In The Wild West, Afl Must Be Ready For Battle

The Age

Tuesday February 19, 2008

Greg Baum

The Gold Coast may be ready, but Australia's biggest football code needs to be equipped in Sydney's far reaches.

THE AFL says it is going places. Now it has to be clear about where and how. Chief executive Andrew Demetriou was easy to believe yesterday when he said the AFL was "deadly serious" about expansion and could afford to wait no longer. But merely saying it won't make it come true.

The AFL knows this, and has been busy behind the scenes. The Gold Coast appears receptive and ready. Western Sydney is not, not yet. Television ratings and anecdotal evidence say it is still strictly and solidly rugby league. The AFL is an alien, inspiring both awe and resentment. Penrith Panthers general manager Mick Leary spoke of his sense of affront recently to see a cricket ground at Emu Plains with a set of Australian football goal posts at each end.

Rugby league fears the AFL's financial clout. Assailed, it will fight. It is one thing to build a ground at Blacktown, another to build a viable support base. The Swans are more established in Sydney than, for instance, the Storm is in Melbourne.

But it has taken 25 years, and lashings of money, and is still a niche in, rather than a corner of, the market.

The AFL says it has learned from the mistakes made in past expansions. It is certain that it will make sure both new clubs are competitive on the field from the beginning. The farce by which then contemptuous Carlton was able to bequeath to the almost stillborn Brisbane Bears a player who was retired and living in London will not be repeated.

But it will take money, an enormous amount. The new clubs will need it, to cover the vast losses they are certain to incur to begin. The old clubs will demand it, as compensation for lost players and sponsorships, as insurance against the uncertainties ahead.

The established clubs cannot protest too loudly since they, in principle, have assented to growth. But they will insist on their pounds of flesh. One industry source estimated yesterday that the asking price for the next lot of television rights deal would be $1 billion.

Rugby league has something to teach the AFL. After failing three times to embed teams on the Gold Coast, it made haste slowly with the Titans. The club had a presence on the Gold Coast for two years before it played a game. Bit by bit, it announced the signing of a coach, players, sponsors. It made itself a local.

Of course, piecemeal recruiting was possible in rugby league, in which it is commonplace and acceptable for a player or coach to announce during one season that he will be playing for another club the next. The AFL puts a greater premium on discretion and loyalty.

Nonetheless, the new AFL club has to try to make itself familiar in the community long before its debut. It was suggested yesterday that it would field a team in the QAFL in the two years preceding its entry into the AFL. It is even more important that the new Sydney club has more than an abstract identity before it begins.

The AFL, too, must be seen to concentrate its funds and energies on the project. One way to demonstrate this would be to scale down its overseas escapades on polo fields and hockey pitches.

South Africa made for lovely pictures, but it was impossible to take seriously talk of establishing a team there one day. If there is ever to be an offshore team in the AFL, it can only be from Tasmania.

Dubai was, frankly, a junket, the AFL schmoozing and being schmoozed by a sponsor. It is to be hoped no club does a deal any time soon with Air Malawi.

The pre-season competition needs to be re-thought. Few clubs are excited by it, even fewer try to win it. The AFL takes it seriously only to please a sponsor that takes itself so seriously it circularises media with instructions about how it must be addressed. Please!

Next year, the AFL could turn vice into virtue. Call the pre-season series what it is: practice games. Play all or most in Sydney and on the Gold Coast. Then the AFL might really be seen to be going places.

© 2008 The Age

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