RussellEbertHandball
Flick pass expert
Cant use the drug excuse, because plenty of players on the east coast were using as much as WCE players so they would have been equally as affected. That's why the AFL brought in an industry wide illicit drugs, 3 strikes policy in 2005. They knew it was a wide spread problem across all club.
WCE players were over the top for no more than 2 or 3 seasons between 2005 and 2007. Not 30+ seasons.
Anyway its hard to bench mark WA teams against other international clubs because almost nowhere else on the planet are teams being forced to travel 4+ hours in a plane every second week in their domestic competition and in a sport as physically punishing and taxing as Aussie Rules. The Perth Reds in the NSWRL comp in the 90's weren't around long enough to do a good comparison.
Brazil would be close with Fortaleza in the Serie A competition having to make a lot of 3 and 4+ hour flights. Maybe the team from Cuiaba as well. I don't know which division the teams from Manaus in the state of Amazonas, deep in the Amazon and NW Brazil, play in (the city hosted 4 group stage WC games in 2014), and where their opponents are based, but they might have to do as much travelling as the WA teams, maybe more. This is probably a good topic for GremioPower to analysis and compare.
Maybe somewhere in Russia or China.
Vancouver's team the BC LIons in the CFL might be the closest in terms of longest flight comparison from their home to Montreal vs Perth to Brisbane distance, but they don't have most of their opponents 4 or 5 hour flight away from them as the CFL is split into a west and east division, and they play against 2 teams that are an hour or so flight away in Alberta, and a team that is 2 hours flight and another 3 hours flight that are in the western division.
Because there are 9 teams, 5 in the western division and 4 in the eastern division they play 10 games in their division, 3 teams 3 times and 2 teams twice and the 4 teams in the east 2 times, home and away each so 4 x 4+hr trips per season. The teams from Ontario and Quebec do 5 long haul trips to the western division each season.
And you can't compare them to the 4 major North American sports. 3 of them NBA, NHL and MLB have longer road trips given their 82, 82 and 162 game seasons respectively so they play 2 or 3 games in a city and then do a short flight to another city or two, maybe three, before they get back home. Their might be one long haul 4+ hour flight in that road trip either at the start or end of the road trip.
NFL has 2 conferences and 4 divisions so the teams might get 2 long haul trips in a 17 game season over 18 weeks.
Plus the majority of North American pro teams have their own charter flights, which means they can do a lot more things to make the stress on the body less severe, than on standard commercial flights.
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