The Soaring

The AFL in their efforts to untangle the knotted ball of father-son fishing wire and still keep hold of the hook, have managed to re-write the father-son law and kick the Eagles in the teeth at the same time.

How so? Well, it appears there is something short of parity when it comes to father-son rulings for the 4 WA/SA teams and all the other clubs. Not only is there higher games played qualifying periods but there was until yesterday a 20 year window in which a father had to play those qualifying games in order for his son to be eligible. That window is gone and in it’s place is a hard and fast cut off point for WAFL and SANFL players, that being the year the WA/SA teams entered the competition.

Adelaide had wanted to widen the qualifying window in order to nab young gun Bryce Gibbs, son of Ross Gibbs a Glenelg and West Perth star in 1980s. The AFL said no, we won’t let you draft him, but we will get rid of the 20 year window and we will place a new cut off date as the year the team enters the AFL, in the case of Adelaide 1990, West Coast 1987 etc. A classic case of reshuffling the deck chairs without making any real change.

The result of this wrangling is a complete cock-up by the AFL and a none too unfamiliar moving of the goalposts. You see the 1987 cutoff now has potentially huge ramifications for the Eagles:

Most bizarre is the consequences to West Coast. The Eagles also illegally drafted in 2004 Mitch Morton, son of Claremont great Noel who played 171 WAFL games to 1988. But with Noel’s 150th WAFL milestone coming after West Coast was first played in 1987, his younger sons Jarryd and Cale are now ineligible as father-son picks, leaving the Eagles fuming. “It’s a joke, it really is” said West Coast chief executive Trevor Nisbett.

Not only has Demetriou screwed Adelaide (actually they screwed themselves, and were appealing to common-sense to be unscrewed, but that’s another matter), he’s managed to completely screw us as well! The man’s a genius. For a man who can so eloquently decry injustice in the world of asylum seekers / illegal immigrants / political pointscoring (whatever your take on it), he does a marvellous job of perpetrating inequality and injustice in the league over which he presides.

So we have an illegal draftee in Mitch Morton and his two brothers swiped from our grasp. That is salt into the wound enough. But taking the individual cases out of the equation, it still reveals a totally flawed system.

Forget the games played, you could argue that as a problem but I won’t. Let’s look at the all new cut off dates, the years the non-Victorian AFL teams entered the competition. There is a serious flaw in when they occur.

By implementing a cut-off at the time the new club forms you effectively wipe out approximately 5 years of qualification for the WA/SA AFL teams. Essentially the counters are all reset to 0 when the new team enters the competition; the WAFL/SANFL qualification window ceases, but you can’t have any AFL father-son’s until the fathers play at least 100 games, which takes 4 plus seasons to accrue. So those 4 plus seasons are simply dead years where there is no continuity from one system (WAFL/SANFL) to the next.

This directly affects Gibbs (whose Father Ross played 253 games, but 191 before 1991) and the Morton brothers (Father Noel played his 150th in 1988). The cynic could say the rules were even constructed this way to ensure a less than even playing field in the AFL prevailed. After all, it is the AFL way.