Opinion We strive to Make it to a Grandfinal in an MG ...

[Lockhart Road]

The PAFC Archives Collection: Chapter Three ‘The Big League: Revival - and New Homes’ 2013-2020

To The World Stage.

This I will read with keen interest, and a sharp eye. It has been an impossible dream of mine since May 2013 for Port Adelaide to make it To The World Stage. The Archives Collection sub-heading quoted above indicates we’ve done it but that was written before the release of the news that MG / SAIC has become a Joint Major Sponsor / Partner of our Club.

To me this partnership is the first signal that we at last have a firm foothold on The World Stage - in terms, that is, of international-origin commercial revenue and recognition. That, for me, was the benchmark at the start seven years ago - a one-million dollar per annum bona fide commercial partner from China.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with our China reliance on one man, Gui Guojie (oh how we love that gutsy ever-smiling little rich guy). The PAFC partnership portfolio from the ‘clear air’ of China has been in crying need of the security that accompanies a substantial industrial / manufacturing enterprise like SAIC - Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, abbreviated to SAIC Motor Corp. - a Fortune Global 100 company and the biggest auto maker in China.



Looking back over those seven years of impossible dreaming, I cannot believe today that we have got to where we are. At times the Club seemed to me to be working against itself, to be tearing itself apart. Today I know the Club was working against itself, was indeed tearing itself apart at its very core: its board of directors.

I’ll tell you more about what I think of that in paragraphs to come.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m feeling good, better than I’ve been for as long as I can recall. I’m looking forward hungrily to seeing that iconic, nostalgic, exciting MG octagon on our property. When I was growing up I had other impossible dreams and one was to own an MG-TF. Instead it was the Triumph Spitfire Mark III for me - two in fact, one brand-new fire-engine red which I bought after returning home to Adelaide from Vietnam in August 1969, the other in Hong Kong a few years later, second-hand and white. I still dream at night of being behind the wheel of one of my Spitfires, seeing and feeling the world from a bucket seat scooting along close to the ground. But my MG-TF remains with me only as an item on my bucket list ... along with seeing Port Adelaide win another AFL flag.



If we can do something as significant as securing MG / SAIC, despite working against ourselves without realising it from the outside - without acknowledging it at the inside - what can our Club pull off when it organises every component of itself to work together as a single machine, organically, every muscle, sinew and molecule of grey matter, all pulling together in the same direction?

We can make ‘Port Adelaide’ a wealth-producing international brand, that’s what we can do. A World Brand. A Brand To Make Us Proud.

And by using the momentum generated by that, the MG sort of momentum, we can win one more premiership ... after another.

It will be thanks to, among others, above others ... Andrew Hunter.

Thanks, Andrew!

https://indaily.com.au/sport/footba...-what-is-port-adelaide-really-doing-in-china/

But it will be no thanks to those who’ve held us back, who’ve stayed too long, self-serving and stagnant in chairs they should never have been invited to sit in.





Small business and sabotage

As at October 2012 the Club’s international exposure was zero. Beyond the shores girt by sea there was a vacuum. But David Koch brought with him a hazy notion of AFL somehow being played in Hong Kong, where he’d cast an eye because his married daughter was resident there and contributing to the family media company - a small business that focused on and won its bread from the media sector called Small Business.

When the Koch era began, a suite of committees reporting to a replacement board was created. One committee was dubbed ‘Marketing & Brand’. It was chaired by one of the new directors, ex-No. 1 Club ticket holder Cos Cardone - whose career as a sports journalist in Adelaide, a Channel 9 sports executive in Melbourne, and now CEO of McGuire Media / JAM TV, brought with it two risks: 1) a neutral one concerning his qualifications for the post, and 2) a built-in fault line that rendered sabotage inevitable, be it by accident or otherwise.

Pigeon pair

This totals a pigeon pair of media mites filling very senior positions on the PAFC board. One is actually in command - the one with least managerial experience and short-course qualification. While Koch’s media set-up is a close-knit family affair, Cardone can point to a small army of executives, producers, assistants and staff reporting to him in his high-voltage caper as the CEO of ‘the country’s largest independent producer of sport and sports entertainment shows’ which is in particular ‘one of the leading producers of Australia’s most popular game’. During 2018 JAM TV was predicted to ‘produce in excess of 330 hours of AFL content across a wide variety of platforms’. Just now, for 2020, something new from McGuire Media / JAM TV / Cos Cardone has been announced via Fairfax:

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl...d-shake-up-the-afl-on-tv-20200224-p543v4.html

When it comes to our Great Game being prime sports entertainment projected into Australian living rooms, on to handheld screens, Cos is king.

