Mark Duffield: West Coast Eagles allowed to be historically bad by both the WAFC and the AFLBehind a paywall. What a shameThe headline is utterly ludicrous, par for the course for that trash rag.
Mark Duffield
The West Australian
The 2022 West Coast team has lost 10 of 11 matches. Eight by 50 points or more, six by 60 points or more, five by 70 points or more. They have a percentage of 49.
The 2001 Dockers, unanimously regarded as the worst team in club history, won two games and the wooden spoon. They were beaten by more than 50 points four times, three times by more than 70 points. They finished the year with a percentage of 72.
Fremantle sacked coach Damian Drum after the ninth successive loss, by 19 points to Sydney at the SCG. If West Coast had been a five-goal better team in each of the past seven games, they would still have lost all of them by more than 19 points.
The Eagles have urged players and the club’s fans to celebrate the small wins.
If a small win is winning one quarter of football in more than a month - the Eagles managed that in the third term of their 52-point loss to GWS in round 10.
If a small win is getting your players to turn up in the right place at the right time and in the right uniform they haven’t quite nailed that, with Patrick Naish requiring Connor West’s No. 36 and Tom Cole’s No.28 for most of his 10 games because of the club’s increasingly embarrassing partnership with apparel provider Castore.
And of course there was the small matter of seven of them being in the wrong place (the Hip-E Club) at the wrong time.
It might have started with injuries and COVID, but no team should be allowed to be this bad.
The club’s percentage is worse than Gold Coast’s in their first season, and marginally better than GWS in their first and Fitzroy in their last when the Roy Boys were stripped bare of talent and playing under a pall of doom.
A long-time friend who is neither a West Coast barracker or hater (he has close friends at the club) said this week he was sick of the Eagles using the word “disappointing”.
And he is right. Disappointing is blowing a five-goal lead and losing by two. Disappointing is kicking 10.21 and losing by 15 points to a team that kicks 15.6.
Horrendous and embarrassing fits this better.
It might have started with injuries and COVID, but no team should be allowed to be this bad.
The truth? They are allowed to be this bad, by both the AFL system and their owners.
Michael Roberts and the WAFC are not going to step into take action at West Coast, despite them being worse than Fremantle in 2001.
Michael Roberts and the WAFC are not going to step into take action at West Coast, despite them being worse than Fremantle in 2001. Credit: The West Australian Sport
The worse they played against the Bulldogs last week, the better the outcome. The 101-point loss made sure they stayed below North Melbourne and took Jai Culley, the unanimous choice as the best player in the mid-season rookie draft.
If they stay this bad they will not only be in position take the best kid in the national draft, but also to “walk” an uncontracted player through the pre-season draft without having to trade.
There is the irony in the Eagles’ 2022 ineptitude. The game’s ultimate capitalists, the ones who privately whinge about AFL hand-outs to less financial clubs, are set to be the major beneficiary from the AFL’s socialist system.
The Eagles have loaded up on older players this week.
I rang WA Football Comission CEO Michael Roberts this week to ask three questions I already knew the answer to: How bad do West Coast have to get before the WAFC considered getting involved? Not yet, he said, and he was doubtful if there were mechanisms in place which would mean they would ever really get involved beyond offering support.
Should there be a point at which they got involved? He referred me to the “millions and millions” West Coast have contributed to the WA football system and then said the Dockers were an underachiever.
He clarified that comment about the Dockers by pointing out they put way less money in than West Coast. Which is stating the bleeding obvious and for Fremantle the bleeding unavoidable given they they were the second team in town, who played their first game after the Eagles had bedded down and rusted on well over half the WA footy market.
The Dockers are somewhere between half and two thirds the size of the Eagles and generate somewhere between $20m and $30m less each year.
It dovetailed into the third question: If Fremantle were this bad, would the WAFC already be involved? While there was no definitive answer, any senior Fremantle administrator who has been at the club when things got tricky knows the answer is yes.
David Hatt, the Freo CEO in 2001 on the way to a $2.5 million operating loss, confirmed no “overt” interference but a stack of implied pressure and influence.
Hatt and football manager Gerard McNeill followed Drum out the door in 2001, both reading the play and taking a share of responsibility for the club’s performance.
How have West Coast become so devoid of soul and spirit with such wildly fluctuating effort?
Maybe part of it is that for their owners, the bottom line really is the bottom line. The Eagles could stagger all the way to the finish, crawling along the bottom of the table, and still hand over a bigger royalty than Fremantle even if the Dockers manage to stay in the top six.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
