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If you think Fremantle’s history and performances are a bit thin on the ground, spare a thought for Gold Coast Suns.
Since they joined the league in 2011, the club has been starved of success. Never a finalist, the club has fallen well short of expectations and has the unenviable record of having lost more games to every club than they have won.
In the meantime, their ‘little brother’ Greater Western Sydney has been a constant finals competitor, making it there again in 2018.
One of the major reasons for the diverse performances of the two clubs is the culture. The Gold Coast is a great place for a holiday, but not a great place to work hard.
As a result the Suns have lost a lot of their class players to other more established clubs that have the history, the culture, the amenities and the likelihood of playing finals to attract these key players. Even this year, the honour of being captain and a salary of over $1 million per year was not enough to prevent star forward Tom Lynch from defecting to the most successful team in recent years, Richmond.
Contrast this with GWS who have managed to retain 14 of the top 15 game players at the club whereas at the Gold Coast eight of the top 15 game players will not be running out on the ground in the Suns’ colours of red, gold and blue.
A greater than 50% attrition rate of your most experienced players is not good when you consider it was only during the 2018 season that the 100th player lined up for the Suns.
That player was Aaron Young who defected to the Suns after 6 years at Port Adelaide. He was joined in Round 1 by two other recruits from other clubs – Nick Holman (2 years at Carlton) and Lachie Weller (3 years at Fremantle) and all three went on to play every game for the season.
They were joined during the year by another five debutantes who all played multiple games. In addition, two of the 2017 recruits in Jarrod Witts and Jarryd Lyons managed to accumulate in two years at the club a significant number of games, which combined with the experience of the remaining senior players Jarrod Harbrow, Steven May, David Swallow, Sam Day and Aaron Hall should give the club a good springboard to build their culture and belief under coach Stuart Dew.
The club is now in the position that the foundation clubs found themselves in the early 1900s: just establishing enough history to give their fans heroes to follow and new faces to celebrate. For the first time, playing one game for the club was not enough to warrant a position in the top 100 players of all time at the club.
By the end of the year, Jacob Dawson had played sufficient games to join Piers Flanagan and Louis Herbert in the “hot seat” (equal 99th on the club’s top 100 game players) and Nathan Ablett, Joel Tippett, Leigh Osborne and Marc Lock will no longer receive top 100 game player invites.
All that remains is for the ghost of Gary Ablett to be excised, and the Suns will move forward.
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