Roos can play dumb, but Hobart looms large CAROLINE WILSON
July 28, 2010 THERE has been an aching familiarity about the mixed messages emanating from Arden Street where the club's fourth interstate move in little more than a decade is concerned.
North Melbourne and the AFL deny the club has signed an agreement to play four games a year at Hobart's Bellerive Oval and help lead a push to revitalise the game in Tasmania from 2012, but it will almost certainly happen. North can say all it likes about avoiding the ''R'' word, but talk of relocation to a state that ultimately wants its own team will, in reality, haunt the club in the manner the Gold Coast did.
That will certainly be the case in the short-term, given the club's perilous position, its broken promises and the AFL commission's relative disappointment in North's progress since 2008.
Two Richmond executives held talks in Hobart yesterday with Tasmania's cricket authority, but the Tigers could not sell more than two games a season to its members and the AFL's view is that a cocktail of funding could earn North Melbourne $3 million annually.North certainly needs something. It has achieved little of what it promised and even its new facility at Arden Street - something every Victorian club has achieved or is on schedule to largely through public money - could become a shared facility with the Melbourne Tigers Basketball Club, with the Kangaroos confirming last night that negotiations were under way.
Sharing a facility is not ideal in the AFL's high-stakes environment and will surely further compromise a club that has walked away from deals in Sydney, Canberra and the Gold Coast, leaving an image of a club chasing quick cash with no real interest in community or lasting relationships. North is not popular in any of those towns and will hopefully learn from past mistakes in Hobart.
This is not about the players who have, by and large, performed above themselves for years and never once shown anything but public love for their guernsey. It is not even about chief executive Eugene Arocca, despite the fact he declared in 2008 the club would no longer be the ''travelling Kangaroos''.
Arocca could choose his words more carefully at times - talk of games at Ballarat has confused the landscape for a start - but all he was doing was reflecting the platform laid down by James Brayshaw's emotional and successful campaign for president, which ended the Gold Coast relocation plan for many key Kangaroos.
And it has been impossible to ignore the symbolism of recent days. Amid a flurry of reports that the North Melbourne-Hobart agreement was a done deal, the Gold Coast Suns were launched in the late afternoon shadow of an emerging new Carrara Stadium - a stadium the Kangaroos said they could not bank on.
Two days later, with a place in the eight at stake, North Melbourne put its bank balance ahead of potential victory when it played an unprepared David Hale for his second match in a day rather than risk a $20,000 fine by fielding a player not named as an emergency.
The AFL should be ashamed of its incompetence too over this incident, but that doesn't change the fact that North Melbourne was forced into submission when its wealthy opponent - Essendon - would have put winning first. And the Bombers won narrowly.
The following day, Melbourne president Jim Stynes held court at the MCG promoting his third annual corporate tin rattle - a move that has virtually eradicated the club's once crippling debt. The club finally has a new home and an exciting young team.
Stynes and his board have delivered what they promised and it should be remembered that when he took over the Demons - six months after Brayshaw's group - Melbourne's problems were seen as significantly worse than the Kangaroos.
Richmond, another critically stricken club with on-field stocks and equally debt stricken, has drawn average home attendances of 40,000 this season - 42,000 if you remove its Etihad games - while North's corresponding figure is 25,000. And its membership has dropped.Having rejected a move north that would have swelled its playing stocks, its bank account, eradicated its debts and ensured free-to-air prime-time games, North Melbourne said it would make things happen full-time in Victoria. But it is now looking south.
The club can deny all it likes that this will prove a hybrid relocation. It can point to Hawthorn and the manner in which that club has engaged with the people of Launceston while remaining a Melbourne-based club. It can say that this time will be different.
But the truth is North Melbourne is pushing to move part-time to Tasmania because it cannot afford to sustain itself at Arden Street and Etihad Stadium - when it assured its members and fans that it could and would. It has taken less than three seasons of the new board to break that promise.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/roos-can-play-dumb-but-hobart-looms-large-20100727-10ub6.html
