Opinion
Lately, I’ve become appalled with how some Collingwood supporters have spoken or written about former Magpies Adam Treloar, Jaidyn Stephenson and Tom Phillips.
“Treloar is a crybaby. He can’t kick.”
“Stephenson is a flash in the pan. He’s soft. He’s been worked out.”
“Phillips is a butcher.”
These slights go on and on and on.
There’s criticism and then there’s ridicule, and this is now devolving into ridicule.
Let’s deal with the first truth, one the media has barely examined: the Collingwood Football Club tried to impose sacrifice and nobility on their trade period, but it’s all been a smokescreen so nobody’s had to directly answer these questions:
•How did you bungle the salary cap so badly?
•How did you not see this coming as early as 2018?
•Who is responsible?
•Why has that person not been held accountable?
•How can we have confidence in the same people managing the salary cap?
•If the cap was so tight, why were players being loaded up on bigger and longer contracts? (It doesn’t wash that they wanted to keep the list together, given these players were already contracted.)
•And, purely hypothetically, if Collingwood had won a flag, what was the strategy to deal with the salary cap then?
This was just appalling management. You’d be fired in any other organisation for messing up this horrifically.
Journalists are happy to doorstop players and hit us with click-bait, to inundate us with stories about players caught texting while driving, or speculating on injuries before players have been thoroughly checked out, but not a single journo has investigated the ‘how’ behind one of the bigger football stories in the last year: “spin aside, how did you mess it up this badly?”
Not a single reporter has pursued this. Not a single journalist has asked these questions.
Not a single journalist has pushed how a sporting organisation that prides itself on its professionalism and efficiency bungled their cap so badly they had to hemorrhage three players from their starting 18 – two of whom they had just signed to big extensions.
As far as the players themselves go, Adam Treloar has been condemned for letting this play out in the media.
Why shouldn’t he voice his hurt? The club used his wife Kim Ravaillion’s move to Queensland as justification for trying to force a trade with Gold Coast and grab their juicy pick five.
(Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
Then Collingwood smeared Treloar in the media – “he’s hard to coach.”
“The leadership group didn’t want him.”
Coach Nathan Buckley’s explanations have been wishy-washy. Treloar’s been adamant. One person has told the same version of how it happened, and the other has told us that, yes, well, maybe, I sorta, kinda see how he mighta, maybe just got that impression.
Treloar’s been gracious – much more than Buckley, or the Collingwood Football Club, deserve.
Ravaillion has whacked the club. Good on her. No – great on her!
If I were Treloar or Ravaillion, I’d be speaking about Collingwood as if I were cutting a heal promo in the WWE.
Treloar’s criticised for his disposal. “We’re better off without him.”
While there can be question marks on Treloar’s disposal and decision-making, he’s suddenly been reduced to someone who burns the ball every time he gets it. I don’t think so.
I imagine Treloar will benefit from being in a better system at the Bulldogs, where they’ll maximise his strengths, rather than bog him down in the middle of a pack and neuter him. Interestingly, Luke Beveridge started him on the wing on Friday night.
Josh Daicos now wears Treloar’s number 7. The cynical part of me sees this as damage control to mollify all those fans out there who wore 7 and now feel betrayed.
“Hang on! It’s not so bad, look! Your number 7 now belongs to the son of a club legend, an exciting prospect, and a player who had a breakout season!”
Why else would a player who snubbed his father’s famous 35 (it was allegedly offered to him) to make an identity in his own number (26) ditch that after his breakout season?
Jaidyn Stephenson has bigger unanswered questions hanging over his head.
Here’s a kid who won the Norwich Rising Star in his debut year (2018), and who the club deemed worthy of their number one guernsey in 2019.
Stephenson was becoming the face of their marketing. The club saw fit to give him a big juicy extension – this isn’t the player’s fault. The club’s come along and said, “Here’s a lot more money, now sign.”
And he did. Why wouldn’t he?
And then he’s ditched.
Jaidyn Stephenson in 2019 (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Why has nobody asked why the club saw fit to chop him? Outside of the salary cap purge, why was he deemed sacrificial, given it seemed the club highly rated his future and he’s a young, exciting, proven talent?
Buckley claimed he felt Collingwood’s list could cover these three departures.
Really? They have fast, exciting players with pace and tons of X-factor on their list?
Stephenson is condemned for his bad 2019 and 2020 campaigns. No, wait.
Until his suspension in 2019, his stats were better than his 2018 stats. We all know the distractions of 2020.
