Richmond taking too long to start its climb up the food chain
May 12, 2007
The Australian
Bottom-feeding does not always lead to a premiership, reports Chip Le GrandTHE response was telling. As angry as the Richmond mob was, it wasn't because its team had lost by 157 points. Nor was it because its club, winless after six rounds of the season, had finally bottomed out.
As the anguish poured out down talk-back lines and into online forums, Richmond's greatest sin was that it had taken so long to get so bad.
The AFL system, through the manipulation of the draft and salary cap, is designed to bring the best teams back to the pack and elevate the most miserable into contention. For clubs yearning for a better future, the light at the end of the tunnel is a reverse doctrine of Newton's Law - what goes up must first come down. The frustration of the mob was that Richmond should have been here two years ago.
Kevin Sheedy, a four-time premiership coach, has spent much of his career fighting this socialist system. Not that long ago, Essendon was to be the Manchester United of the AFL, a perennial power club impervious to cyclical forces.
More lately, Sheedy has embraced these same forces with born-again zeal. This time last year, when James Hird was still talking about finals, Sheedy was eyeing off a bottom-four finish. "It is not about winning games and going nowhere," he said after Essendon had lost its seventh straight match.
"(Unless) you want to keep coming sixth and fifth and fourth all your life, you have got to make a decision whether you want to have a crack at a premiership or you don't," Sheedy said this week. "You have just got to tell the truth to your fans and say 'look, this is what me must do if we are going to have another chance in the very foreseeable future'."
Draft young, play the kids, be honest with the fans and stick to the plan. Sound familiar? Where football used to be as simple as trying to win the next game, it is now about five-year business plans and windows of opportunity and premiership clocks forever shy of midnight. And selling the message loud and clear.
According to Sheedy, only three teams are seriously eyeing off the premiership this year and next. The other 13, he said, will have a "fairly big whack" at 2010.
While Sheedy doesn't speak for all clubs, his comments are revealing. As a sceptical Wayne Carey remarked recently, it seems every club is rebuilding these days.
Richmond insists it is not on the bottom of the ladder by design. Club president Gary March says the poor form and fitness of experienced senior players has forced coach Terry Wallace to play more youngsters than he would have liked.
"That is not how we wanted to develop our list," March said in the midst of the Tigers' post-mortem. "This notion that Richmond has thrown in the season and they are only going to play kids is not true."
Beyond Punt Road, however, the events leading up to Richmond's record loss against Geelong last Sunday have sparked debate over whether Wallace shifted the balance between player development and winning matches to new, dangerous ground.
By selecting young, inexperienced players ahead of established senior performers Darren Gaspar, Andrew Krakouer and Greg Tivendale, and exposing a green trio of midfielders to the first bounce while Shane Tuck and captain Kane Johnson warmed the bench, Wallace arguably did no more that what Collingwood did in 2005 and Essendon last year, when senior players were mothballed in the second half of the season.
The difference with Wallace is he has done it in early May.
"The Richmond situation at the moment is obviously what sparks this kind of discussion," Brisbane coach Leigh Matthews said.
"I don't know what went on there with the Darren Gaspar decision. It appears a situation where they have decided to play younger guys instead of experienced guys. That is not normal in the first couple of months or even in the first half of a season. For whatever reason, Richmond has decided that is right for them."
Wallace's explanation is that Richmond supporters have been crying out for Brett Deledio to be started in the centre. "People are now questioning that rationale but they were screaming for us to do it," March said.
Perhaps they were but it is incongruous to think of Wallace picking his team by plebiscite. As Matthews drily noted: "If you start listening to fans, you will end up one of them."
Matthews stressed he did not want to comment on Richmond's internal affairs or judge its decisions. AFL coaches are the first to admit they have little knowledge about what goes on inside rival clubs. But Matthews challenges the notion that long-term player development must come at the expense of winning games in the short term.
"The two things are not in conflict," he told The Weekend Australian. "They are not mutually exclusive. You are doing both things at the same time. The players have to believe that the idea of being out there is to win."
Sydney coach Paul Roos does not believe Wallace coached to lose against Geelong or that any coach would deliberately "tank" games to maximise draft position at the end of the season. He said that instead of yielding to the cyclical design of the draft and salary cap rules, the responsibility of clubs was to "buck the system".
