Afl Sporting Quotes

Of all the places I hate, I think I might hate Melbourne the most. They’ve got a Labor premier, the only federal Greens MP, Adam Bandt, comes from there and they follow AFL, which is the sporting equivalent of watching a herd of gazelles run around an oval for two hours. Only in Melbourne, the snowflake capital of the world, would you get a point for missing a goal.

Australian Rules Football lets me experience all the action without leaving my seat.

It all made for a mixed first impression. When I watched training with the new draftees, I could see this was an AFL team with some seriously good players. But the infrastructure around the team was relatively scant, felt amateurish and was not what I expected from an AFL club. It was all by virtue of not having a home; we had a nomadic existence in those formative years. At that point most Victorian clubs too still had to be satisfied with unprofessional working environments at suburban grounds, but it is fair to say that Fremantle was at the extreme end of the scale.

What was this? Putting aside their famous metallic-blue colors for a day, the Cowboys wore dark blue jerseys with white numerals, white pants, and white helmets with dark blue stars on the sides—their uniform from the early sixties, when they were a pitiful expansion team rather than one of the most popular sports franchises on the planet. The Chiefs wore white pants, bright red jerseys, and bright red helmets with the state of Texas outlined on either side—their attire from when they were known as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League.

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Right’ was not how I would describe the AFL’s decision to play our final against Geelong at Skilled Stadium. It had always been our understanding that the venue for finals should be the best available stadium, in the home state of the higher-ranked team. But apparently this was a guideline rather than a rule and the AFL, no stranger to running an agenda that suited their objectives, decided the match would earn more revenue played in Geelong. I found this incredibly disrespectful to Fremantle. It was inappropriate, it was arrogant, it was flawed. Internally, we were seething but focused. Externally, we stuck by our ‘anywhere, anytime’ mantra, and vowed to make the best of the situation.

I remember doing kick-to-kick with Micky Barlow at his first training session with the group. I reckon he missed me with every kick. It was a bit of a blustery day and he might have been nervous, but my first thought was, ‘This guy has no skill whatsoever - what the hell are we doing drafting him?’ Clearly, I don’t have a future as an AFL recruiter, because he soon proved me wrong.

That afternoon, Fremantle turned the football world on its head. Mark Harvey had been axed, to be replaced by Ross Lyon, a coach who had taken the Saints to four successive finals campaigns and three Grand Finals, and who was walking out of the final year of his contract. Forget the AFL finals were happening - this was the news of the week, if not the year!

The West Australian Football Commission (WAFC) got a second team but was not prepared to invest in that team because any investment would drain funds from other parts of the WA football system. The AFL also firmly wanted a second club in Perth to continue its growth as a truly national competition, but after seeing the Eagles play in three and win two of the five Grand Finals between 1990 and 1994, rival clubs were loathe to allow recruiting concessions that might create a second western juggernaut. Hence, the Dockers were not well resourced and light on for talent, left to fend for themselves and somehow expected to make money from day one. By the time the AFL established new clubs on the Gold Coast and in western Sydney nearly 20 years later, they had learned from previous mistakes and invested in those clubs to give them the best chance of success. The support and concessions those clubs received were phenomenal compared to Fremantle’s.