Success for the Gold Coast Suns is far from inevitable

Ever since September 2008, when the concessions for the Gold Coast Suns were first announced, there has been a widely-held view that the AFL was setting its expansion teams up for certain success.

Prior to the Suns’ first season in 2011, one club chief anonymously said their stack of top ten draft picks was “an absolute jackpot” and “too much”.

The AFL’s expansion strategy appeared to pin its hopes on the new teams winning premierships within their first few seasons, which they hoped would help to establish a fan-base in the developing markets.

It’s not exactly foolproof logic to begin with, but the Suns’ dismal performance in last Saturday’s Queensland derby – I refuse to call it the QClash – makes me wonder if it can even clear the first hurdle.

This is an important moment for the Gold Coast Football Club. While it is generally believed that the AFL won’t let them fail, it’s worth noting that as of the end of the 2014 season, their expansion concessions are over.

Their list goes back to a maximum of 38 players and their Total Player Payment bonus allowance is abolished. That’s it. Zip. Zero. Come 2015, they will be just another club with the same salary cap and access to draft picks as anyone else outside of Sydney.

So if there is to be success, it has to come largely from the current group of players. The same group of players who were belted last week by lowly Brisbane, and by the Bulldogs the week before.

The Suns have drafted many exciting prospects over the last few years, but it’s not clear who on their list will lead the younger generation once Gary Ablett Junior is gone.

David Swallow is often seen as the natural leader of this young team, but he did little on Saturday aside from giving away a few dumb free kicks.

Harley Bennell has played some brilliant individual games this year, but he was shut out entirely on the weekend by the unheralded Rohan Bewick.

Tom Lynch could be the AFL’s next great key forward, but in wet conditions with his side getting badly beaten he made some bad errors in front of goal when his teammates seriously needed a lift.

I didn’t even notice Jaeger O’Meara on the day. He had thirteen tackles according to the stats, which shows he was getting involved, but it also shows that he was regularly second to the ball.

Apart from Ablett, the Suns’ recruitment from other clubs has been underwhelming. They get solid service from the likes of Jarrod Harbrow and Michael Rischitelli, but they’re not the sort of players that improve those around them.

Gold Coast have done the right thing in making sure all of their most talented young players are squared away on multi-year contracts well before the off-season. Apart from Josh Caddy, their player retention has put their cross-town rivals to shame.

The flip side of good player retention is often a lack of flexibility to go out and recruit new players. However, the Suns have quietly been linked to Melbourne free agent James Frawley, so perhaps they’ve managed their salary cap well enough to stay in the market.

Still, from here on in every time they try to recruit an established player, they’ll do it on equal footing with every other club in the league, including the clubs in heartland states, which seem to be more attractive destinations for career-focused young footballers.

The Suns would expect to get a boost from their academy zone, by far the most fertile of the four zones divided among the frontier clubs, but it looks likely that the AFL will change the rules to ensure that clubs with academies don’t benefit from them too much.

So that leaves Gold Coast as just another frontier club in the notoriously fickle Gold Coast market, with most of its list from outside the state, and without any real competitive advantage apart from the young talent already on its list. Expect rival clubs to start circling those talented youngsters in the near future.

The Suns and the AFL had better hope that success comes quickly – if young footballers feel they can achieve more success elsewhere, why wouldn’t they look to move?.

Gold Coast have a 0-7 record without Gary Ablett. What that exposes is a lack of resilience. When things go wrong, when conditions are less than ideal, their young players don’t really know how to respond. This is also reflected in a pretty lousy record away from Metricon Stadium.

Resilience is built through experience, particularly the experience of dealing with adversity.

So it’s not all doom and gloom. It might even be that this challenging stretch of games without Ablett will prove more valuable for the young Suns than their first finals experience would have.

But right at this moment, Gold Coast’s projected rise up the ladder, and the success of the AFL’s expansion clubs, looks anything but inevitable.