The decision comes after the Giants refused to come to the trade table last October to hash out a deal with Fremantle, to whom McCarthy had requested a move.
With no deal eventuating, McCarthy – contracted until the end of 2017 – had no choice but to settle in for another year with the Giants. However, it now appears that has proven too much for him.
There is something I have said about McCarthy and other young footballers in this position many times before, and I’m sure I will say it many times again in the future.
If you can’t cope with being away from home, if you can’t deal with the fact the draft could send you anywhere, if you’re not willing to put in the hard yards wherever your new home is, then maybe a career in the AFL is just not for you.
A little over two years ago at the 2013 national draft, Fremantle were widely expected to pick up McCarthy as their annointed successor to Matthew Pavlich with pick 17.
However, Greater Western Sydney surprised the AFL world, picking up the tall Western Australian prospect with pick 14, which they had received from Port Adelaide in a trade that also saw another homesick youngster Jared Polec return to South Australia.
At that time the Giants had Jeremy Cameron and Jon Patton as established members of their future forward line and had just used the No.1 pick on Tom Boyd, leading many pundits to question why they would spend a first round pick on yet another key forward – and even more when McCarthy signed a two-year contract extension before playing a senior game.
Flash forward to the start of 2015 – Boyd had gone to the Bulldogs, Patton was recovering from a second ACL injury, and McCarthy was tearing it up in the seniors, making the Giants look like geniuses.
McCarthy kicked 29 goals in his first 12 games in 2015 and at that stage of the season was among the top ten goalkickers in the league and shaping as a contender for the Rising Star Award.
He struggled to reproduce that form in the remainder of the season, kicking just six more goals for the year and none at all in his last three games, but the message was very clear – the kid could play.
Fremantle, still searching for a player who could fill Pavlich’s shoes, approached contracted McCarthy with a huge offer to return home, he requested a trade, and the standoff began.
Now that McCarthy has caved on his commitment to the Giants and taken indefinite leave, I wonder if Fremantle will be reconsidering their contract offer – and if not, perhaps they should.
Homesickness won’t be an issue for him if he plays at Fremantle, but if the decision to quit and go home rather than put in the hard work at a club he chose to sign a contract extension with is how McCarthy deals with things, he may not have the mental toughness to make it as an AFL footballer.
Granted he has shown the talent to thrive at the top level, but it takes a lot more than talent to really succeed. The most successful footballers are unanimously those who combine talent with mental strength and dedication.
How is a player who can’t cope with living away from home going to deal with the pressure and scrutiny of being a senior member of the team? How is someone who makes the decision to quit a difficult situation going to act when the team is two goals down with five minutes to go in a final?
What has surprised me is that I have seen far more people questioning the Giants’ decision to hold McCarthy despite his trade request last year rather than questioning McCarthy’s commitment to being an AFL footballer.
Personally, I commend the Giants on being one of few clubs willing to hold firm on this issue. If a player has signed a contract with them, then they have every right to hold them to it. Given how many young, talented, interstate footballers are on their list, that is something they are right to be clear on.
I wish Cam McCarthy the best of luck in recovering from his homesickness, absolutely. But I do suggest that he seriously considers his future. If he doesn’t have the dedication to stick to his word and meet the demands of being an AFL footballer – not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard – this might not be the career for him.
jax
Guest
Karma and Rasty, please listen up. Antony Flew literally wrote the book on atheism and was the worlds most respected and renowned authority on atheism for almost 50 years. Science proved that he was wrong and he admitted it and wrote a book on it. When he realised that the odds of replicating the DNA sequence is the equivalent of 250 poker machines simultaneously hitting the jackpot he changed his mind and concluded that there must be a creator. Take a look at the origins of DNA and the proteins required to create the universe. If you sit a monkey down at a typewriter how long do you think it will take him to write like Shakespeare? Now who is the one that is relying on faith? I'm following the scientific evidence while you're probably following what you see on tv and learn in classrooms. Scientific journals - do you know how they work? For example - take a look at the Journal of Fluid Dynamics. One professor founded the journal, he was backed by a university (and they are backed by wealthy benefactors) and he remained the sole editor of the journal for almost 40 years. He was the traffic cop and controlled much of the scientific information flow in this field of science, one man. Peer review simply means that another scientist can replicate the experiment. In the 2013 peer-reviewed Organisational Study on climate science only 36% of scientists and geoengineers believed that man was responsible for climate change. 64% were sceptics. You won't be told or taught any of these things in classrooms or on the news - you have to peel back the layers of literally everything that you have ever learnt if you want to find the truth as most of it is lies. You might want to start with 'famous scientists that believed in God' seeing that science is your religion of choice, or Antony Flew or Gerald Schroeder. Don't believe anything that I, or any man tells you. Go out and look for yourself. You might be surprised at what you discover. Go for it and good luck.
