense opens up Pandora’s box.
Every Melbourne club or any other club for that matter will find a boom recruit from another sport and request the AFL fund his salary outside the cap.
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