 

[Lockhart Road]

Bring back the Bars

At its inception the replacement board was tasked by its masters, the AFL, with the defibrillation of our flatlining 143-year-old club, whilst remaining religiously risk-averse. This sounds like an ‘operation was a success but the patient died’ sort of thing. The suite of committees was assembled in line with this strategy, each committee being chaired by a director. As we already know, Cos Cardone wheedled his way to chairman of ‘Marketing & Brand’.

‘Marketing & Brand’ was a wonky moniker for a Club committee, it occurred to me when I read it at the back of one of the year books. The Brand had already been created by 2013, and so ‘Marketing of the Brand’ would’ve been the title to identify the committee’s raison d’etre rather than make a muddle of it.

However, ‘marketing of the brand’ - said brand being ‘Port Adelaide Football Club’ - would have required Cos to position himself in point-blank competition with his employer, Collingwood president Eddie E. McGuire. For the ticking bomb to go off it would require PAFC’s marketing train to get going with due haste and huff and puff, be engineered properly and - of most danger to Eddie - bring back the Bars on a permanent basis and be a resounding success.

Early ripe

On Saturday, 2nd October 2012, the day of Koch’s appointment as chairman of PAFC, The David was quoted by Fairfax as declaring: “It is amazing the number of born-and-bred Port Adelaide business people that have moved on to great success nationally and internationally who want to help.”

It was the smartest observation Koch was ever to make, and it happened on his first day. Early ripe, was The David. Port people, volunteers, real Port people, did indeed come forward. Many lived and worked overseas, some had been out there for decades, out there beyond the shores girt by sea, out there becoming successful as Koch had generalised, in the vacuum of the PAFC brand as seen by the rest of the globe.

Providential

In September 2013 came partnership with a not-so famous brand: the Hong Kong Football Club. The hook to HKFC was that the three-hectare sports club with its bespoke multi-storey multi-faceted clubhouse built by its filthy rich next-door neighbour, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, would provide PAFC with its base of operations for the region, specifically China.

On a warm sunny spring Saturday morning, 17 May 2014, The David and his directors including Cos Cardone - chairman of Marketing & Brand - trooped into a first-floor HKFC meeting room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on Happy Valley Race Course horse-shoed by stark dark-green mountains of the volcanic type. At a long table the PAFC China Strategy was ratified, voted into existence, set in minutes of stone, rock solid. In China stone and rock are an ancient symbol of longevity. Port Adelaide was here to stay.

And in every Chinese mountain there sleeps a Chinese dragon. The horse-shoe of dragons picketing Happy Valley Race Course render its feng shui supreme, make it the most providential of locations outside of postcode 5015 to stage a board meeting and ratify a strategy aimed at The World Stage.





Simple as that

The objective of the China Strategy of 2014 was to market the Port Adelaide brand in our quest for a $1,000,000 per annum corporate partner. Simple as that, nothing grander. No annual AFL match in Shanghai, no talent scouting for our own version of Yao Ming, no junior Power Footy programme in schools. Not yet. That would all come later, as the marketing strategy was developed by the Club (ironically minus involvement of its ‘Marketing & Brand’ Committee).

A posse of PAFC volunteers, real and enthusiastic Port people, at once got to work on the strategy for their Club in and from Hong Kong. Looking back on it, how pinpoint, how prescient, how damn refreshing had been The David with that positive national and international marketing prediction of 2 October 2012.

But ... where oh where has gone that praiseworthy version of David Koch? No longer does his daughter live in Hong Kong. No longer does The David have a family pull north in the direction of the World Stage.

She’s gone. He’s gone with her, so to speak.

Shock not awe

By early 2015 many suggestions had come from Hong Kong to the Club as to how to proceed, how to market the brand, in China. I put one to Cos Cardone over a Melbourne CBD coffee, which had gone cold waiting for him to show. My idea was that McGuire Media consider going international by opening a branch office in Hong Kong which would establish itself partnering our China Strategy to publicise AFL in general and PAFC in particular in our new market.

Cos Cardone froze in shock not awe. The topic got no further than my opening line. Cos seemed to be instantly and primarily fixed on how his quick-thinking fast-talking counter-puncher of a boss, Eddie E., would read such a proposal, crafted by me to benefit PAFC specifically but Collingwood only in general as one of the pack of seventeen also-running non-Port AFL clubs in China.

