Here at AussieRulesBlog Central, we haven’t had the opportunity to watch David Rodan ply his trade, week in and week out. We reckon it would have been a privilege to have done so.

We could never understand why the Tigers moved him on after 66 games, and now, 111 games further on, Port Adelaide have taken the same decision. Both clubs haven’t had lists full of blokes giving 150%, getting the ball, running and driving it forward. And yet Rodan is moved on.

Obviously the clubs know the man better than we do as casual observers. Rodan has had three ACL operations and is nearing 30 years old. These must be factors. And it’s true that Rodan hasn’t been a star, but. . .

Any time we’ve seen him, he’s been having a red hot go, and that’s all most footy fans want to see.

Here at AussieRulesBlog Central, we’ve been ruminating on the [insert sponsor] AFL Trade Period. Well, with footy over for the year, other than reliving some of 2012’s glory by replay, there’s not much else to do if the round ball sends you off to sleep faster than a handful of Valium.

Free agency and the extended draft period seems to have unlocked a lot of wanderlust amongst the AFL’s six hundred-odd players. After two weeks, we’ve seen players dashing around the competition like snooker balls after a particularly strong break. It’s all quite unusual, and not a little disconcerting.

But we’ve been thinking. Not long ago, we were ourselves in a situation where our daily grind at the millstone to assuage the bank manager was under some pressure. Even had that not been the case, were we sufficiently disenchanted with our place at the coalface, we are perfectly at liberty to go off searching for other, more attractive options. Find another employer, satisfy them of our willingness to bleed for the company’s bottom line and we’re off.

Not so, your AFL footballer. Admittedly, apart from the rookies, they can buy and sell AussieRulesBlog quite easily. Yet during the season, every week, we expect them to put their bodies in harm’s way, and we’re ever ready to criticise if we determine they haven’t gone in hard enough. (We are talking of the general ‘we’ here, not the Royal ‘we’.)

But let them hint that they’re not as happy at ‘club X’ as we deem they should be and we quickly label them as traitors and turncoats. As do some of their ex-teammates this week!

How many of us would put up with the restrictions on our trade of our labours that AFL players must submit to? Not many, we’ll wager.

Next time your boss or your coworkers are getting up your nasal passage, just contemplate what it could be like if your boss could match the offer you got from another employer and keep you at the familiar grindstone against your will.

Hmmm. This trade period doesn’t look so bad now.

Last week, we pondered the effects, a year on, of Brisbane coach Michael Voss’ brainsnap decision to recruit Brendan Fevola by offering up Michael Rischitelli and Daniel Bradshaw.

Well, the jury is in. Only the Tigers deemed it necessary to offer a player up without his asking for a move. It’s not all that clear to us why they would have done so, since a team that relied so heavily for scoring on one player, Jack Riewoldt, would seem to be in need of a forward foil with some goal sense. Andrew Collins has seemed, on the few viewings we’ve had of him, to have looked like he could provide a useful contest and some goal sense. Shaun Grigg seems to be more of a defender come midfielder. Curious. Nevertheless, we are Damian Hardwick fans, so we’re prepared to see what happens.

What has been stranger to watch has been the merry-go-round of assistant coaches this year. Of course, they all arrive at their new home terribly “excited” about their new team’s prospects.

Gavin Brown’s exit from Magpieland and Brendan McCartney’s “defection” to Essendon were the biggest surprises sprung. Outgoing Geelong President Frank Costa seemed resigned in a television interview tonight to the viewthat Mark Thompson will also bob up at Bomberland sooner or later.

Brown is probably the more interesting move. His three years coaching the Magpies’ ‘magoos’ suggests he harbours senior coaching ambitions. This year’s Malthouse–Buckley slow-motion coup agreement would appear to close off any avenues at the “Which sponsor do we have this year” Centre. We wouldn’t have thought that assistant to Ratten would look terribly impressive on a CV, but perhaps no-one better credentialed made an offer. Will Brown’s blood boil, or his head spin ’round a la Linda Blair in The Exorcist, when he has to sing We are the navy blues. . .?

