Members of Adelaide Crows’ 2001 inner sanctum reflect on Laurence Angwin’s controversial year

Potential unfulfilled. Wild. Physically gifted. A draft fizzer. Easily distracted. These are some of the ways members of the Adelaide Crows’ 2001 inner sanctum describe Laurence Angwin, the club’s highest ever draft pick. Angwin and the Crows parted ways after just 13 months without him ever playing a game for the club.

SA footballer Laurence Angwin, left, with Brett Burton during Adelaide Crows pre-season training in 2001.

• Part 1: How Crows’ highest ever draftee became ‘spectacular failure’

THE name Laurence Angwin provokes a plethora of reactions from those in the Adelaide Crows’ inner sanctum for the 2000 national draft and 2001 season.

“He had all the talent but … didn’t have the mindset to give himself a chance of making it,” dual premiership captain Mark Bickley tells The Advertiser.

“He was potential unfulfilled,” ex-teammate Ken McGregor says.

“What on paper looked to be a very good selection, turned out to be a fizzer,” former football operations manager John Reid adds.

“There were some trials and tribulations along the way,” recalls Gary Ayres, the Crows coach at the time.

“He was wild. You could have a sportsman’s night on him,” according to ex-teammate Michael Handby.

Laurence Angwin during an Adelaide Crows training session in 2001 — it was the only season he was at the club.

Adelaide selected Angwin, an athletic, 200cm ruckman scouts compared to Shaun Rehn and Jeff White, with its first top-10 selection at a national draft — pick seven in 2000.

Just 13 months later, after a string of off-field issues, including getting arrested for drink-driving and allegations of stealing — allegations Angwin denies — the Crows parted ways with the former Dandenong Stingray without him ever playing an AFL game for the club.

He remains Adelaide’s earliest ever pick — and still will be after Thursday night’s draft, unless the Crows trade up the order to try to nab SA young guns Jack Lukosius or Izak Rankine.

Today, despite Angwin falling well short of the club’s expectations, his former Crows associates know why he was taken so high in the draft order.

“If he was a genuinely switched on kid, he would’ve been a star,” says Handby, a teammate of Angwin’s at Dandenong, Glenelg and Adelaide.

“He was a bloke that could do everything and might have been a once-in-a-generation player.”

Like Angwin, Handby arrived at the Crows from Dandenong via the 2000 national draft.

An injured Laurence Angwin with his arm in a sling during an Adelaide Crows training session in 2001.

They ended up playing SANFL together at Glenelg and living with the same host family in Adelaide.

Handby remembers not only Angwin’s football talent but him being the life of the party.

He says Angwin once ate an entire sponge cake on the day of a game for Glenelg for a dare.

“He was fun to go out with because he wouldn’t have a filter button,” Handby says.

Angwin’s SANFL debut with Glenelg seems to epitomise his colliding worlds as a rising football star and seeker of good times.

He received two Magarey Medal votes after starring in the ruck for the Tigers against Sturt — then was seen standing on a table post-match in Glenelg’s function room with a cigarette in one hand, wine bottle in the other.

“It’s still talked about these days at the Bay,” Handby says.

Another time, Angwin played a Saturday afternoon SANFL game having arrived home at 8am that morning from a night of drinking.

“And he dominated,” Handby recalls.

That was the thing about Angwin, his ability was never questioned — he kicked six goals and took 11 marks in a TAC under-18 game in 2000 — but his preparation and professionalism raised eyebrows.

Michael Handby, pictured left in 2001, was teammates with Laurence Angwin at Dandenong Stingrays, Glenelg and with the Crows.

Angwin’s attitude was a big reason why then Adelaide recruiting manager James Fantasia wanted to draft Kane Cornes instead of him but Crows coach Gary Ayres was keen on a ruckman given Rehn was departing, and got his way.

Warning signs emerged not long after Angwin joined the Crows, most of them initially because he struggled to train.

Angwin missed his first pre-season session with an allergy that affected his eyes.

During that same week, he crashed to the pavement during a training run and ended up concussed and in hospital, to be later diagnosed with a viral infection.

In February, he was sidelined with a stomach virus.

“He could run better than most people out there but he couldn’t get on the track more than one or two nights,” Bickley says.

“When he did, you could see why he went high in the draft.

“He was athletically gifted and physically gifted.”

