Cornes: The sacking that sums up everything wrong with the AFL ‘experiment’

It was inevitable Stuart Dew would be sacked from his position as the coach of the Gold Coast Suns, as the “Curse of Carrara” claims another victim.

Stuart Dew was sacked from his position as the coach of the Gold Coast Suns last week. It was inevitable. Several days earlier, the club’s chief executive, Mark Evans, had said publicly his position was safe. If ever there is a portend for an AFL coach’s demise, it is that. Dew becomes another victim of a failed AFL experiment. They should realise by now that you can’t parachute a team into a community that doesn’t really want it. Have they learned nothing from history? The Gold Coast is no country for new football teams; or for new basketball teams, or new rugby league teams. The “Curse of Carrara” claims another victim.

Remember the Brisbane Bears? The team was called the “Brisbane” Bears but they were parachuted into the Gold Coast and played their home games at Carrara Oval.

Stuart Dew after the Suns’ Round 17 loss to Port Adelaide at Adelaide Oval. Photo by James Elsby/AFL Photos via Getty Images

Various private owners from media fraudster, Christopher Skase, a television star in Paul Cronin and a hospitality mogul in Reuben Pelerman squandered millions on the football team. To make the ground amenable to night football, Skase had $6 million dollars of floodlighting erected, then failed to pay for it. Nevertheless, the players including our own Mark Mickan, Martin Leslie and Mark Williams, performed valiantly. Players always will. Millions were spent attracting high profile players like Warwick Capper and Brownlow Medallist Brad Hardie but the experiment was doomed. A football team is not a magnate’s plaything. The Bears never succeeded until the team moved to Brisbane, merged with the ill-fated Fitzroy and called itself the Lions.

Over the past 40 years a multitude of sporting teams have called Carrara home. Rugby union, rugby league, touch football, baseball, soccer, cricket teams have all played on the ground. None has been successful. As they did with Greater Western Sydney, the AFL hoped to capitalise on an expanding population centre. With overly generous draft and recruiting concessions and millions of dollars in infrastructure and administration support it hoped to buy credibility and success. GWS might have reached a grand final but it failed to capture the heart of the its constituency which never really wanted them. The same fate awaits the Gold Coast Suns. Coaches, players and the front office work hard and want desperately to believe but they face overwhelming odds of success. Carrara is now a fancy, redeveloped 25,000 seat stadium but the curse still hovers

Stuart Dew with his team after the Suns’ Round 17 loss to Port Adelaide at Adelaide Oval. Photo by Sarah Reed/AFL Photos via Getty Images

I first met Stuart Dew when he was a 16 year-old junior footballer. He was playing in an under-age SA state team at the Western Oval as a curtain-raiser for an E.J. Whitten Legends game. It seemed an unusual venue for an under-age state game. A friendly kid, you couldn’t help but notice him. There was a warmth and friendliness that invited conversation. He was the sort of young footballer that you followed through the years and in 1997, there he was again, listed as one of the Power’s inaugural squad members. He was 17. Someone had a good eye for talent. Thus began a significant AFL career as a small forward. His booming left foot kick was a priceless football asset. When Port was at its peak under Mark Williams, Dew kicked 44 goals in 2001, 51 goals in 2002, and 31 in the club’s premiership year of 2004.

Some would say he retired prematurely after 180 games but he followed his heart and Teresa Palmer, his girlfriend at the time, to the bright lights of Los Angeles with a half-hearted ambition to pursue a career as a punter for one of the professional American football teams. Neither worked out and Hawthorn coach, Alastair Clarkson, who had been close to Dew when they were coach and player at Central Districts made him an offer too good to refuse. So, after a year off, he went to Hawthorn with a modified training program that focused on his strengths as an explosive, power athlete rather than the issues of skin folds, weight control and aerobic running.

Clarkson’s faith was vindicated in the 2008 grand final when, in a five-minute burst in the third quarter, Dew tore the game apart and inspired the Hawks to an upset grand final victory. He is forever immortalised in Hawthorn’s pantheon of football greats. An unlikely hero, he was never the svelte, perfectly toned athlete, but he was powerful, alert and used the ball beautifully. After 206 AFL games, he retired and was appointed an assistant coach to John Longmire at Sydney and was instrumental in that club’s period of success. His apprenticeship to the senior coach was well-served and in 2018 he won the senior coaching position at the Gold Coast. It was a poisoned chalice. The club had been a perennial cellar-dweller since its inception, although it had climbed to the lofty heights of 12th on the ladder under Guy McKenna in 2014.

Stuart Dew during the Round 17 match between the Power and Suns at Adelaide Oval. Photo by Sarah Reed/AFL Photos via Getty Images

Stuart Dew has been the Gold Coast Suns’ longest serving senior coach but despite the draft concessions, the AFL’s bankroll and the quality and reputation of its office holders and staff, the club has not been able to rise above that previous high of 12th. In the end, the record has to speak, so despite the assurances and hollow endorsements, Dew was sacked with another year left to run on his contract. Tensions within the club and officials who think they know better claimed him. Perhaps they were right. You can’t argue against the record and after such optimism at the end of last season the disappointment in this year’s performances is justified. Besides, it’s so much easier to sack coaches these days after the AFL introduced a ruling that the clubs only had to pay out six months of an existing contract. Disgraceful!

However, the one thing that cannot be justified is the lack of professionalism and confidentiality at the club. It is inexcusable that a board member or an executive of the club should leak the details of the club’s dissatisfaction with its senior coach to the media. Believing he had the club’s support, Dew responded with a rebuttal of the claims he was about to be terminated. Barely 24 hours later, he was sacked. The “rat in the ranks” surely must follow.

So what now for the Gold Coast Suns. It will begin the search for a new coach, although it’s hard to believe that they would sack an incumbent without already having a replacement in place. Damien Hardwick is the raging favourite for the position. It would be the height of cynicism. Hardwick who only weeks ago stepped down from the Richmond position claiming he was burnt out and had nothing left to offer, has not commented publicly so maybe it’s only rumour. Still, it is remarkable how a new challenge and million-dollar contracts can revitalise an exhausted old coach.

It is conceivable that a new coach might take the Suns’ playing list into a finals campaign. The talent is surely good enough. It may prove to be remarkably simple. Mindset is one of the keys. Those players, deep down inside, may never have thought they were good enough. Stuart Dew and the coaches before him were never able to convince them that they were. Clarkson, or whoever it is that takes Dew’s place might bring it out of them. They may play finals; they may even make a grand final but that club will never have a football soul.

And what of Stuart Dew? He will survive. He’ll take comfort in his family and once the pain and the anger has frustrated, football will come calling again. He still has much to offer.