Everyone has their interpretation of trade week and this is mine.
Maybe it’s just me, but as each season goes by, more and more it seems like trade week has become an out clause that excuses Clubs from everything they told supporters leading up to that point. Otherwise, why do I suddenly feel like someone who’s just been cheated on and lied to?
Over the years I’ve copped rattling tins, humiliating defeats, having my Club be the laughing stock of the AFL and even people laughing in my face when I said I was a Richmond supporter. I didn’t like it, but I wore it. What I won’t cop is the negligent way the Club now seemingly treats its players and supporters, with absolutely no regard for any relationships developed by the Club, leading up to trade week.
On the one hand, Clubs do all they can to build camaraderie, team harmony and spirit amongst players and have them develop an affinity for the place, and then spend time telling supporters how wonderful the future will be with these players, yet when it comes to trade week it’s like we’re played for fools or something.
Are people just expected to take everything the Club tells them as gospel, even though they say one thing on one day and then do another when it’s convenient? I’m usually willing to go along with what’s best for the Club and have never had an issue with that, but there’s a limit for everyone and I don’t support messing with people’s emotions and generally treating them like they don’t really matter, in comparison to what’s good for the Club.
This might just be a game to them, or a job, but there are supporters who have invested and devoted themselves to the RFC cause. Does that give the Club right of way to prey on people because they know that, no matter what happens or what they do, people will get over it, in time? And anyway, the Club is always bigger than the individual, and that’s professional sport.
Which apparently makes it seem ok for Clubs to treat people with contempt. An example of that, for me, is Cogs. Whether he was genuinely put up for trade I don’t know, but where there’s smoke there’s fire. The thing that gets me is that, when he started out he was seen as this shining light and blah blah blah and trundled out whenever the Club needed to dodge some bullets from the angry hordes, or put a positive spin on things, through some ordinary times. He no doubt did it because it was in the best interests of the Club. And anyway, down the track the Club would surely repay his faith.
That was then and this is now, and what is good for the club one day doesn’t necessarily correspond with what is good for the club on another, because circumstances change. That may be so, and to be expected even, but where’s the consistency in the way people are treated from one day to the next, especially during trade week?
Regardless of all the attempts made to convince players that this is the place to be and that their best interests will be taken care of by the Club, come trade week, that all seems to count for nothing.
Instead, players and supporters alike are supposed to conveniently forget everything that happened before and go along with whatever the Club is telling us is in its best interests now. Never mind the carcases that lay strewn, and the endless list of tortured souls, all of whom nobly suffered in the best interests of the Club. After all, they’re not what matters in all of this, are they?
And when the week is over and deals fall through, or whatever, they’ll just expect everyone to just resume normal transmission, won’t they? No big deal really.
Well, they can expect that, but not when they promote the current flavour of the month player(s) as the future of the Club, have supporters develop attachments to them and then when it comes to trade week just pretend none of that ever happened and that it’s ok to use them as trade bait, because it’s in the best interests of the Club.
In the real world, where I choose to make infrequent appearances, players get traded for various reasons, each year. Sometimes it’s best for a player and Club to part company. Fine. Some even get to play in premierships because of it, ironically, just none that have been traded to RFC in recent memory. Good luck to the lucky ones.
Maybe players are so well drilled and resilient enough to deal with these things and recover quickly from such things. But it doesn’t alter how it reflects on any Club. Not to me it doesn’t.
Where is the credence when they can feed us sweet nothings for 51 weeks of the year and then when trade week comes around they adopt the ‘anything (and anyone) goes’ approach? How is my battered mind supposed to deal with that? Are they stark raving mad? That could explain it, otherwise I don’t get it.
And what exactly has G. Polak done throughout his career thus far, to justify such attention, apart from being tall enough to be a KPP? And no, I haven’t read the ‘Could Polak play Full Back’ thread. Like I care right now.
Apart from the mixed messages this time of year sends, this ‘use and abuse’ mentality doesn’t fill me with the confidence to think that the Club is building the foundations for success. Rather, if this is an example of things to come, it seems to expect to find the answers to its shortcomings by replacing what seemed like foundations already set in concrete with those built on flimsier stuff.
The whole thing just makes me feel like I’ve been taken for a ride. Ha, sucked in again.
First they sell their spin to those players and supporters who will listen, spend years building up their emotional attachment to all things RFC, and then inexplicably proceed to put them through the wringer, without even blinking.
If that’s what they think of the people that have given the most, and how they treat them, then what hope is there of this Club ever achieving anything of any significance? I ask myself. And where is the pride in any of that?
