Adelaide Crows fans are losing faith in a club run by also-rans | Paul Starick
We’ve seen this before. Adelaide finds a young star with an X-factor and then fumbles terribly, writes Paul Starick.
Opinion
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The furore over Josh Rachele’s axing is the latest explosion of Crows fans’ frustration at being starved of on-field success for too long.
Rachele is a fan favourite, because he is an exciting, passionate player with the X-factor that can win games.
He’s just 21 years old and brimming with promise.
Now it looks like coach Matthew Nicks, who seems a great bloke and has undoubtedly rebuilt team culture, wants to curb Rachele’s exuberance because of on-field jibes at Port fans.
We’ve seen this movie before.
Crows players get disgruntled with the club and return home to Victoria.
It seemed the biggest achievement of the Nicks era had been turning this around and attracting star players Jordan Dawson, now the captain, and Izak Rankine to the club.
Now there’s confusion about what’s going on, given Rachele can hardly have been dropped for poor form.
The club has failed to explain the reason for his axing and frustrated fans do not trust that the Crows’ lengthy rebuild is heading in the right direction.
Crows powerbrokers, from the indefatigable chairman John Olsen down, seem distracted with the ongoing and torturous saga of relocating the club’s headquarters to Thebarton Oval.
This is understandable.
The process has been unduly political and will be enormously expensive, so the board has a duty to get it right.
But one can’t help but feel this has been a distraction from a laser-like focus on returning the Crows to a powerhouse club of the AFL and becoming, once again, a regular finals contender.
Fans are impatient.
The Crows haven’t made the finals since losing the Grand Final to Richmond in 2017.
The last premiership was more than a quarter of a century ago, back in the glory days of back-to-back flags in 1997 and 1998.
Back then, the Crows were the pride of South Australia. They retain the biggest supporter base, by far, of any sporting club in SA.
But the fans are losing faith and are tired of their team being a bunch of also-rans.
Paul Starick is an Adelaide Football Club foundation member.
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