Four weeks before the start of the 2001 season, Angwin crashed a car near Moonta on the Yorke Peninsula on the way to teammate Hayden Skipworth’s 18th birthday party and escaped with minor cuts, bruises and whiplash.

Gary Ayres was Laurence Angwin’s coach at the Crows for the 2001 season.

The car was written off.

“The playing group were all pretty disappointed and angry at him doing that,” McGregor says.

“A lot of players have problems when they first come into the system but they end up learning pretty quickly and end up becoming long-term players.”

Ayres agrees, saying many draftees “wise up and take it on board, others don’t.”

“Once you get them into a 24-7 system, that’s when you’ve got to smooth out the rough edges because they’re only kids,” he says.

“As you always do, you give someone an opportunity to improve but it happened fairly early on that things with Laurie were excuse-driven.

“Talent, skill, athleticism, all those things, tick, tick, tick … but sacrifice, commitment, discipline weren’t strong words in Laurie Angwin’s dictionary, unfortunately”

But Angwin’s laddish behaviour and training struggles were the least of Adelaide’s concerns.

The biggest were allegations of stealing — allegations Angwin denies — and his “habit of not telling the truth”, as one ex-Crow put it.

People at the club at the time say lots of his misbehaving was brazen yet denied when confronted.

In a story Angwin refuted this week, his host family kicked him out in April 2000 after money given to Handby for his 18th birthday was found under Angwin’s bed.

Former Crows football operations manager John Reid remembers Laurence Angwin being talented but too easily distracted to make it during his time at the club.

On the field, injuries curtailed his campaign — firstly hamstring tendinitis, then a season-ending shoulder reconstruction in June.

Angwin was arrested at Oaklands Park in August after driving through a red light and recording a blood-alcohol reading of 0.107.

He was later convicted, fined $625 and disqualified from holding a licence for six months.

“There were no doubts about his ability — he could play,” Reid says.

“But he was too easily distracted.”

Ayres, now at the helm of VFL club Port Melbourne, says coaching enormously talented players who are not committed is frustrating.

“It’s certainly a big step for a young man to go interstate but all the things that the Adelaide Crows did were about setting Laurence up in a really good environment, he just didn’t want to buy into it,” he says.

“We all make mistakes, no doubt about that — no one is perfect … but if you keep making the same mistakes, it does become disappointing.”

Angwin’s tenure at Adelaide officially ended with his delisting at the end of 2002, although it essentially finished in mid-December 2001 when he moved back to Melbourne.

Mark Bickley was teammates with Laurence Angwin in 2001.

The club described Angwin’s return to Victoria as him quitting due to homesickness and frustration over his run of injuries.

In reality, Reid says, it was a mutual parting of ways.

“It wasn’t a hard decision to make,” he says.

“We’d had enough and I think he knew he’d run his race.

“It wasn’t like there was just a few bits and pieces, there was a lot of stuff.”

Reid says Angwin is just one of many examples “there’s no foolproof way to guarantee that someone’s going to be the right selection”, even now.

“If I handed you the file and you looked at it you might have thought there’d have been a little bit of risk, but he’d be worth taking,” he says.

“You interview them, interview their teachers, interview their parents, interview their coaches, do all that stuff but there’s still no 100 per cent guarantee and Laurence certainly fell in that category.”

Bickley says Angwin’s time at the Crows is a classic case of players needing both ability and commitment to make it at the elite level.

Injuries held Laurence Angwin back during the 2000/01 AFL pre-season.

McGregor agrees: “He had this obvious talent and was a very good player — he had agility, speed and all that — but he was only 18 and an immature 18.

“When you come into the AFL everyone is talented and good at what they do, and the little things like the training and the discipline are the difference between players that make it and players that don’t.

“He hadn’t learnt that.

“Now as an older man, I wish I could’ve helped him more.

“He wasn’t ready for that expectation to be such a high draft pick and be away from his parents and junior footy coaches, who’d obviously brought out the best in him.”

Ayres says Angwin’s name is often associated with draftees who do not live up to the hype but there are plenty of young footballers who struggle with the elite level’s demands.

“There is the pressure and there are the things that, for whatever reason, unfortunately the young men can’t cope with,” he says.

“There’s been plenty along the journey and there’ll be more.”

TOMORROW: LAURENCE ANGWIN TALKS ABOUT HIS TIME AT THE CROWS

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