The framing of the media coverage on the McCartney change has been interesting. A “defection”? Of course the spectre of Thompson turning up as Hird’s mentor, and persistent reports that it has been on the cards for months, seems to suggest some labyrinthine machinations, but defection? We should also note that McCartney had been ‘demoted’ from an assistant role at Sleepy Hollow to overseeing up and comers in the Academy squad this year. It’s hard not to conclude that Thompson had a significant part in that decision. The coach’s rooms at Windy Hill might be an interesting place to be if McCartney and Thompson are to be reunited.

On a recent visit to the grandly-titled Windy Hill ‘Precinct’, we didn’t detect anything resembling Checkpoint Charlie (younger people click here for an explanation), so would that mean that the Bombers are on the side of freedom and the Cat Empire are the forces of darkness? Well, cold-war defection did go both ways and we are thoroughly red and black! :-)

And there’s only 110-odd or 120-odd days ’til we’re back into the pre-season footy!!  :-(  We can only hope that the Ashes Tests will offer something more diverting than recent summers have managed. The Poms look to have put a decent squad together and the Aussies attack and batting have more holes than a colander. Please let it be close with a series win to the Aussies on the last day of the last Test.

It will be interesting, come next Monday afternoon, to look at the trades that have been done and consider the flow-on effects of last year’s disastrous play for Brendan Fevola by Brisbane coach, Michael Voss.

How many clubs would be willing to countenance losing club champion Rischitelli, elite goal-kicker Bradshaw and emerging star Henderson for the questionable social skills and on-field narcissism of Fevola.

Time will tell whether Voss’ arrogance has condemned Brisbane to an extended period at the less-glorious end of the ladder, but a certain amount of trust between coach and playing group must surely have also been lost in the transaction.

Who’s really to know whether Hawthorn have already paid a price for hawking [no pun intended] Campbell Brown around the traps without his knowledge? Is it credible that a man who seemed to epitomise the team spirit of ‘the family club’ would pick up his little red wagon and head north otherwise?

However much we may dislike the Trade Week ‘meat market’, it has provided a relatively ordered and civilised means for players to escape poisonous environments and make a new start. More so, the dramatic concessions afforded to the Suns and GWS have empowered some players to visit retribution upon clubs when they’ve been treated shabbily.

News that Carlton and Brisbane are working toward a trade of Fevola for Bradshaw and Rischitelli, apparently if the Lions players can be “convinced” to move, reveals once more the truly ugly end of the AFL system.

No more need be written on the subject of Fevola’s manifold indiscretions.Whether the Blues are well served by moving him on is a moot point. There’s plenty of precedent to suggest a move into a non-AFL-saturated community would benefit Fevola — think Lockett and Hall in Sydney — and a move to a new team environment where there is no history of putting up with his ‘high jinks’ might also work for him.

No, the ugly end of this scenario is Bradshaw and Rischitelli being dragged into the deal somewhat peripherally. Rischitelli has certainly been mentioned in trade discussions previously and there’s a sense that he’d welcome a move back to Melbourne for non-football reasons.

Bradshaw, originally from Victoria, has been a long-term servant of the Lions and provides a very effective foil for Jonathan Brown. Apparently he has made no secret of his intention to move back to Victoria at the end of his playing career. That is, however, a very long way from being an unwitting pawn in some Machiavellian trade deal.

Greg Baum has written an excellent piece on this scenario in The Age. He contrasts the various “loyalties” around AFL, from the fans’ unwavering commitment to clubs’ demands of players. The most telling remark, for me, concerns Hawks legend Don Scott, who, Baum reports, felt more loyalty to the player group than to the club per se. Even this has to been in context, as many will recall Scott standing before an angry Hawthorn crowd and ripping a Melbourne Demons guernsey during the contretemps over those two clubs’ merger plans.

I make no secret of my affection for the Bombers. It’s my firmly-held belief that the Bombers’ great team of the late 90s and early 00s was irrevocably torn asunder by the departure, under somewhat strained and unwilling circumstances, of Damien Hardwick, Blake Caracella, Chris Heffernan and Justin Blumfield within the space of two years. None of the four would probably have been considered a top-flight player in their own right. As a group, the four would hardly have been considered by outsiders as the heart and soul of the Bombers, yet, in the wake of these departures and without the loss of stars, the Bombers went into an almost uninterrupted slide.

I wonder if Brisbane's team fabric could survive the forced departure of Bradshaw and Rischitelli and the importing of the self-centred Fevola, or will it implode as the Bombers’ did a little less than a decade ago.