Stephenson’s a third-year player who might’ve struggled with hub life. If he’s expendable after one bad season, then on that logic, Collingwood should also exit Brodie Grundy, Will Hoskin-Elliott, Josh Thomawell… this could be a long list.
As bad as Stephenson’s 2020 was, he was still second in Collingwood’s goal-kicking, and kicked more goals (14 goals from 14 games) than fellow forwards Will Hoskin Elliott (11 goals from 18 games) and Josh Thomas (4 goals from 14 games).
If Stephenson could do this in a year where things weren’t going well for him, imagine what he could do if you got him right.
But now, apparently, he’s a problematic, limited, soft talent. Really? After winning the Norwich Rising Star, after being given number one, after becoming the face of marketing, the club does a 180 and nobody asks why Stephenson is deemed expendable?
Obviously, there’s much more there than a salary.
Has a journalist chased this up? Nope.
In 2018, Tom Phillips had a breakout year as a winger. Then, in 2020, in a year every team is struggling to score, and then compound that by Collingwood’s glacial ball movement going inside F50, the club – in their infinite wisdom – decide to make him a defensive half-forward.
And then he struggles. Along with every other forward at the club.
We’re then told Josh Daicos has gone past Phillips because, you know, there’s only one wing on the ground. Phillips’s elite endurance no longer gives him an edge because games have been shortened, he butchers the ball. This, that.
I expect he’ll show up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list next.
Maybe the reality is much simpler: in 2018, he was used in a role to complement a strong midfield, and in 2020, he was used in an alien role during a compromised season where scores were low and games were defensive across the entire competition.
How this becomes Phillips’s fall from grace and an indictment on his capability is beyond me.
Tom Phillips (Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images)
Then there’s the old money qualification: they’re not earning their dollars. They should be much better players for the big bucks they’re being paid.
The club deemed them worth those salaries knowing their output, their potential, and what the future was likely to offer. I didn’t see the players themselves holding out for these bigger contracts.
The truth is Collingwood overpaid them, and now the critics are saying, well, then, they should’ve overperformed to justify those dollars? Wait – what?
Well, there’s a cunning strategy: pay players more than they’re worth, then complain when their output isn’t commensurate with what they’re earning.
“It was just a business decision,” we’re also assured.
Well, yes, technically, it was. But it was a business decision that was required after the club messed up the salary cap. It’s like saying, “I decided to put out the house fire after I purposely started it.” Good job there – you’re a hero!
None of this was the club dealing from a position of strength and prescience.
These three players aren’t perfect. No players are. I appreciate they had their shortcomings and had areas of their games they had to work on.
But the way they’ve been vandalised now that they’re no longer in black and white, the way they’ve been depreciated and ripped apart is appalling – fans subconsciously trying to rationalise Collingwood’s bungling until it’s palatable.
And a shot, too, at the commentators (particularly Garry Lyon and Jonathon Brown) in the Collingwood-Bulldogs game who were disappointed the Collingwood players didn’t niggle Treloar, or get in his face.
I can understand this logic if a player leaves a club acrimoniously. Or even if he simply leaves voluntarily. Or if he jumps for more money. But none of those are applicable here.
Treloar didn’t want to leave. He’s done nothing but spoken highly of the club and the players and expressed his desire that he wanted to stay. Yet his former teammates should get stuck into him?
Honestly, this was shameful, irresponsible, and insensitive editorialising from the commentary team. Worse, they tried to justify it by quipping how things have changed in today’s game.
No, they haven’t.
These are just extraordinary circumstances that not one of you could process or comprehend on any level of humanity.
Good on the Collingwood supporters who applauded Treloar at the end, and the Collingwood players who each embraced him. That showed the true bonds, rather than this bull machismo that the commentators were demanding.
Whatever vitriol I feel in relation to Treloar, Stephenson and Phillips, it’s aimed exclusively at the Collingwood Football Club for creating this situation.
Treloar and Phillips had solid starts to their careers elsewhere, and will continue to grow. Stephenson blitzed in a team that was smashed.
Watching Collingwood’s performance on Friday night, I’m unsure how, or why, they could try to sell the claim that they could cover these three players.
It’s just another indictment on the club, and yet more evidence how they’ve broken whatever they tried to build, and how the message they’ve sold to the public, and continue try to sell, is a fallacy.
To Adam Treloar, Tom Phillips and Jaidyn Stephenson: I wish you well at your new clubs. I hope you have long, smashing, successful careers, and make Collingwood rue their ineptitude.
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