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Gary Ablett Jr used to have it all. Premierships, the undisputed title of the game’s best player, and hair.
Having left Geelong at the end of 2010 for an assortment of pleasantly heavy bags with comically large dollar signs printed across the front, Ablett somehow only managed to enhance his standing in the game.
Many had questioned whether he would be able to continue to spend two hours a week performing a very public brand of piss-taking, given he wouldn’t be receiving the help he had grown used to in his time with the Cats.
On that front, as we now all know, no dice.
A second Brownlow Medal for Ablett in 2013, and what would have probably been a third in 2014 if not for a single tackle, will attest to that.
Yet the 2017 season looms as the strangest of Ablett’s career, the season nine to his Scrubs – if Scrubs had originally been a, you know, much better show.
What can Ablett actually achieve this year?
In leaving for the Gold Coast, the then-preposterous amount of money being offered was undoubtedly the driving factor for Ablett. However, there was ambition in the move too.
Having achieved most of the game’s major awards for midfielders, Ablett was being handed the opportunity to prove himself capable of being a key part of a whole club’s creation from the ground up, and help deliver success within a short time frame.
But now, entering their seventh season, it seems unlikely that the Suns will see to that end with Ablett.
The team itself has embarked on not just a new chapter, but a new book entirely.
A club that is pushing for the sort of success intended when Ablett was first acquired probably wouldn’t have selected four top-ten picks at the previous year’s draft.
Despite the most assuring of reassuring efforts in the media from club chairman Tony Cochrane – who you might recall from such critically acclaimed performances as Jaeger ain’t leaving! – finals are almost certainly off the cards.
And now, after a tumultuous offseason in which Ablett reportedly requested a trade back to Geelong, Ablett cannot even hang his hat on helping lead the club towards a brighter future, having relinquished his role as captain, and having even been omitted from a seven-man leadership group.
Though his recently injury-ravaged seasons have undoubtedly played a hand in that latter demotion as well, that’s a spectacular fall from grace.
The insanity of Ablett’s very specific trade request is perhaps best denoted in two key areas.
It came just 18 months after the former Cat had signed a contract extension, which links him to the AFL’s second-youngest club until the end of the 2018 season.
And he obviously chose his high-school sweetheart, the one that got away – because he, uh, left them – in Geelong: a side with no trade currency, which thanks to trading away future picks again, will again have little to work with at the end of the coming season too.
All these factors suggest the Suns are moving on from their superstar, with coach Rodney Eade suggesting in February that Ablett will spend a significant part of the year as a forward.
This feeling only becomes stronger when you consider the midfielders Gold Coast have lost in recent seasons, from Josh Caddy and Harley Bennell, to Jaeger O’Meara and Dion Prestia.
“We have to go past Gary… you can’t rely on one player,” Eade said.
It’s just a shame for Ablett’s tenure at the Suns – whichever way it ends – that it has taken this long for the club to realise this.
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