For most supporters, March is the last time we can truly feel hopeful about our football team. Despite this sense of pre-season opportunism, more than likely your team will suck and quickly crush your spirt and soul like they do every year. This a guide on what to expect from your team in 2018. (Full credit to Drew Magary and Deadspin for this idea. Click here to view his guide for all 32 NFL teams.)
Your team: Are they really anyone’s team? Have you ever met an actual Gold Coast Suns fan?
Your 2017:
The most poorly devised expansion team in Australian sport since the Gold Coast Titans in the NRL, or the Gold Coast Blaze in the NBL, or Gold Coast United in the A-League (you get the idea), continued their downward spiral into complete irrelevance with another pitiful season. After a Round 12 win over Hawthorn, their second over the Hawks (winning), the Suns actually looked half competent, sitting at 5 wins 6 losses, a game and percentage behind Port Adelaide who were fifth. They went onto win one more game for the season. Overall their 2017 was marred by embarrassing losses, an embarrassing drama with their star player and a coach getting fired.
Yes, Rodney Eade, the highly decorated coach who took Sydney to a Grand Final and the Bulldogs to three-straight preliminary finals was sacked with three-games to go, following a 23-point loss to Fremantle. Caretaker Dean Solomon took over for three games and must have enjoyed his stint in the main chair at Metricon Stadium, with his side suffering 58, 33 and 115-point losses to round out another 6-win season.
Eade waded through three truly awful seasons, winning just 16 of his 63 games. He has since been appointed coach of Balwyn Tigers in the Eastern Football League and I bet he’s looking forward to coaching a professional organisation for a change.
Going back to that embarrassing drama with their star player, oh boy, what a performance by Gary Ablett. The prodigal son and the only person who had been keeping the Suns on the footy map, at all, since their inception into the league, played out a magical year, not so much on the field, only off it. Ablett’s season included weekly questioning over whether he’d again seek a trade back to Geelong, having made his intentions quite clear that he was ready to flee the fledging club in the 2016 trade period. He also suffered a myriad of phantom injuries, which limited him to just 14 games, playing primarily when he could be bothered or when he was in the mood. And the high point of the fiasco came prior to their final game in Round 23, where he showed off a burst of speed not seen from the little master since the 2009 Grand Final run which led to Paul Chapman’s winning goal, as he escaped reporters outside Metricon Stadium, it was truly an outstanding display.
And yet, Ablett still won the club’s best and fairest, the most ludicrous club champion since Brisbane had a four-way tie in 2015.
Outside of the bald one, rumours about star forward Tom Lynch returning to Victoria began to flare up and will only intensify this year. Adam Saad followed Ablett back to Victoria in the trade period and via delistings the Sun farewelled Daniel Currie, who surely breaks the record for least games-per-season in a career (10 games in 11 seasons) and Jarrad Grant. So long, microphone head.
What’s new that sucks: Farewell Rocket, hello nemesis, Stuart Dew. I hope you fail and fail miserably. I hope you fail so horribly it will go down in history alongside the likes of Scott Watters and Mark Neeld. Curse you and your round figure forever. Okay I haven’t gotten over 2008 and I never will, but seriously, is there a less enviable position to start your head coaching career? A club with clear, systematic cultural issues, a list constantly having to be replenished due to key players wanting to leave Queensland, a disastrous situation off field and almost no sign of a quick turnaround. It’s going to be a long, arduous task. At least he knows what it’s like to be part of a coaching staff at a club facing hardship. It’s not like his only coaching experience has been in the cushy surroundings of Sydney, making finals every single year.
To make life easier for the first-time coach, the Suns won’t even have a home ground until Round 11. This story has gone under the radar, an AFL club won’t have a home ground to play at until mid-season. Thanks to an archaic sporting event which shouldn’t even exist anymore, Gold Coast face a murderer’s row of games across Australia and around the world. In the first 10 rounds before their bye, the Suns play “home” games in Cairns, at the Gabba and in China and more bizarrely, a home game in Perth against Fremantle. In a league obsessed with equalisation and removing imperfections from the fixture, it’s great that the Dockers get to play an away game at Optus Stadium. This is actually the first of back-to-back games in Perth for Gold Coast, a perfect opportunity for any WA based players to meet with their future club for the 2019 season.
In typical AFL fashion, this appears to be a hastily put together contingency plan and will almost certainly crush Gold Coast’s season before it even begins. Can you imagine if this happened to Sydney, or the Adelaide teams? It would be a crisis, but because it’s Gold Coast, no one cares. Surely there’s an alternative venue nearby the Sun could play four, five home games at. Good luck getting off to a quick start, Stu.
On-field, the Sun at least get to unveil another high-priced recruit taken with their second pick in the draft last year. Wait a minute, they traded that pick away. Well then surely, they get a bona fide star to step straight in and replace Ablett? No, they got Lachie Weller. Yes, the most egregious deal in last year’s free agency period saw the Suns trade away pick two for the 47-game midfielder, with a career average of 17-disposals-per-game and who only has kicked 17-goals in his career. This was truly stunning, a last-minute deal which came within the flurry of action on the final day of the trade period. When the story broke that Weller had requested a trade home and that the Dockers were demanding Gold Coast’s first pick, most would have laughed. It’s one of those spoon-fed quotes to drum up a headline. A club throws out a fake request and the two teams work out a fair deal behind the scenes, say a second-round pick. If the Suns weren’t a train wreck, here’s how the conversation could have gone;
Gold Coast: Lachie wants to come home, we want him.
Fremantle: Fair enough, we want pick 2
Gold Coast: Hahaha, of course.
Fremantle: I know right, can you imagine us asking for pick 2? How about a second-rounder?
Gold Coast: Deal.
Instead Fremantle asked for pick two and Gold Coast simply said yes. Maybe they were so stunned a player actually wanted to head to the Gold Coast, they forgot they could still negotiate.
What has always sucked: So far, the Gold Coast experiment has been a complete failure for the AFL. Not a single trip to the finals, a history of off-field disaster stories, cultural problems rife throughout the club, trouble at board level, hideous list building and a complete inability to make revenue without AFL assistance. With each season that passes, the idea in 2011 of sticking 40+ 18-21-year old’s together on the Gold Coast with wads of cash and spare time seems more and more insane. This is the true task facing Dew, it’s not just fixing on-field problems and constructing a gameplan which will lead to improvement. He has to overhaul the entire culture of the club. Guy McKenna seemingly let it flourish, Eade then failed to fix it, can their next coach?
The Suns are a sieve for the AFL, losing money hand-over-foot every year. Aside from a glimmer of hope in 2014 where they won 10 games, Gold Coast has been a complete laughing stock and they face another massive challenge to keep their next star player.
Clubs have already revealed they plan to meet with Lynch during the season and every Victorian club, particularly those with cap space will throw insane dollars at the key tall. What’s the incentive for Lynch to stay? Aside from the wildcard of a “ambassadorial” salary from the AFL if he stays, he can earn millions playing in his home state at a club which can play finals and contend for premierships. They held on to one captain in 2017, Steven May, but trade talks around Lynch will drag on all season and frankly you couldn’t blame him for leaving.
They also have a hideous looking jumper. It’s just red with their ugly logo plastered in the middle and some yellow down the sides.
Did you know? The Suns have never beaten Adelaide or Sydney and don’t have an overall winning record against any team.
Past Gold Coast Suns players:
- Sam Iles
- Kyal Horsley
- Daniel Gorringe
- Rex Liddy
- Piers Flanagan
What might not suck: They helped crush Hawthorn by sending them Jaeger O’Meara, whose cardboard knees no longer function properly. Thank you, Gold Coast.