Don Freo
Guest
You'd better tell his manager that he has kids. That may well be a surprise to him. It could also be a surprise to his partner.
Casper
Guest
Has anyone got compassion for the real victim here, his manager will be deprived of 10-15% of that extra money Cam would have got from Freo. How is he going to put his kids through private school/Uni unless he can manipulate clubs.
Casper
Guest
So the 18 year old armed services recruit should be allowed to refuse posting interstate and being sent to serve overseas even though he knew what the game was all about when signing on?
Casper
Guest
Can anyone advise if he gets full pay while sitting at home with mum & dad? Since he's made the request for a trade, I'd play hardball. In the corporate world, when a top employee gets poached by a competitor, he generally gets put on gardening leave to stop them losing clients.
Karma Miranda
Guest
Religion is an unwavering faith in a particular concept that cannot be proven (ie: that God exists, or AFL is "better" than Rugby). Science however, is a fact-based process of eliminating all possibilities from a set of circumstances to reach an inevitable conclusion. Science is the very antithesis of Religion, much like Jax's concept of Slavery versus the Freedom an AFL player enjoys to choose any other form of employment should he not agree with the rules the AFL requires him to follow.
Minz
Guest
Jax - yes, the military. Join up as a 17 year old, and you can sign up for up to a 13-year commitment if you're going for pilot training (I'm not sure if there's longer periods). However, you do (or did, at least) have up to 2 years to decide it wasn't for you, and go home without penalty.
Minz
Guest
I did. I was homesick. I got over it.
josh
Guest
Get used to this people, these young kids don't want to play for a team in an area that doesn't want them. He could be a celebrity in Perth or a Pariah in Western Sydney. Not a hard choice is it.
Peter McConvill
Roar Rookie
In short completely agree. Some thoughts 1. Every year 100´s of 17 and 18 year olds leave home and travel across the country to join the ADF, either as troops or officer cadets. They have nothing like the level of support or pay that footballers get but they suck it up or leave. If you cant cut it you have no business trying to in the ADF: 2. Every year, thousands of kids from country areas leave home to go to university, or even just high school. They suck it up or give and, go home and surrender their dreams. 3. There are dozens, if not hundreds of professions where there are only limited employers (perhaps limited to 1) and people who want to follow that profession have limited options. Fighter pilots, air traffic controllers, soldiers, police, regulators, judges etc etc. There´s absolutely nothing unusual or inherently wrong with this as long as the employer isnt abusing it market position. For a 18/19 year old to volunteer for this knowing what was coming, to be accept the contract, be assured of a wage far in excess anything he could expect for any other job he´s qualified for and then try and present as being abused it a bit rich. 4. Finally the slavery thing. Silly, undergraduate semantics. Being required to do something you´d rather not in order be rewarded so that you can do the things you want to do isn't slavery, its part of being sentient.
northerner
Guest
Off topic, I know, but Dynamo Kyiv is a Ukrainian team, not a Russian one. The Ukrainians would have your guts for garters for making that mistake.
Dalgety Carrington
Roar Guru
I'm just unsure about the merits of career advice from someone who a) has no direct experience in that particular career and b) has zero specific information about what the particular individual he is giving said advice to is experiencing.
