As usual, Aussie rules’ biggest club will want to have its cake, and eat it too!
Barcodes President Eddie McGuire’s threats over the Giants’ potential interest in Scott Pendlebury need to be balanced with the thought of, arguably, Australia’s most powerful sporting club being itself let loose in the free agency china shop from 2013.
And in a curiously serendipitous coincidence, the Barcodes’ Travis Cloke’s manager-father David is already talking up his youngest son’s free-agency value post his current contract.
Which non-Barcodes footy fan wouldn’t revel in the delicious irony of Eddie Everywhere bouncing off the walls of a rubber room over Pendlebury while his club’s star forward seeks the best dollars he can get elsewhere in the competition?
Eddie’s bluster is all very well, but the AFL’s salary cap system severely restricts the ability of successful clubs to counter attractive financial packages mounted by less successful clubs. Similarly, it also restricts the Barcodes’ ability to be a spoiler in any meaningful way.
Eddy wishes he was George Harris or Big Jack Elliott and he could buy a team of champions, but the landscape has changed.
It will be players and individual player priorities that will decide who smiles and who cries. Irrevocably, for players the only loyalty will be to the playing group they are part of. There will be some who will play their entire careers at one club, but they will become fewer. Fans and administrations need to brace themselves. This is not going to be pretty.
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