Round 1 Preview: Get over it Richmond, move on

Richmond’s Nathan Broad didn’t have quite the same level of fun as his teammates, this off-season.

It is finally here, Round 1, marking the official end of the off-season, dominated by one team, guess who?

Yes, if you’re a fan of any of the other 17 teams, you’ve no doubt enjoyed the last six-months, a Tigers lovefest across all forms of media. Damien Hardwick recounting on a daily basis how he had to change his methods after the 2016 disaster. Dustin Martin suddenly becoming a marketable face of the league, and for some reason, Bonds underwear. Alex Rance again trying to drum up some publicity with a faux retirement. Jack Riewoldt’s wedding. Brendon Gale being Brendon Gale, etc. etc.

After the Bulldogs broke their premiership drought in 2016, I didn’t think the level of coverage on a single team could be topped, that the media could spend more time focusing on a single team, but alas they have. And I get that there will be a greater focus on the reigning premiers, it makes sense. You’re going to hear about the Tigers more than say, North Melbourne, who no one ever has any interest in, particularly this year. However, at some point, enough is enough, surely.

The entire 2018 season has been built on Richmond, from the marketing by the league, to the marketing by major TV networks, to which players are constantly being promoted. And I pray and hope, it all falls apart and quickly.

Richmond have eight marque games on either Thursday or Friday night, with the ANZAC Day eve game against Melbourne on a Tuesday night thrown in for good measure. Can you imagine if the Tigers put up a Bulldogs-like premiership defence? Wouldn’t it be glorious. A slow start, in-fighting, injuries, turmoil and the return of supporters threatening to microwave memberships and burning down Punt Road, the good old days.

Anyway, what else has been going on outside of Richmond? Well the AFL has botched Tasmania and how to handle sex scandals inside AFL House. Collingwood are still a dumpster fire. Jeff Kennett is back, that’s just what we need. And some Melbourne players didn’t want to go on a pre-season camp, which means according to some meatheads in the media, we should write off their entire season before it even begins.

I do enjoy the likes of Wayne Carey and Cam Mooney calling Melbourne players soft for going to the AFLPA to voice their concerns regarding training habits at the clubs. It’s not like that’s the reason the AFLPA exists and I mean they don’t even go around king hitting opponents off the ball, now that’s toughness.

So, the season begins tonight, which means it’s still prediction season. Some general thoughts for the 2018 season. Sydney’s midfield will return to being a powerhouse. I don’t like the Port Adelaide hype but it’s more deserved than the Essendon hype. Free agent and trade acquisitions seem to guarantee success in the eyes of some, the Bombers have major holes. The Dees will play finals and are the best chance at replicating the Dogs and Tigers of years before. For some reason, I’m bullish on Fremantle, I like what they’re building despite their deficiencies up forward. Gold Coast not having a home ground for half a season is an absolute travesty, although Stuart Dew seems like a competent coach. Geelong will do what they do every year under Chris Scott and fall short in the finals and North will be irrelevant, again.

Some major predictions;

Premiers – Sydney
Runners Up – Adelaide
Wooden Spoon – North Melbourne
Brownlow – Bryce Gibbs

Ladder

  1. Sydney
  2. GWS Giants
  3. Adelaide
  4. Richmond
  5. Melbourne
  6. Geelong
  7. Port Adelaide
  8. Hawthorn
  9. Collingwood
  10. Fremantle
  11. St. Kilda
  12. Essendon
  13. Western Bulldogs
  14. Gold Coast
  15. West Coast
  16. Brisbane
  17. Carlton
  18. North Melbourne

Season Wins Over/Under

Adelaide (15.5) – Over
Brisbane (6.5) – Under
Carlton (6.5) – Under
Collingwood (10.5) – Under
Essendon (12.5) – Under
Fremantle (9.5) – Over
Geelong (14.5) – Under
Gold Coast (5.5) – Over
GWS Giants (14.5) – Over
Hawthorn (10.5) – Over
Melbourne (12.5) – Over
North Melbourne (6.5) – Under
Port Adelaide (13.5) – Under
Richmond (13.5) – Over
St. Kilda (9.5) – Over
Sydney (15.5) – Over
West Coast (10.5) – Under
Western Bulldogs (11.5) – Under

And now, onwards to Round 1;

Richmond (-30.5) vs Carlton

The Tigers coronation in front of 80,000 insufferable Richmond supporters with 10,000 Carlton supporters asking themselves why they bothered to turn up and be surrounded by these people. Despite all the optimism around Brendon Bolton and this improving Carlton list, they only won six-games in 2017 and went 1-9 from Round 14, giving Bolton a 2-18 record between Rounds 14 and 23 across his first two-seasons. They’ve also lost two of their best five players from last year with Gibbs at Adelaide and Sam Docherty being lost for the season with an ACL tear. Hopefully the Blues will stick with Richmond for a half or longer, but a six to seven goal loss is on the cards.