“Do you think,” reacted Cos, aghast, “that I would think of using my position at Port Adelaide Football Club for personal advantage in any way?”

One nasty moment

No, Cos. On the contrary, I was thinking of you using your position at McGuire Media to advantage the Port Adelaide Football Club, on whose board you sit.

It was that one nasty moment that told me - and my colleague from Hong Kong who’d been sitting with me for two hours, waiting for the silhouette of Director Cardone to darken the entrance of the coffee shop - exactly how far PAFC was off the top of Cos’s list of private priorities.

“Are we giving you enough help up there?” he thereafter kept repeating. Time and again, not meaning a word. Band-aid phrases that have stuck in my memory. “How can we help you guys some more up there?” I’d already told him. I’d read him, and I’d given up on him. So had my colleague.





Conflict of disinterest

Cos’s committee with its empty title was prescribed to meet a minimum of once per month. In reality it met irregularly and eratically, more and more so as time moved on, as the Club’s JMS cupboard, for a while stocked with the branding of Renault, EnergyAustralia and Oak, suddenly went bare, with the PAFC brand itself threatening to repeat recent history and follow suit - neglected as it was, along with other failings, by any Cos-led attempt at World Stage marketing.

Then came 2019 and a futile switch of name to ‘Brand & Marketing’. By then, as I read it, Cos had given up. He had no more to give, having started with so little in the ‘give’ department. He was frustrated at having to put on appearances, at having to play at being real, bored to the bone with things marketing & brand, brand & marketing, whatever. He’d been fitting in to his Melbourne powerbroker schedule, as add-ons, a reducing dribble of distant meetings of the committee whose management and success he’d taken on, been charged with ... de facto by the AFL, no less. And he made sure any meeting was cut short by him being the controlling voice, the only voice.

Consequential to the conflict of interest, the fault line, which accompanied Cos to Alberton for his first board meeting in 2012 was this conflict of disinterest.

Lesser mortals v. Immortals

In the past couple of years, be aware, Club volunteers have put up their hands or come forward, keen to reinforce Cos’s committee with their varied talents - one ... two ... three ... four ... more of them. These particular dinky-die Portonians are all well versed in the science of marketing, in its nuances and tricks, as a result of actual participation on its playing fields, both national and international.

But ... as I would expect from personal experience ... these volunteers have not been welcomed, have not been respected as contributors. They are feared, looked upon as disrupters, trespassers into the penumbra of the sacred spotlight at the captain’s end of the table. What they have to say or suggest is given shorter shrift than that delivered right to my face when I dared make my own abortive pitch over a stone cold Melbourne CBD cup of coffee in February 2015.

Their contributions are looked upon as a threat ... designed only to create more work for lesser mortals and to show those lesser mortals up for what they are - lesser mortals. Someone who chairs a meeting intent on minimum input from the chair, who is intent on listening, on sorting the gems from the guff, on ensuring that progress is made at every meeting towards the objective of success, is no lesser mortal. He or she is immortal.

And so, minus the example of great leadership, the good ship Marketing & Brand / Brand & Marketing took on such an ugly list its captain set about abandoning it ... leaving his volunteer hands to swim or sink, to strike out for the horizon - from beyond which perchance a revamped committee, with a new and punchy name, led by a fully focused, unconflicted skipper with the Port River running through his veins, will inevitably steam into existence.

The Chairman’s furniture

Meanwhile, where to for Cos?

Where to for Cos, apart from personal undeserved ‘glory’ associated with 2020 and the 150th Anniversary of Port Adelaide Football Club?

Rumour has his cold calculating eye fixed on the Chairman’s furniture, counting the days left before the Small Family Business Koch Era ends, after which Cos intends the Big Production Conflicted Cardone Era to take over.

Should this happen, it would mean that PAFC’s participation in McGuire Media’s newly spruiked multi-club promotion for streaming on Amazon would have Cos interviewing himself. You see how manipulated, how downright crass, this is?



Holly Gonelately

Only one other director ever sat on the ill-fated Marketing & Brand Committee. Holly Ransom. While Cos works in his day job for the president of a competitor AFL club drumming up promotions for other competitor clubs, Holly barracks for yet another competitor AFL club as she travels all over carving notches in the belt she calls her c.v.

As we are now aware, Holly has been increasingly unable to physically attend much of anything at the Club, from annual functions to committees to board gatherings to the AGM. Holly is now the only female gender director we have ... and yet, lately, she’s gone. She’s at Harvard, from where she’ll skype her image to Alberton and cheer on the West Coast Eagles.

