Reece Homfray analysis: Clearout means the Crows can finally wake up from Grand Final nightmare
It took the Crows two years to realise they could not treat the wounds inflicted at the 2017 Grand Final by ignoring them, writes Reece Homfray. But today’s bloodletting means the healing can finally begin.
Reece Homfray
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For a while there, Adelaide thought it could solve the problems of the past two years by burying its head in the sand.
Nothing to see here, no issue with management, good people and good coaches, we’ll back them in, was the constant messaging from West Lakes.
Loyalty, unity and stability is to be admired in the current era of AFL football where the axe is swung with ruthless effect on people’s futures and often before time.
But then there comes a time when a club like Adelaide simply cannot deny there is a problem any longer and the overwhelming evidence says the only way to move forward is not by sticking heads in the sand but for heads to roll.
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The Crows just needed to be told by an external review, which in all likelihood mirrored the findings of their internal review, and now the decision has been made for them.
And so head of football Brett Burton and senior assistant coach Scott Camporeale were sacked on Friday, following senior coach Don Pyke out the door after a six-week post mortem of another failed season.
There was nothing surprising about the findings of the review which in part were made public today. If you read social media, Burton and Camporeale were the two names ‘fans’ had been calling for months, and it won’t be lost on whoever runs the Crows’ social media accounts that reaction to the news triggered the most positive comments or GIFs they would have mused over all year.
As respected as Burton was as a player in his 177-game career with Adelaide and then as fitness coach and administrator with Brisbane and the Crows, you cannot have a football department laid bare and then so woefully exposed by the events of the past two years and the man in charge of the department keeps his job.
Perhaps the only surprise was that Burton was marched out the door and not redeployed like some at Adelaide after the 2012 Kurt Tippett salary cap saga, the last major scandal to rock the football club.
But Burton is seen by some, rightly or wrongly, as responsible for the disastrous mind training camp in the aftermath of the 2017 grand final.
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The club stood by the camp and Burton for a long time and pointed to an AFL integrity unit investigation which it supposedly asked for and which cleared it of any wrongdoing.
But that doesn’t mean the players weren’t angry, upset or as Cameron Ellis-Yolmen said on his way out the door last week, divided. And there could be more to come.
Camporeale meanwhile has been loved at Adelaide for a long time. Not least of all for the way in which he led the team in its darkest hour as it grieved the loss of Phil Walsh. But after nine years in a job within an industry which mirrors a revolving door, his time is up and the writing was on the wall when Pyke quit.
He and Pyke were joined at the hip and if finishing 12th and 11th in the past two years was enough of a “decline in on-field performance” to warrant an external review, then once Pyke walked then his senior assistant was surely seen as being just as culpable.
Camporeale’s exit also makes sense because Adelaide’s next senior coach, widely believed to be Matthew Nicks, should have a clean slate to work with when he comes in.
So with the senior coach now long gone, his senior assistant and the head of football following in his footsteps, the question is, is that all?
Fans should rightly ask how much responsibility for the failings of the last two years does the board from chairman Rob Chapman down, and management from chief executive Andrew Fagan down, carry?
The current board and, or, Fagan oversaw the appointments of Pyke, Camporeale and Burton and ticked off on the mind camp although would have never envisaged it going so catastrophically wrong.
But the current board and Fagan are also responsible for the commercial position the club now finds itself in where it can make the ruthless decisions to get its house in order no matter what the financial cost.
The club signed Optus as a secondary major sponsor this year, crowds kept going to Adelaide Oval even when all seemed lost and they are currently negotiating a move to a new multimillion-dollar headquarters in the North Adelaide parklands.
It seems they will be spared in the clean up, just as chief executive Steven Trigg even survived a seven-month suspension after Tippett-gate, with the club believing they are part of the solution and not the problem, to borrow a line from Pyke at his farewell press conference.
The mind-blowing thing is that this whole sorry saga can be traced back to one day in 2017 — Saturday, September 30, when Adelaide lost to Richmond by 48 points in the grand final.
This wasn’t a team at rock bottom like a Melbourne, Carlton or Gold Coast has been in the past decade, but it found its way there and quickly.
The team should have moved on from the 2017 grand final in a matter of weeks. You can’t help but imagine whether things would have turned out differently if players got a hug instead of the cold shoulder in its wake.
The chronic injury toll in 2018 only masked the problem because there were more heads in the sand. We’ll be right when we get our full team on the park, they said.
But they weren’t. Assistant coach Josh Francou — a respected football man — walked out and still hasn’t said why. More players followed, two reviews and a senior coach later and here we are.
After the news that Burton and Camporeale were gone today came the announcement that a new position would be created, ‘head of leadership and culture’, that will oversee the entire men’s and women’s playing lists and football departments.
Nick Maxwell has almost the identical role on paper at Collingwood where senior coach Nathan Buckley has endeared himself to his players and the football world for the compassion he showed after their grand final loss in 2018.
The other pin-up boy for relationships in football is Richmond’s two-time premiership coach Damien Hardwick who is so comfortable with his players he writes them letters and leaves presents in front of their lockers on game day.
It’s no surprise then that central to Adelaide’s search for its next coach has been a mandate that he must be a relationships coach.
If that person is Nicks, who spent 175 games and 10 years immersed in the “Bloods” culture at Sydney, then they should be in good hands.
All ties to the 2017 grand final have now been cut and while this mess could have perhaps been avoided by handling its aftermath very differently, at least the cord has been severed and the football club can move on. At long last.
reece.homfray@news.com.au