"I don't pretend to know why clubs do what they do but I would be absolutely staggered if any team or any coach put a team on the field to purposely lose a game of footy," Roos said. "That is just unfathomable. You might not have as good a team but I don't think anyone thinks, because of the uncertainty of football, that you can't win."
In pure football terms, it is difficult to disagree with Roos. Where the argument becomes blurred is when supporter expectations and football politics are overlaid on top of match committee decisions.
Coaches who have survived as long as Wallace are not deaf to supporter and boardroom sentiment. Wallace knows that the orthodoxy of team-building and long-term planning ensures coaches and clubs are rarely criticised for playing young players at the expense of older ones once a team is out of finals contention. No football board is likely to take issue with a coach for underestimating their list.
The flip side, as Roos points out, is any coach who drafts for short-term success and doesn't win a premiership has hell to pay. In this climate, it is better to aim low and succeed rather than aim high and fail. As a case in point, consider the refusal of Fremantle coach Chris Connolly to publicly declare the Dockers a realistic premiership chance this season.
"You can think that you are closer (to a premiership) than you actually are and recruit some people accordingly," Roos said. "Then all of a sudden, you get four or five injuries and you get criticised in the press because you have recruited poorly.
"The press needs to understand the reason why they did what they did. Why should they be criticised when maybe they were close, if not for reasons beyond their control?"
Cue the annual mea culpa from Danny Frawley, the last Richmond coach who dared put his club on a short-term, premiership footing.
When 13 of 16 teams are rebuilding - according to Sheedy, at least - it is difficult to question the prevailing wisdom. However, it is worth considering whether any club has actually won a premiership after bottoming out.
St Kilda is regularly cited as the prototype of long-term planning after benefiting from a glut of early draft picks between 2000 and 2002, yet the Saints are arguably further away from winning a premiership today than they were three years ago. Hawthorn has risen from the depths of its 2004-2005 nadir, but no further than this time last year, when it was similarly placed at 4-2. The Western Bulldogs are a far better team than the rabble which finished 16th and 14th under Peter Rohde in 2003 and 2004 but have not regularly challenged the best teams in the competition.
West Coast won a premiership last year after finishing near the bottom in 2000 and 2001 but this can hardly be considered club strategy - Ken Judge was sacked as senior coach for his aberration. Since 1990, when Mick Malthouse was appointed coach, the Eagles have played in every finals series bar two. The Eagles believe in team building, just not at the expense of their win-loss record.
The notion that clubs must bottom out to reach the top is being challenged by the resurgence of Brisbane and Port Adelaide, the grand finalists of three years ago. Port Adelaide, after missing the finals for one season, is second only to the West Coast. Brisbane, after winning seven games last year and 10 the year before, is sitting in third.
Brisbane finished in the bottom four last season and, over time, will benefit from its early draft pick in a particularly strong national draft. But rather than attributing last year's result to cyclical forces, Matthews believes long-term injuries to key players like Jonathan Brown, Nigel Lappin and Chris Johnson was the decisive factor, the same variable which prompted Collingwood's rapid decline in 2005 and Essendon's last year.
"I don't believe in the concept of deliberately bottoming out," Matthews said. "I don't think anyone has done that. A lot of times, the reason you are down the bottom is you simply haven't been able to get your personnel on the field. Sometimes it is you just haven't got the talent. But I am not of the notion that anyone is deliberately bottoming out."
Matthews says the bottom line at any AFL club, at all times, has to be winning. In recent weeks, Brisbane has had to address this very issue in its reserves team because senior-listed players were too focused on their own development and not enough on team success.
"As soon as the scoreboard becomes irrelevant then all of a sudden you haven't got the basic fabric of a team, which is trying to beat the opposition on the scoreboard on the day," Matthews said. "If you are not thinking about that, what are you out there for?
"The premise of what we do is the group comes before the individual. If all of a sudden you put an individual before the group in any shape or form, it is a dicey situation you are playing with.
"If you are saying we are playing this individual because we will be better long-term, the other side of the coin is we are prepared not to be as good right now. I am not sure what that says to the other players in the team."
What is the message from Wallace for today's game against Port Adelaide? Tivendale and Krakouer are back in the team and Johnson is named to start on the ball.
Richmond still has a five-year plan and is still developing a team for the future. But right now, nothing is more important than a win.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21715343-2722,00.html