Them thar Volunteer Hills

So, taking into account the aforementioned shenanigans lurking behind what should’ve been engineered into a glossy international mission to professionally market the Club’s brand ... how the hell has PAFC made it to the World Stage as being reported per Chapter Three, The Archives Collection?

Remember what The David predicted on his first day in the chair? Something about unpaid Port people, both nationally and internationally. Something about volunteers and them being an untapped asset. Plus something he didn’t say, but implied: that the Club would grow rich and invincible if it could only come up with, and maintain, an efficient unselfish self-confident procedure to mine the gold that is buried in them thar Volunteer Hills ... and turn it into our next string of premierships.



Believe me, they are out there, those Hills, with their nuggets of gold.

They will always be there. Never, ever, will they give up.

Not a one of us.


THE BARS IS BACK




THE MOMENT THAT TIPPED THE SCALES AND BROUGHT THEM BACK



THIS IS HOW A BOARD MEMBER UNIQUELY CONTRIBUTES TO PAFC’S MARCH TO THE WORLD STAGE

IT’S CALLED TEAMWORK - A COMPOSITE OF CLUB EXECS FROM BOTH THE CHINA AND COMMERCIAL TEAMS, VOLUNTEERS AT HOME AND ABROAD, AND A SPECIALIST BOARD MEMBER OR TWO

 

[1954]

View attachment 829059


The PAFC Archives Collection:
Chapter Three ‘The Big League: Revival - and New Homes’ 2013-2020
To The World Stage.

This I will read with keen interest, and a sharp eye. It has been an impossible dream of mine since May 2013 for Port Adelaide to make it To The World Stage. The Archives Collection sub-heading quoted above indicates we’ve done it but that was written before the release of the news that MG / SAIC has become a Joint Major Sponsor / Partner of our Club.

To me this partnership is the first sign that we at last have a firm foothold on The World Stage - in terms, that is, of international-origin commercial revenue and recognition. That, for me, was the benchmark at the start seven years ago - a one-million dollar per annum bona fide commercial partner from China.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with our China reliance on one man, Gui Guojie (oh how we love that gutsy ever-smiling little rich guy). The PAFC partnership portfolio from the ‘clear air’ of China has long been in crying need of the added security that comes with a substantial manufacturing enterprise such as SAIC - Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, abbreviated to SAIC Motor Corp. - a Fortune Global 100 company and the biggest auto maker in China.

View attachment 829060

Looking back over those seven years of impossible dreaming, I cannot believe today that we have got to where we are. At times the Club seemed to me to be working against itself, to be tearing itself apart. Today I know that the Club was working against itself, was indeed tearing itself apart at its very core: its board of directors. I’ll tell you more about what I think of that in paragraphs to come.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m feeling good, better than I’ve been for as long as I can recall. I’m looking forward hungrily to seeing that iconic, nostalgic, exciting MG octagon on our property. When I was growing up I had other impossible dreams and one was to own an MG-TF. Instead it was the Triumph Spitfire Mark III for me - two in fact, one brand-new fire-engine red which I bought after returning home to Adelaide from Vietnam in August 1969, the other in Hong Kong a few years later, second-hand and white. I still dream at night of being behind the wheel of one of my Spitfires, seeing and feeling the world from a bucket seat scooting along close to the ground. But my MG-TF remains with me only as an item on my bucket list ... along with seeing Port Adelaide win another AFL flag.

View attachment 829061

If we can do something as significant as securing MG / SAIC, despite working against ourselves without realising it from the outside - without acknowledging it at the inside - what can our Club pull off when it organises every component of itself to work together as a single machine, organically, every muscle, sinew and molecule of grey matter, all pulling together in the same direction?

We can make ‘Port Adelaide’ a wealth-producing international brand, that’s what we can do. A World Brand. A Brand To Make Us Proud.

And by using the momentum generated by that, the MG sort of momentum, we can win one more premiership ... after another.

It will be thanks to, among others, above others ... Andrew Hunter.

Thanks, Andrew!

https://indaily.com.au/sport/footba...-what-is-port-adelaide-really-doing-in-china/

But it will be no thanks to those who’ve held us back, who’ve stayed too long, self-serving and stagnant in chairs they should never have been asked to sit in.

View attachment 829066

Small business and sabotage

As at October 2012 the Club’s international exposure was zero. Beyond the shores girt by sea there was a vacuum. But David Koch brought with him a hazy notion of AFL somehow being played in Hong Kong, where he’d cast an eye because his married daughter was resident there and contributing to the family media company - a small business that focused on and won its bread from the media sector called Small Business.

