The AFL Rover's rant: Free agency is free for all, so stop the whingeing.
Tom Lynch's likely move to Richmond has everyone crying foul, but only when it suits them.
Now that Tom Lynch has unofficially-officially declared Richmond as his next home, the only thing left to complete the year-long saga is the inevitable carry-one from all angles over the fairness of the free agency system.
Or the unfairness.
Lynch hasn’t actually nominated a club yet, but there’s already many saying star players shouldn’t be allowed to go to good clubs.
Why this has waited till now is confusing, considering the star forward has been juggling Richmond, Hawthorn and Collingwood – arguably the three strongest clubs in the land – for the past four months.
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“Should last year’s premier and possibly this year’s premiers be able to pick up one of the best players in the competition under free agency, is that the system that we want?” Mark Robinson asked on Fox Footy’s AFL 360 on Wednesday night.
“It’s not how free agency was conceived, it’s not how it was sold and not how it was implemented,” Gerard Whateley added.
“How Tom Lynch can leave the Gold Coast Suns for a team like the Richmond Football Club in free agency just isn’t fair,” Kane Cornes told FIVEaa’s Sportsday SA program.
Cornes cranked it up further – as Kane Cornes is wont to do – on Friday morning when he told SEN free agency is a “farce” and that it “threatens the integrity of the competition”.
And on and on and on it goes.
Of course good players want to go to good clubs. Bad players want to go to good clubs too, but the love and desire doesn’t tend to be reciprocated.
What do Cornes and Robinson and Whateley suggest be done instead?
We’ve got a salary cap, we’ve got a soft cap on off-field spending, we’ve got a draft system designed to reward the mediocre, we’ve got compensation picks, we’ve got priority picks, we’ve got a fixture based on the previous year’s ladder positions.
Do they suggest players get a rating from one to 788, and the bottom quarter can only move to top-four clubs, while the best 197 are restricted to trading to cellar dwellers.
Even better, they’re forcibly moved to struggling sides.
Why not deregister every player at the end of every season, put them all back in the pool and do one almighty, week-long draft.
On live TV.
And everyone gets paid the same amount, and all the names go into a hat and when Bang and Olufsen or Toyota or Kelvinator or Glenelg IGA want a fancy AFL footballer to do a product endorsement they do a lucky dip and hope they get Dustin Martin rather than Cam Ellis-Yolmen.
Maybe the mish-mash of new rule changes should be applied depending on ladder positions: last year’s wooden spooner can have starting line-ups in whatever position they please and eight men up in the ruck if it takes their fancy, while the reigning premier is restricted to zones not just for the starting bounce, but throughout the game.
And there’s a little 4 x 4 box in the forward pocket where Dustin Martin and Paddy Dangerfield have to stay.
It’s not a fair and even playing field and the truth is the advantages generally lie with the struggling clubs.
Use the draft and the salary cap to your advantage and establish a winning culture – all of a sudden there’ll be big names on the phone. Get good administrators that know a smart buy and before you know it there’ll be more managers at the door asking about next year’s opportunities.
No one argued against the fairness of the system when Gary Ablett went to Gold Coast, Dayne Beams to Brisbane, Tom Boyd to the Bulldogs or Buddy to the Swans.
Well, we might have had a bit of a cry about Franklin, but then he was going to the one club that had an extra million to spend.
Are Robinson and Whateley and everyone else with a microphone going to complain when Andrew Gaff signs at super-club St Kilda?
No.
But then I don’t recall Cornes kicking up a fuss when his alma mater brought two-time Lions best and fairest winner Tom Rockliff across from the wooden spoon winning Brisbane as a free agent.
Strange that.
https://www.sportingnews.com/au/afl/news/the-afl-rovers-rant-free-agency-is-free-for-all-so-stop-the/kwparibtj0g61mgp1vp8ehr7k
