Why the heat has been dialled up on Adelaide coach Don Pyke
After almost four years in charge, enjoying near unanimous support from Crows fans, the tide of opinion is starting to turn against Adelaide coach Don Pyke, writes Michelangelo Rucci.
It is rare for an AFL coaching “honeymoon” to last 86 games, almost four seasons. But then Don Pyke’s introduction as the Crows senior coach at the end of 2015 was in extraordinary circumstances.
Pyke returned to the Adelaide Football Club, where he had been an assistant coach to Neil Craig a decade earlier, taking over a “resilient” team that had played finals in Season 2015 and won an epic knock-out battle with the Western Bulldogs at the MCG. He was not inheriting a team on the slide needing a saviour.
With a 17-7 start, followed by another 17-win season in 2017, Pyke’s first two seasons at West Lakes were a dream run … albeit without the ultimate prize that seemed a formality for the Crows in the 2017 AFL grand final against Richmond at the MCG.
Even last season, the fall from pacesetter to non-finalist was “excused” by the horror injury run … and that pre-season camp on the Gold Coast where Pyke had great intentions poorly executed by an outside agency. The heat was more on Crows football chief Brett Burton, fitness coach Martin Haas and whoever let the black cat back in the building than on Pyke.
But now the honeymoon is over. Showdown 47 — with the second-half “embarrassment” against Port Adelaide — has taken care of that.
So Pyke, the most reclusive coach in Adelaide’s 29-season story, is no longer short of advice no matter where he hides from public focus. Not that Pyke is good in taking feedback, as noted by how two of his assistant coaches (current Carlton interim coach David Teague and Gold Coast assistant Josh Francou) left West Lakes.
Pyke will be challenged to ignore the echoes of the critics, particularly among the Crows fan base that wants to believe in an “inclusive” club. His calls at selection will be judged with more intensity than in his previous 86 matches.
The tide — from honeymoon to intense scrutiny that every AFL coach ultimately faces — has clearly changed on Pyke when fans are now questioning why he spend half a quarter in his elevated coach’s box and the later half on the bench. It was not an issue when the Crows were winning …
Pyke’s handling (or mishandling) of Carlton recruit Bryce Gibbs, a player rated as worthy of two first-round draft picks in the 2017 AFL trade period, will become a tougher question to bat away with the safe-play responses of “he is working on a couple of things” or “he is down on confidence”.
Pyke’s preference for senior players rather than committing to the in-game development of young prospects — in particular 2017 No. 12 draftee forward Darcy Fogarty — will become a staple of talkback radio if the Crows become an also-ran to September’s top-eight finals rather than a top-four contender (as everyone expected). Where is the future, the fans will ask.
Pyke’s gameday work will be picked at by fans, who unlike the Crows coach have not played 132 AFL matches and won two AFL premiership medals with West Coast. But then, neither have the bulk of the men and women who sit on the Adelaide Football Club board who will decide if Pyke’s contract is extended beyond the current term to the end of 2021.
Pyke is a grand theorist, making him a superb manager of teams from Monday to Friday. But the practicalities — known as match-day coaching — can sometimes appear quite challenging for the stubborn Pyke. He certainly appeared overwhelmed in Showdown 47.
At 8-7 — and far from the pacesetter everyone expected with an end to Adelaide’s heavy injury count from last season — the long-running honeymoon is clearly over for Pyke. In the hot seat, he could emerge as a better coach. He certainly will be tested in dealing with the “outside noise”, more so if there is not enough challenging him within the bubble at West Lakes.
REALITY BITES
AFL Players’ Association president Patrick Dangerfield is advocating a shorter pre-season in the belief this will bring a solution to the game’s rising injury count. But not too many of his current and former AFL colleagues seeing merit in longer summer holidays.
Dangerfield said: “We’ve got the longest pre-season in world sports. I think at some stage we’ll see senior players returning in January and the players one to four years, there’d be some sort of training camp.
“To engage pre-season at the moment, you return for two weeks then you’ve got a three-week Christmas break and then you’re back to training, it’s a little bit untidy.
“I think eventually we’ll get to a stage where it would be a build-up over eight weeks in that January period.”
Fellow Brownlow Medallist and current Hawthorn assistant coach Sam Mitchell disagrees: “The nasty mix for young people in my view is if you’ve got a fair bit of money and a fair bit of time, then things can in general go wrong.
“If players are spending that time on education and getting some school learning then fine, but if they’re spending it in Mykonos or London or whatever players do in their holidays these days, do they need four months off to go on holidays, I’m not sure?
“If it’s to extend the holiday period, I’m not sure that’s what’s best for players despite the players probably wanting that themselves.
“To be honest, I fought against things like that as a player.”
Crows forward Riley Knight also is not keen on a shorter pre-season. He told SEN1629: “It is a pretty gruelling period for players. A shorter pre-season would be great, but at the same time if it keep getting shorter and shorter we will be getting back at the start of the season itself.
“It can be shortened a fraction, but I don’t mind the length of the pre-season at the moment … particularly withe breaks (during summer training). It’s up for debate, but I don;t mind how long the pre-season is at the moment.”
STUCK IN TUNNEL
As the debate on the SCG digging out its cricket square — to appease the AFL’s needs — becomes quite emotive in Sydney, there is this amazing revelation of the “parting gift” from SCG Trust chairman Rodney Cavalier as the venue was recently redeveloped.
As he took a special interest in the engineering designs for the new stand at the SCG, the cricket-devoted Cavalier is said to have ensured there was no alley way between the stands that was wide enough to allow the carting of drop-in squares as used in Mel bourne at the MCG and at the Docklands and at Adelaide Oval.
The SCG Trust is now chaired by a football man, Greater Western Sydney Giants chairman Tony Shepherd who will find cricket’s guard of the SCG cricket square might be a tougher challenge than winning an AFL premiership.
Cricket NSW has informed the committee investigating the benefits and otherwise of drop-in squares that the portables “simply do not deteriorate over the four days of a Sheffield Shield match or five days of a Test.”
“In multiple venues,” it adds, “with some of the world’s finest curators in control, they continue to have a sameness about them which fail to express the unique characteristics that exist in Sydney with the natural pitch. Deterioration is key to a spinning pitch, therefore there is a real risk that moving to drop ins will nullify the unique characteristic that the SCG is famous for, and risk it becoming just like any other ground around Australia.”
The AFL has started a battle here.
WHERE’S PAV?
Quite a few eyebrows have been raised in Perth by the absence of former Fremantle captain Matthew Pavlich from the West Australian’s top-50 list of most powerful people in the game in WA. Surely it cannot be a case of “Pav” being ignored because he reads the sports news on the Channel Nine signal in Perth, thereby being a competitor to the West Australia’s television owners at Channel Seven?
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