When the Koch era began, a suite of committees reporting to a replacement board was created. One committee was dubbed ‘Marketing & Brand’. It was chaired by one of the new directors, ex-No. 1 Club ticket holder Cos Cardone - whose career as a sports journalist in Adelaide, a Channel 9 sports executive in Melbourne, and now CEO of McGuire Media / JAM TV, brought with it two risks: 1) a neutral one concerning his qualifications for the post, and 2) a built-in fault line that rendered sabotage inevitable, be it by accident or otherwise.

Pigeon pair

This totals a pigeon pair of media mites filling very senior positions on the PAFC board. One is actually in command - the one with least managerial experience and short-course qualification. While Koch’s media set-up is a close-knit family affair, Cardone can point to a small army of executives, producers, assistants and staff reporting to him in his high-voltage caper as the CEO of ‘the country’s largest independent producer of sport and sports entertainment shows’ which is in particular ‘one of the leading producers of Australia’s most popular game’. During 2018 JAM TV was predicted to ‘produce in excess of 330 hours of AFL content across a wide variety of platforms’. Just now, for 2020, something new from McGuire Media / JAM TV / Cos Cardone has been announced via Fairfax:

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl...d-shake-up-the-afl-on-tv-20200224-p543v4.html

When it comes to our Great Game being prime sports entertainment projected into Australian living rooms, on to handheld screens, Cos is king.

View attachment 829070

I knew that deep down you really were a Triumph man LR.

After your success with MG maybe you and REH can work on BMW to revive the Triumph name they have owned for something like 40 years and done nothing with, no SUV's though.

 

[GremioPower]

Bring back the Bars

At its inception the replacement board was tasked by its masters, the AFL, with the defibrillation of our flatlining 143-year-old club, whilst remaining religiously risk-averse. This sounds like an ‘operation was a success but the patient died’ sort of thing. The suite of committees was assembled in line with this strategy, each committee being chaired by a director. As we already know, Cos Cardone opted to be chairman of ‘Marketing & Brand’.

‘Marketing & Brand’ was a wonky moniker for a Club committee, it occurred to me when I read it at the back of one of the year books. The Brand had already been created by 2013, and so ‘Marketing of the Brand’ would’ve been the title to identify the committee’s raison d’etre rather than make a muddle of it.

However, ‘marketing of the brand’ - said brand being ‘Port Adelaide Football Club’ - would have required Cos to put himself in point-blank competition with his employer, Collingwood president Eddie E. McGuire. For the bomb to go off it would require PAFC’s marketing train to get going with due haste and huff and puff, be engineered properly and, of most danger to Eddie, bring back the Bars and be a resounding success.

Early ripe

On Saturday, 2nd October 2012, the day of Koch’s appointment as chairman of PAFC, The David was quoted by Fairfax as declaring: “It is amazing the number of born-and-bred Port Adelaide business people that have moved on to great success nationally and internationally who want to help.”

It was the smartest observation Koch was ever to make, and it happened on his first day. Early ripe, was The David. Port people, volunteers, real Port people, did indeed come forward. Many lived and worked overseas, some had been out there for decades, out there beyond the shores girt by sea, out there becoming successful as Koch had generalised, in the vacuum of the PAFC brand as seen by the rest of the globe.

Providential

In September 2013 came partnership with a not-so famous brand: the Hong Kong Football Club. The hook to HKFC was that the three-hectare sports club with its bespoke multi-storey multi-faceted clubhouse built by its filthy rich next-door neighbour, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, would provide PAFC with its base of operations for the region, specifically China.

On a warm sunny spring Saturday morning, 17 May 2014, The David and his directors including Cos Cardone - chairman of Marketing & Brand - trooped into a first-floor HKFC meeting room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on Happy Valley Race Course horse-shoed by stark dark-green mountains of the volcanic type. At a long table the PAFC China Strategy was ratified, voted into existence, set in minutes of stone, rock solid. In China stone and rock are an ancient symbol of longevity. Port Adelaide was here to stay.

And in every Chinese mountain there sleeps a Chinese dragon. The horse-shoe of dragons picketing Happy Valley Race Course render its feng shui supreme, make it the most providential of locations outside of postcode 5015 to stage a board meeting and ratify a strategy aimed at The World Stage.


