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Crows sack two more in coaching cull

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11th October, 2019
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Adelaide have completed their internal review with head of football Brett Burton and senior assistant coach Scott Camporeale to depart the AFL club.

Adelaide have cleared the decks for their incoming AFL senior coach with the ruthless sackings of Brett Burton and Scott Camporeale.

Burton and Camporeale have been at the core of their football department and they are prominent casualties of the Crows’ post-season reviews, which wound up on Friday.

The Crows aim to announce their new coach within a week and it cannot come quickly enough for the club.

Adelaide have paid a fearful and self-inflicted price for how they dealt with 40 minutes of poor football in the 2017 grand final loss to Richmond, with the notorious 2018 pre-season camp headlining their missteps.

Coach Don Pyke fell on his sword last month and Taylor Walker has stepped down as captain.

Taylor Walker

(Photo by Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images)

“I’m very much looking forward to that day,” Crows chief executive Andrew Fagan said of next week’s senior coach announcement.

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“We want to just be able to start looking forward.

“For a variety of reasons, including some self-inflicted wounds, we’ve struggled to look forward for a couple of years.

“We’ve found ourselves getting tangled up, which is why we’ve made some decisions.”

Burton was a popular Adelaide player in his 177-game career and he returned to the club in late 2016 as football boss.

Camporeale had been a Crows assistant coach since late 2010 and was interim senior coach for the end of the 2015 season after Phil Walsh’s tragic death.

But Burton especially had become a lightning rod for criticism as the Crows dropped out of the top eight for the last two seasons.

“They are really, really tough calls – certainly among the toughest I’ve been involved in over 25 years in sport. It’s hard,” Fagan said

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“Both Brett and Scott, they’re quality people and they’ve invested a tremendous amount into this club over a number of years.

“But it’s a brutal industry as well.

“We wanted to ensure that a new senior coach had the ability, without any reasonable restraint, to be able to define what he wanted the program to look like with some genuine fresh eyes around him.”

There will be criticism that the changes have not gone far enough, with Fagan and prominent board member Mark Ricciuto also in the spotlight as the Crows have struggled.

But Fagan said the Jason Dunstall-led external review found Adelaide are doing a lot right, adding that much of that review lined up with their internal post-season findings.

“Ultimately it found those (governance) structures were appropriate – the issues that were identified were pretty localised, to some dynamics within the football department,” Fagan said

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He is optimistic that the Crows can turn around their on-field fortunes quickly.

“He (Dunstall) identified plenty of things that were going well, he made it pretty clear that there are lots of things that are in very good shape,” he said.

“He made the clear point that things can turn very quickly through the right change.

“It does come with some tough decisions.”

Significantly, Adelaide will appoint a head of leadership and culture after the reviews found the club needed more emphasis on “maintaining and in some instances improving personal relationships”.

© AAP

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