It’s heartening to see that the Giants have secured a major sponsor with the new advertisements plastered all over the AFL website this afternoon.


Only one question guys: who decided your logo was going to work on an AFL guernsey? I guess the association with the Giants, and especially The Promised Land, will carry the bulk of the load along with advertising like this above, but it’s pretty hard to see that the Giants’ TV exposure is going to deliver much when the sponsor logo disappears into the background. Presumably it looks better, and stands out more, on the charcoal guernsey.

Oh well, it’s their money.

Update: The picture of #1 draft pick Jonathan Patton in his brand new Giants polo shirt illustrates the issue for the “co-major partner”. Every name except theirs is perfectly readable in this pic.

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.

AussieRulesBlog isn’t a Robert Walls fan at the best of times, but his effort in the commentary box at the Suns’ first proper AFL game was atrocious by any measure.

 

We’re pretty sure he has never had an original thought and his ponderous monotone delivery is mind numbing, nevertheless we acknowledge that some people appreciate what they perceive as his forthrightness.

 

Let’s leave aside that someone had Channel 10 was having a lend of themselves scheduling Malcolm Blight — a Gold Coast Suns board member — and Walls — recently inducted as a Legend of Carlton Football Club (which says a lot about the Blues) — to do special comments on the Suns’ game against Carlton.

 

Other media people (mostly) manage to maintain a reasonable degree of objective decorum when doing one of their favourite team’s games. Everyone knows that Tim Lane, for instance, is a committed Blues man, but it rarely affects his call. Likewise Eddie Maguire and the Barcodes. Or Jason Dunstall and the Hawks.

 

Along with the position in the media comes a responsibility — not unlike that we foist onto players. We expect those in the media to comment without fear or favour. Walls failed the latter test utterly on Saturday night.

 

AussieRulesBlog suffered both Walls and the Suns until the Geelong-Fremantle game started. The Suns are clearly completely unprepared for elite football. Despite the big money splashed to gain a modicum of experience, it was pretty clear that the pre-season flattered the team. They were so far behind the Blues — mostly two to five metres! — that it’s really hard to see how they can compete with any other team this year — even Brisbane.

 

The AFL were clearly keen not to repeat what were seen as the mistakes in the birth of Brisbane. A group of, mostly, second-raters were gifted to Brisbane and went on to prove that it takes time to build a team. By gifting Gold Coast a plethora of draft picks, the AFL has, without doubt, provided hope for the Suns, but we’re not sure after Saturday night that perhaps a middle ground isn’t a better option. And the spectre of 2012 just got a hell of a lot more fearsome for a group of blokes out in western Sydney.