View attachment 829077


Simple as that

The objective of the China Strategy of 2014 was to market the Port Adelaide brand in our quest for a $1,000,000 per annum corporate partner. Simple as that, nothing grander. No annual AFL match in Shanghai, no talent scouting for our own version of Yao Ming, no junior Power Footy programme in schools. Not yet. That would all come later, as the marketing strategy was developed by the Club (ironically minus involvement of its ‘Marketing & Brand’ Committee).

A posse of PAFC volunteers, real and enthusiastic Port people, at once got to work on the strategy for their Club in and from Hong Kong. Looking back on it, how pinpoint, how prescient, how damn refreshing had been The David with that positive national and international marketing prediction of 2 October 2012.

But ... where oh where has gone that praiseworthy version of David Koch? No longer does his daughter live in Hong Kong. No longer does The David have a family pull north in the direction of the World Stage.

She’s gone. He’s gone with her, so to speak.

Shock not awe

By early 2015 many suggestions had come from Hong Kong to the Club as to how to proceed, how to market the brand, in China. I put one to Cos Cardone over a Melbourne CBD coffee, which had gone cold waiting for him to show. My idea was that McGuire Media consider going international by opening a branch office in Hong Kong which would establish itself partnering our China Strategy to publicise AFL in general and PAFC in particular in our new market.

Cos Cardone froze in shock not awe. The topic got no further than my opening line. Cos seemed to be instantly and primarily fixed on how his quick-thinking fast-talking counter-puncher of a boss, Eddie E., would read such a proposal, crafted by me to benefit PAFC specifically but Collingwood only in general as one of the pack of seventeen also-running non-Port AFL clubs in China.

“Do you think,” reacted Cos, aghast, “that I would think of using my position at Port Adelaide Football Club for personal advantage in any way?”

One nasty moment

No, Cos. On the contrary, I was thinking of you using your position at McGuire Media to advantage the Port Adelaide Football Club, on whose board you sit.

It was that one nasty moment that told me - and my colleague from Hong Kong who’d been sitting with me for two hours, waiting for the silhouette of Director Cardone to darken the entrance of the coffee shop - exactly how far PAFC was off the top of Cos’s list of private priorities.

“Are we giving you enough help up there?” He thereafter kept repeating. Time and again, not meaning a word. Band-aid phrases. “How can we help you guys some more up there?” I’d already told him. I’d read him, and I’d given up on him. So had my colleague.


View attachment 829075


Conflict of disinterest

Cos’s committee with its empty title was prescribed to meet a minimum of once per month. In reality it met irregularly and eratically, more and more so as time moved on, as the Club’s JMS cupboard, for a while stocked with the branding of Renault, EnergyAustralia and Oak, suddenly went bare, with the PAFC brand itself threatening to repeat recent history and follow suit - neglected as it was, along with other failings, by any Cos-led attempt at World Stage marketing.

Then came 2019 and a futile switch of name to ‘Brand & Marketing’. By then, as I read it, Cos had given up. He had no more to give, having started with so little in the ‘give’ department. He was frustrated at having to put on appearances, at having to play at being real, bored to the bone with things marketing & brand, brand & marketing, whatever. He’d been fitting in to his Melbourne powerbroker schedule, as add-ons, a reducing dribble of distant meetings of the committee whose management and success he’d taken on, been charged with ... de facto by the AFL, no less. And he made sure any meeting was cut short by him being the controlling voice, the only voice.

Consequential to the conflict of interest, the fault line, which accompanied Cos to Alberton for his first board meeting in 2012 was this conflict of disinterest.

Swim or sink

In the past couple of years, be aware, Club volunteers have put up their hands or come forward to reinforce Cos’s committee with their varied talents - one ... two ... three ... four ... more of them. These particular dinky-die Portonians are all well versed in the science of marketing, in its nuances and tricks, as a result of actual participation on its playing fields, both national and international.

But ... as I would expect from personal experience ... these volunteers have not been welcomed and respected as contributors. They are feared, looked upon as disrupters, trespassers into the penumbra of the spotlight at the captain’s end of the table. What they have to say or suggest is given shorter shrift than that delivered right to my face when I dared make my own abortive pitch over a stone cold Melbourne CBD cup of coffee in February 2015.

And so the good ship Marketing & Brand / Brand & Marketing took on such an ugly list its captain set about abandoning it ... leaving his volunteer hands to swim or sink, to strike out for the horizon - from beyond which perchance a new committee, with a new and punchy name, led by a fully focused, unconflicted skipper with the Port River running through his veins, will inevitably steam into existence.

The Chairman’s furniture

Meanwhile, where to for Cos?

Where to for Cos, apart from personal undeserved ‘glory’ associated with 2020 and the 150th Anniversary of Port Adelaide Football Club?

