The challenges in the way of Josh Jenkins’ Adelaide Crows life membership dream
Josh Jenkins created headlines last week — and this is not likely to end for the Crows key forward-ruckman. He has become a fascinating example of a modern player thinking outside traditional themes while seeking a traditional honour.
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Crows key forward-ruckman Josh Jenkins wants to be a life member at the Adelaide Football Club, just as Coleman Medallist Tony Modra before he was shipped to Fremantle at the end of the 1998 AFL season.
Jenkins has served the Adelaide Football Club for eight seasons — two short of the usual life-membership criteria — since being traded to the Crows from the Essendon rookie list at the end of 2011.
Modra was in his seventh season in 1998 — well short of life membership as the club rules were in the 1990s — when he did have a heated discussion with premiership coach Malcolm Blight and followed up by clearing out his locker to end his part in the club’s defence of the 1997 flag.
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Jenkins, 30, is on contract for next season and 2021 when he would qualify for club life membership. Modra had to wait for inaugural Crows chief executive and later chairman Bill Sanders to sanction his life membership by acknowledging Modra’s significant influence at the start-up AFL club as a cult hero — and later off the field in marketing and game-day hospitality.
Jenkins has been dropped twice this year — a curse that also hit Modra in the 1990s, but in Modra’s case it was far from the simple form issues that have knocked down Jenkins (unless you want to believe the gossip).
It has been a strange — and demanding — fortnight for Jenkins. Dropped from the AFL line-up — even though his numbers are judged differently to those of co-captain and fellow key forward Taylor Walker — Jenkins has still commanded the headlines.
Subjected to farcical storylines, such as a punch-up with coach Don Pyke and “revelations” that his name has been blackballed at match committee because of a “bromance” with Port Adelaide premiership hero and media critic Kane Cornes, a columnist at The Advertiser and radio breakfast host at SEN. He also has been accused of “leaking” to the media.
And there was Jenkins’ own account — while in his regular radio spot with Cornes on SEN — of his being rebuked at his football club for being forthright and transparent in his media work.
“I’ve got the challenge that I enjoy this space and I try to be as giving as I can and I’ve certainly crossed the mark a couple of times,” Jenkins said. “My comments about playing the Cats and playing against ‘Danger’ (Patrick Dangerfield) leading into the (2017) preliminary final, I’d love to take those back, but this is the world we step into and what you say is out there forever.
“A couple of times I’ve overstepped the mark and I’ve owned it. But I’d like to think for the most part my intentions are genuine.”
Jenkins is paying the price for being a crusader who ultimately should be remembered for trying to advance the game of Australian football.
Unlike other key forwards in the Adelaide Football Club’s 30-season story, Jenkins — in total contrast to Modra — has not captured the endless adulation and any reassuring comfort zone at West Lakes.
There are those who still wish Adelaide had worked a trade for Jenkins with Brisbane at the end of the 2015 or 2016 seasons. Rather, Jenkins in July 2016 — after enduring all the tension with Brownlow Medallist Mark Ricciuto, the Crows director in charge of list management — signed a five-year, $4 million contract to the end of 2021.
There are those who now hope Jenkins will become trade bait in October, particularly with Gold Coast to engineer the come-home deal for 2018 No. 2 draftee Jack Lukosius to create the Lukosius-Darcy Fogarty tandem in the Adelaide attack.
As Jenkins clings to his dream of being a life member at the Adelaide Football Club, it is worth remembering that the final call on any trade rests with the player and not the club. (Although a club can nudge the player with the thought it is better to play AFL at Gold Coast than SANFL with Adelaide).
For all his advocacy of American professional sports, Jenkins is not playing the full nine yards with calls for the AFL to have — as in the USA — public declaration of player salaries and free trading among the clubs.
The AFL has free agency for the players after eight years of service. And the clubs would savour the chance to freely trade players who have become excess to needs — or do not fit the expectations held when put on five-year contracts.
Josh Jenkins is to stay in the headlines for some time.
These are anxious times in SA football — for the players, the fans, the clubs such as Adelaide and Port Adelaide that have so much hanging on the critical cut-off line of being an AFL top-eight finalist or an also ran in Season 2019.
The enewsletter Roast on Tuesday will:
REVISIT AFLW champion Erin Phillips’ call for social media accounts to be verified. As inaugural Crows coach Graham Cornes said in his tweet at those trying to bring down Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley: “Until you have the courage to put your name to your tweets, nothing that you post could ever be taken seriously. By all means agitate but don’t try and destroy from the cover of anonymity.”
LOOK at the “what next” question at both the Crows and Port Adelaide Football Club, in particular the Power where president David Koch might have unwittingly answered just who does take his chair after the club’s 150th anniversary season next year.
AND Reality Bites remains on the money. There was the recent forecast of a change in the Port Adelaide board room — and there is just that. Former Port Adelaide league player and long-serving director Ross Haslam has stepped down from the board to concentrate on growing demands in his “real job” with civil projects in Adelaide’s CBD.
Haslam’s seat on the Port Adelaide board has been taken by a specialist in China — Andrew Day, who has been a chief executive and board member in several industries and has a strong understanding of business partnerships in China where the Power is seeking its financial growth.
The Roast will continue online with The Advertiser on Wednesday and Thursday.