Balthazar
Guest
waaay too many assumptions in this article, Josh. I don't know whether there is a serious problem impacting Cam or not, maybe he is a big sook as all the usual Freo-bashers say. Only time will (or may not) tell. However, all clubs talk to contracted players, let's not pretend otherwise and go with the "Freo approached him with a big offer" line. We don't know that they even checked in with his manager, although they probably did. Certainly, it was Cam and his manager that have run the go-home campaign publicly. What we do know is both the club (Freo) and his manager have repeatedly said it was not a big offer. It is at least as plausible as anything else that he may have some personal issues to deal with. They may not have arisen in 2014, when he signed his extension without having played a game. They may have arisen in mid-2015, which is when Cam and his manager have repeatedly said he first approached the club and said he was struggling. This could of course explain his drop off in form at the same time. And it can, and does happen, that players sign with clubs and then find it is not healthy for them to remain there. They can function elsewhere. I would have thought that the story of Clark and Melbourne/Geelong would be too fresh in people's memories to go round this roundabout again. In the end, you may be right that Cam is not going to cope with AFL. And good luck to him with whatever he does if that is the case. Or maybe he is a self-entitled brat. But the reasons I think GWS has stuffed this all up and now have egg on their faces don't even get mentioned in your article. We know that last year when GWS played Freo in Perth he was not even part of the travelling party. This was after he says he approached them with his homesickness. This seems pretty callous to me - Freo routinely takes young players as emergencies when playing in their home State, and I am sure other teams do too. Then there was all the crap put in the media about how he loves GWS and Western Sydney. Then the propaganda about how he was just going to get over it (because others have bought property and got girlfriends and settled down) has continued every few weeks during the pre-season. Clearly untrue and - to a casual observer - not sounding like they had taken his complaints seriously. And they also traded a whole pile of players, including ones who were happy at the club, but not McCarthy. Well within their rights to do so but would not have improved a strained relationship. You nailed your flag to the mast a long time ago when you laid the blame at Freo's feet for not offering more, even if it was overs. I say that GWS was well within their rights to enforce his contract but, with the way they went about it, it is utterly unsurprising that, at the least, they created a resentful young man and, if he has significant issues to deal with, they may have made them worse.
Roy
Guest
He is indeed - he's also a biblical scholar - and is only nine years of age !
New York Hawk
Guest
Anyone who knew anything about slavery would never think, letalone post comments about it on a public forum, the AFL draft was anything close to slavery. You need a giant dose of perspective.
jax
Guest
No, science is a religion. Peel back the covers and look at the assumptions that it is based on eg the dogmas. Not all of it is religion as some science is great and definitely true and it has its place but it's given way too much credit IMO.
Bakkies
Guest
Messi moved from Argentina when he was around 14 to work with the Barcelona academy and he is not an exception. If you want to play sport you have to make sacrifices. It makes you tougher and more resilient living out of your comfort zone. Tennis players move as well. Andy Murray went to Spain which he chose to do when he was around the same age to get better coaching in far better weather. He met Nadal there and got to know his future rival. That wouldn't have happened if he stayed at home around Dunblane being coached by his mother.
Dean R
Guest
My intention was not to get political here Jax, as I agree with you wholeheartedly. People are often dragged into war for misguided political reasons that serve no one. I was merely pointing out that the battle Cam is facing is nothing compared what men his age were faced with not so long ago. At that time, if men left to go to war, then cried and said the war was not for them, and they missed their family, they would have been labelled as deserters and traitors. Cam was not conscripted to go to GWS, he willingly joined the AFL, knowing full well that he might be picked up by another team across the country, then foolishly decided to extend his contract, and now after all his wishes were granted, he now wants to say....Nah! This is not for me. I now want to go home. In my book, he is every bit a deserter, and in laments terms, a 'cry baby'. He lacks the mental fortitude of what an Aussie rules footballer needs to have. Honestly, if the guy wants to 'cut and run' now, then who's to say he won't do it at another AFL club when the going gets a bit too tough for him there. As a society, we are far too sympathetic for his cause, when in years gone by, as a society we all would be admonishing him. In my opinion, the AFL should send a message to people like Cam, and penalise him for walking away from his contracted club by banning him for a couple of years before he can join a new AFL club.
rasty
Guest
Are you one of the few that know the reasons behind the wars you have cited? You leg-end...
Carl
Guest
Mcarthy had a hot looking gf from perth last year which ended around the time it emerged he was gonna have to go back to Sydney, and now has landed another once again from Perth, wonder if it's to do with his personal relationships... Edit: Just checked and he deactivated his facebook...interesting