Rumour has his cold calculating eye fixed on the Chairman’s furniture, counting the days left before the Small Family Business Koch Era ends, after which Cos intends the Big Production Conflicted Cardone Era to take over.

Should this happen, it would mean that PAFC’s participation in McGuire Media’s newly spruiked multi-club promotion for streaming on Amazon would have Cos interviewing himself. You see how manipulated, how downright crass, this is?

View attachment 829074

Holly Gonelately

Only one other director ever sat on the ill-fated Marketing & Brand Committee. Holly Ransom. While Cos works in his day job for the president of a competitor AFL club drumming up promotions for other competitor clubs, Holly barracks for yet another competitor AFL club as she travels all over carving notches in the belt she calls her c.v.

As we are now aware, Holly has been increasingly unable to physically attend much of anything at the Club, from annual functions to committees to board gatherings to the AGM. Holly is now the only female gender director we have ... and yet, lately, she’s gone. She’s at Harvard, from where she’ll skype her image to Alberton and cheer on the West Coast Eagles.

Them thar Volunteer Hills

So, taking into account the aforementioned shenanigans lurking behind what should’ve been engineered into a glossy international mission to professionally market the Club’s brand ... how the hell has PAFC made it to the World Stage as being reported per Chapter Three, The Archives Collection?

Remember what The David predicted on his first day in the chair? Something about unpaid Port people, both nationally and internationally. Something about volunteers and them being an untapped asset. Plus something he didn’t say, but implied: that the Club would grow rich and invincible if it could only come up with, and maintain, an efficient unselfish self-confident procedure to mine the gold that is buried in them thar Volunteer Hills ... and turn it into our next string of premierships.

View attachment 829076

Believe me, they are out there, those Hills, with their nuggets of gold.

They will always be there. Never, ever, will they give up.

Not a one of us.


THE BARS IS BACK

View attachment 829078


THE MOMENT THAT TIPPED THE SCALES AND BROUGHT THEM BACK

View attachment 829080

THIS IS HOW A BOARD MEMBER UNIQUELY CONTRIBUTES TO PAFC’S MARCH TO THE WORLD STAGE

IT’S CALLED TEAMWORK - A COMPOSITE OF CLUB EXECS FROM BOTH THE CHINA AND COMMERCIAL TEAMS, VOLUNTEERS AT HOME AND ABROAD, AND A SPECIALIST BOARD MEMBER OR TWO


View attachment 829079

Nothing is so bad that can't possibly get worse. This view of a Cardone-led Port... Damn!

It's 10:30am, and I need a drink.

 

[Lockhart Road]

Nothing is so bad that can't possibly get worse. This view of a Port-led Cardone... Damn!

Nothing is so obvious until it’s exposed.

 

[Lockhart Road]

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl...bs-in-documentary-series-20200225-p544ao.html

Amazon want all AFL clubs in documentary series

Port Adelaide chairman David Koch confirmed that Port Adelaide were interested in getting involved.

"I think it's fabulous. Yeah, I don't think we'd be asked. But we're not really a glamour club. If we were (asked), we would definitely be involved,'' he said.
Koch said he had became interested in formula one via Netflix's series Inside Formula One and the Amazon series on Manchester City "was incredible as well.''
Koch, a major Channel Seven host, saw the impact of tech giants as a positive for the game. "That's what media is about at the moment. That's what consumers are about. They - and particularly on the international stage - dealing with Amazon is huge, it's something our local broadcasters here can't do and you know Amazon have huge budgets to do it.''
Koch said he had not spoken to Collingwood counterpart Eddie McGuire, but pointed out that Port board member Cos Cardone was chief executive at McGuire Media.

 

[Launchpad McQuack]

Yeah, I don't think we'd be asked. But we're not really a glamour club.

Sigh.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Ye gods, Cardone has to go!

 

[OneGreatClub]

Enjoyed this. Thanks LR.
The changing of the guard can’t come soon enough.

 

[Duck Farmer]

Port Adelaide chairman David Koch confirmed that Port Adelaide were interested in getting involved.

"I think it's fabulous. Yeah, I don't think we'd be asked. But we're not really a glamour club.

Yeah. Thanks once again for the little, battling, blue-collar club schtick.

 

[Interstater]

There are times in the past where I've felt uncomfortable with the amount of information you make public.
This is not one of those times.
Your words are important, but your actions have been even more so.

Thank you.

Now please pass me a pitchfork, we have some Cords to cut.
My Dream is that we become a self managed football club again.