Adelaide (-2.5) vs Essendon

It’s probably no different to any other season, but there seems to be a lot of injuries on the eve of the year. Adelaide haven’t escaped the injury bug with captain Taylor Walker being ruled out of their opener and Brad Crouch looking at almost two months on the sidelines with groin soreness. The Bombers lost Marty Gleeson in the JLT series with a serious ankle injury and small forward Orazio Fantasia will miss several games. These odds are much closer than they should be and the Crows will cruise.

Brisbane (+24.5) vs St. Kilda

The Saints are a strange case, in the words of Damo Barrett, “where are they at?” St. Kilda are stuck in no man’s land, sort of good enough to sneak into the finals, but won’t do any damage. As all clubs seem to love doing, the Saints went and re-signed Alan Richardson despite him not having achieved a thing. Even with this extension, the heat will be on if they’re sitting at home in September once again. They have an easy start against the Lions, who are still a year away from being competitive.

Fremantle (+26.5) vs Port Adelaide

The pre-season buzz team finally gets to roll out their star studded new recruits. Rockliff, Watts, Motlop, Thomas, McKenzie, the assembling of a new dream team at Alberton Oval. If I was making a premiership push off the back of a free agency/trade spending spree, I wouldn’t have picked the two flakiest players in the game. Jack Watts hasn’t played at a consistent level at any point across his entire career and Motlop’s best football was four-years ago. I say bring back Aaron Young, a victim of the modern game where kicking goals as a forward is seen as a negative.

Hawthorn (-1.5) vs Collingwood

Another year begins with Nathan Buckley in charge of a team with no key position talent, injuries and little chance of doing anything. It’s going to fun putting up with another year of a media circus at the Westpac Centre when Collingwood start 2-6 for about the 5th year in a row and journalists are calling for Buckley’s head. At least Cyril Rioli is supposedly going to be back for this game, yay everyone celebrate, Cywil is back!

Gold Coast (Push) vs North Melbourne

It’s hard to find a game so irrelevant in Round 1, but here we go. Fitting that the game is being played in Cairns.

GWS Giants (-17.5) vs Western Bulldogs

There’s been a lot of buzz around the Giants with many believing they’re a legit premiership chance. I do like the Giants and they’ll be up there again, but what exactly have they done to get better? The Giants were a long way off last season, despite their preliminary final finish. In the final month of their season, including Round 23, they lost to the other three preliminary finalists by an average of 39-points and none of those losses were particularly competitive. They did face their fair share of injury issues last year and a fit Stephen Coniglio is a big plus, but their improvement rests on the next group of youngsters from the more recent drafts and how quickly will they get better, if at all?

Melbourne (Push) vs Geelong

I have no idea who will win this game and being a pessimistic supporter, I assume the Cats will be jumped by a hungry side who are surely desperate for finals. Geelong has an injury list the length of your arm and even with Gary Ablett seemingly making his return, Paddy Dangerfield won’t play. He won’t even be there biggest loss for the Round 1, Lachie Henderson’s injury is disastrous for Geelong. They had two legendary defenders retire and have done nothing to replace them. Good luck relying on Harry Taylor as your number one key defender.

Sydney (-17.5) vs West Coast

Short of Geelong’s dominance at GMHBA Stadium, no team had a greater advantage at home than the Eagles at Subiaco. That’s now gone, with the dimensions of their new stadium being closer to Etihad Stadium. They will still no doubt have their ridiculous advantage from umpires each home game, but they’ll be facing a similar challenge to visiting teams, becoming accustomed to the new ground. They don’t get an easy opening against the Swans who will be locked in from Round 1 after the calamity in 2017. An away win first up.

Season Record

0/0 (N/A)

One last note, the over hit on every game in Round 1 last year. The first round generally sees a lot of high scoring, just something to remember.

Why Your Team Sucks 2018: Gold Coast Suns

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.