The house of the fading Gold Coast Suns

Clipper - keep a lid on it - the ottoman empire lurched on till WW1 when trench warfare took over - a perfect analogy for Rugby League.

The Brumbies won comps in late 90s etc so there are already 2 pro footy teams in a town of $300k and they need to be subsidized. Soccer has a better chance in Summer with no opposition but they have failed once already.

Wake up Jeff and back to the NRL

We will never sustain an AFL in Canberra - as much as I'd like one based down here permanently. You only will need to look at what crowd figures for GWS will be like when invariably they have a lean patch I the future. The only reason they are even playing here is the ACT Government is pumping in the good part of $1 million per game to support it - ridiculous subsidisation that is not sustainable in the longer term.

The problem with AFL in canberra is that the surrounding regions have always been League territory and the Raiders were able to fill their team with players from Riverina, Queanbeyan, Yass, Cooma, Goulburn etc League has had pretty healthy junior comps in canberra since the 80s though and I would say the city has produced more NRL players since than AFL ones.

Yep most WA footy fans will currently support either Freo or Eagles, but there is still scope for a third team: 1) Subi's limited capacity means that most fans (especially younger fans) don't actually get to see their team live. Of course Burswood will be better but the Eagles already have over 50,000 members and Freo are in the mid-to-high 40,000s. So that still won't leave a lot of spare seats for families to walk up to the gate on match day and take their kids to a couple of games a year. Because of this we are starting to bread a different footy culture over here amongst kids where footy is a TV game not something they actually see live. That's a shame that might bite WA footy hard in the future. In short if WA#3 marketed itself to people who want to take the kids to a few games a year but not commit to $500+ membership they might get themselves quite a few members. 2) I'm old enough to remember the "old" WA footy culture of the WAFL. Back in those days everyone had a local team and, eg, barracking for the Tigers meant Claremont not Richmond. The Swans wore black & white not red & white. That has obviously totally changed in the last 20 years. The point is that even if you are a committed Eagles or Dockers fan today you aren't yet "rusted on" with generations of your family supporting the one team. Its not like Melbourne in that regard because of the way footy has changed over here. There still capacity for allegiances to change.

No one is 'hoping for his career to be over'. Some of us are however looking at it with both eyes open. How many AFL players have made it back after 2 knee reco's and been the player they were before, or became even better? Just as many never make it back as do with most needing a few seasons before getting back to 80% of what they were. Until it happens we won't know what O'Meara's fate will be.

Birdman, I don't like Hawthorn but I'd love to see O'Meara back in full flight and turn into the player he was once destined to be. He was beautiful to watch. He deserves a break.

Good comment George. Totally agree with all of that. I think if Ablett, Swallow, O'Meara, Bennell, Prestia, etc. had only missed a few games instead of a few seasons, then Gold Coast would be causing havoc similar to GWS. The coaching, training, development and admin might have been poor early, which stifles any chance of being seriously threatening, but above all the raft of injuries were ridiculous. In terms of club culture, Gold Coast need to inject a couple of mature, great clubmen into their ranks. Sounds like Rishcitelli and more recently Barlow fit that bill, but a couple more wouldn't hurt. If Gold Coast have a near-healthy list in 2017 then they will cause damage in the competition. In addition to the recruits you've mentioned, Pearce Hanley should be a useful pick-up too. Good luck.

I've read somewhere that Union supplanted other codes in NZ because church schools replaced staff lost in the Great War with an influx of 'masters'^ (as teachers were called then) from similar English 'Public Schools' - and their game of choice was (naturally) Rugby. History indicates that the toffs game became more widespread there than it did in Australia where it could not compete with League N of the Murray & E of the Darling and with Rules elsewhere. Regarding how "egalitarian" different sports are, Australian ['Rules'] Football is the most - docs & profs mix freely with tradies & shoppies; League and Union already discussed; soccer was largely an Anglo-Scots immigrants game until after WWII, and became more Euro-migrant from then on - more "wogball" and less "Britball". I reckon the jury is still deadlocked on whether Mr Lowy & his rich mates were right or wrong to de-ethnicise soccer, thereby cutting it off from its social & cultural grassroots heritage; the stagnant crowd stats seem to bear that out; lots of angry posts about how SM-Hellas did not get a Victorian A-League guernsey (or should that be 'strip'?). (^ being a 'master' then did not necessarily mean mastery of teaching subjects; being uni-credentialed now too often seems to mean being even less masterful in the classroom. Just as well airline pilots and surgeons are not prepared in the same slapdash way. Sad.)

Good point Wazza - with Sydney becoming an all code city, Brisbane is now the stronghold for league - sort of Byzantine like, they struggled on, shrinking down to Constantinople before capitulating in 1453.

........I reckon the historic class differences between League & Union certainly has seen League evolve more culturally compatible with our egalitarian idea of ourselves despite this being under threat due to a growing affluence. Union represents the very Albion private school WASPS club in this country, a stigma it continues to grapple with and which holds it back here I believe. That said, Union suffers from no such status stigma in NZ, possibly because its founding colonial DNA was extremely different to ours as a bastion of protestant farming gentry compared to our convict beginnings. League was never big in the ACT until the code went professional. The Raiders seized the opportunity to capitalise on a lack of professional sporting presence in the nations capital, by moving from Queanbeyan's Seifert Oval to Canberra. At that time it was Australian Footy that truly dominated Canberras sporting culture with Union 2nd behind it for patronage.

There is an extension flagged to Robina in that document - coming in at an estimated $697 million though I wouldn't expect that to be built before 2021. I honestly think the AFL will be lucky to get their Metricon link before about 2025.

The fact that Eade is the wrong coach for the Suns does not excuse the fact that McKenna was also the wrong coach. That being said, if they had their roles reversed, and Eade was coach for the first few years followed by McKenna, you might have had a successful football club by now.

I care...even as a Freo fan. Gold Coast has been monstered by injury and there are many quality players back on track. The problem, as indicated by the departure of Prestia, O'Meara and the desire of Ablett to leave, is the adversarial coaching style of the antiquated Rocket Eade. Does the Gold Coast admin really believe its squad doesn't talk to players from other clubs and hear about the kind of coaching that is available? They could consider making an offer to Guy McKenna.

.......it is far more RL focused than Canberra is to be sure, which has sustained its Australian Footy DNA over the decades despite the AFL's abject neglect of and contempt for the nations capital.

......the code has sustained a very robust support since the 50s and despite the AFL's neglect. The population of a growing Canberra is approx 420K swelling to over 600k if you consider the surrounding region that includes to the Riverina that boasts a strong footy DNA as well. Our proximity to Sydney should also be viewed as a boon for the AFL in terms of basing an elite stand alone side in the nations capital.

Canberra's population is around 420k while this swells to over to 600k when you include the surrounding region that accesses Canberra as a regional centre.

.......P.S. GWS is an acronym for what exactly MF. Once you have worked that one out you may realise that Canberra has diddly symbolic or cultural affinity with the Giants and never will, while we will be dropped like a hot spud once if ever, the good people of Western Sydney take to the code. The AFL and their television plastic Giants were NEVER intended to be our team while we are simply their safety net, no more no less.

.......so then how is that a NZ team is being touted? Where is the rationale in that pray tell?