 

[Lockhart Road]

There are times in the past where I've felt uncomfortable with the amount of information you make public.
This is not one of those times.
Your words are important, but your actions have been even more so.

Thank you.

Now please pass me a pitchfork, we have some Cords to cut.
My Dream is that we become a self managed football club again.

Thank you Interstater

I’m well aware how far out on a limb I went with certain threads in 2018/2019.

It was a conscious decision to do so, made after much thought. It was a tactic, designed to induce a reaction.

I am delighted to tell you that while we have people at the top who are only there for themselves - with the exception of new faces Darren Cahill and Andrew Day - the tactic revealed that at the level below CEO we have bold, intelligent and determined executives at work for the Club whose only objective is to make PAFC the best in the world at what we do, on and off field.

A hard bugger to deal with, that’s me, and a hard bugger to impress.

I’m impressed.

 

[VineValerian]

Ye gods, Cardone has to go!

Cos Cardone.

 

[Interstater]

The focus on silver bars somehow led me to Port Adelaide Peng.

Black, white, teal, with a red sun rising.
Seems appropriate today.

 

[Lockhart Road]

Cos Cardone.

View attachment 829233

Chicken Cacciatori

 

[TheFVK]

There are times in the past where I've felt uncomfortable with the amount of information you make public.
This is not one of those times.
Your words are important, but your actions have been even more so.

Thank you.

Now please pass me a pitchfork, we have some Cords to cut.
My Dream is that we become a self managed football club again.

Well said interstater. I do agree, and with the benefit of hindsight can also see the motivation behind it from LR. A very fine line to walk but it seems one walked wisely and this is a great reward for all the effort and anguish put towards it (and shows what can be done when people leave egos at the door, and let bygones be bygones).

 

[Janus]

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl...bs-in-documentary-series-20200225-p544ao.html

Amazon want all AFL clubs in documentary series

Port Adelaide chairman David Koch confirmed that Port Adelaide were interested in getting involved.

"I think it's fabulous. Yeah, I don't think we'd be asked. But we're not really a glamour club. If we were (asked), we would definitely be involved,'' he said.
Koch said he had became interested in formula one via Netflix's series Inside Formula One and the Amazon series on Manchester City "was incredible as well.''
Koch, a major Channel Seven host, saw the impact of tech giants as a positive for the game. "That's what media is about at the moment. That's what consumers are about. They - and particularly on the international stage - dealing with Amazon is huge, it's something our local broadcasters here can't do and you know Amazon have huge budgets to do it.''
Koch said he had not spoken to Collingwood counterpart Eddie McGuire, but pointed out that Port board member Cos Cardone was chief executive at McGuire Media.

We should send Amazon on a trip with Andrew Hunter to China and talk to Tony Zhang etc about the game in Shanghai, as well as interviewing kids in the Power Footy program etc. and end it interviewing Gui Guojie about his vision for Australian Rules football in China.

Add it to the press kit that we can send out to potential sponsors.

 

[Lockhart Road]

ANDREW HUNTER - When he started out on his Long March in early 2015 ... five years almost to the day.

Thank you again, Andrew.

 

[bomberclifford]

View attachment 829960

ANDREW HUNTER - When he started out on his Long March in early 2015 ... five years almost to the day.

Thank you again, Andrew.

Has been huge. Sorry to see him go.

 

[LFC2010]

Cos Cardone.

 

[Far Kern]

Lockhart Road goes bang again. Thanks.

 

[manureid]

Port's China guru quits to join Jay in WA - InDaily

<strong>EXCLUSIVE |</strong> Port Adelaide’s China strategy will be tested this year, with the project’s chief architect quitting the football club ahead of a decision on whether to abandon its May 31 match in Shanghai over coronavirus fears.

indaily.com.au

Bigfooty gets a (not named) mention....

He even took to an online football forum this week to thank particular supporters for their “great support, ideas and advice over the course of our journey in mainland China”, noting that one contributor’s feedback “was critical to the [MG] partnership” announcement.

 

[VineValerian]

We should send Amazon on a trip with Andrew Hunter to China and talk to Tony Zhang etc about the game in Shanghai, as well as interviewing kids in the Power Footy program etc. and end it interviewing Gui Guojie about his vision for Australian Rules football in China.

Add it to the press kit that we can send out to potential sponsors.

Do it before he leaves us in May though.

 

[Janus]

Do it before he leaves us in May though.

Just change it to whoever we get to replace him.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Why do all the good blokes leave....yet...ah never mind.