Two former greats of the Adelaide Football Club sit down and discuss where it’s all gone wrong for the Crows this season
Inaugural Crows coach Graham Cornes and dual premiership-winning captain Mark Bickley discuss with sports reporter Liz Walsh what they think has gone wrong at Adelaide.
- Graham Cornes: Crows critics need a history lesson
- How to get the most out of your Advertiser digital subscription
LIZ WALSH: It’s been a tough week at West Lakes. do you think an external review will solve the club’s problems?
GRAHAM CORNES: It won’t be the answer, but it will be a start to exposing the problems and the challenges and you can’t review objectively and honestly from within and need fresh eyes from outside.
MARK BICKLEY: They did a review last year and clearly the results on field haven’t shown, so one of the things the supporters have demanded is transparency and by opening yourself up to external sources that is providing a level of transparency. So it was demanded from the supporters and they’ve listened and I think it was a good thing.
Stream every match of the 2019 Toyota AFL Finals Series before the Grand Final live and on-demand on KAYO SPORTS. Get your 14-day free trial and start streaming instantly >
LW: Is there a problem at the Adelaide Football Club?
GC: Of course. There’s a problem with the footy program, there’s a problem with the playing list. There’s a problem with the way they play, anyone who knows footy can see that.
MB: I 100 per cent agree. The other problem I see is they have an issue with getting the right people in the right jobs in the footy department and being able to attract the right people. Josh Francou came and left, David Teague, James Podsiadly was poached by the AFL. David Noble was hand-picked to go to Brisbane.
They’ve had very good people at the club, but when those people have gone, have they been able to replace them with similar quality? For a club the size of Adelaide, is the expectation of the supporters being met with what they’ve been able to replace them with?
LW: Premiership coach Malcolm Blight said this week, it’s the weakest decade he’s seen at the Crows, do you agree?
MB: I don’t agree at all. The Crows have been around three decades, and they’ve made three grand finals … I think Adelaide has been really consistent along the way.
We’re not a club like the Melbourne Footy Club who have had 10 years of ineptitude or Carlton, or even Brisbane. If you look at Brisbane’s last eight years, 15th is the highest on the ladder they’ve been. We are not talking about this with Adelaide.
Clubs go through ups and downs and right before Malcolm arrived (in 1996), it was one of the darkest periods for Adelaide. Unfortunately in 1994, Graham was relieved of his (coaching) duties and then it was Robert Shaw who was brought in and was an abject failure in terms of results. And when Malcolm arrived it was a bit of a cleaning of the decks to start afresh.
If that is where Adelaide is at right now, if you look back to 1996, maybe that’s an exciting thing.
With great change, comes great opportunity and I think that there’s still so much for Adelaide to look forward to in terms of they’re still a strong club, they’ve recognised they’ve got an issue, they’re trying to fix it and in five weeks time we’ll get a clearer picture of where the issues lie and whose responsibility it is to move forward from here.
LW: Do supporters have the right to criticise their club?
GC: There have always been critical voices, but never before have so many people had access to a forum to air their criticism and strangely enough, so many ill-informed comments are taken as gospel. For example, the claim that the board is out of touch with membership and that fans’ collective voices aren’t heard. That simply is wrong. You can email the club and they’ll email you back. You can go on social media, on the club’s Facebook site and your comments will be answered.
MB: The trouble is though, Graham, that perception becomes reality. Every club has angry agitators or people who are never happy, but I feel like this year they have either persuaded or influenced the people sitting in that middle ground who don’t say much. The majority is now starting to nod in agreement with what others are saying.
And whether that’s the fault of the club that they haven’t been on the front foot enough to be able to influence that majority to the reality, as opposed to the perception that they feel like they’re not being listened to?
GC: I always say to those people who are critical of the club that it doesn’t listen to them: ‘Give me examples’.
MB: I’ll give you one, and I think everyone throws their head back in angst, but the mystic and the mystery around the (2018 Gold Coast pre-season) camp.
GC: Nobody has told us what went wrong on that camp.
MB: There in lies the problem.
GC: But the club has come out and answered every question about it.
MB: It still seems to me, there is this mystique about it.
It’s a pivotal moment. From 2017 and after the grand final loss, then through that pre-season, it’s been a slippery slope since then and I don’t think many of the supporters really understand how or why it’s gone wrong.
I’m not blaming the camp, but when it comes to the perception of transparency, that’s an example where we are 18 months down the track and you could stop any member on the street and ask them: “What do you think happened on the camp?”, they have no idea and they would look at that as one of the issues that has maybe contributed to their club falling off the cliff.
LW: Surely it’s OK for fans to be upset that their club made the grand final in 2017 and the two seasons since have been unsuccessful?
MB: I feel like what the team had been through — the trauma they’d been through — that they felt like the 2017 grand final was their destiny, and when it didn’t happen, they felt like all the hard yards they’d done had amounted to nothing. My experience talking to players is it felt really hard getting motivated to come back to training.
GC: I’ll accept that.
MB: And when they got back to training and they weren’t quite in the right frame of mind, (coaches) were then; “Let’s smash you boys and see if we can get you into the right shape” and unfortunately that didn’t work.
GC: I’ll accept that. The criticisms that are valid are of the football program. We can’t refute too many. We can perhaps explain some of the reasons the football program has failed, but we can’t hide from the criticisms of the football program and of the players’ performance and the player list management.
You can’t hide from that.
MB: But to get back to the members feeling they aren’t being heard … I feel like one of the reasons is that when (chairman) Rob Chapman is on the front of the paper saying: “I rate our footy program as the best in the AFL” … if the club hasn’t performed some of the supporters and members, can say: “We’ve voiced our concerns, we’ve told you we’re not happy, you’ve disregarded us telling us that we’re wrong, and you’re right”.
I think it’s the language. Sometimes the language comes across as: “We know better than you know”. And sometimes they very may well. But please don’t disregard the people who are your lifeblood, which is your members. That’s where words like arrogance and phrases like “we’re not valued” come from.
LW: Was the club open enough this season about why it was dropping players back to the SANFL?
GC: Yes, because that’s between player and coach.
MB: It’s more about the philosophy. When Eddie Betts was dropped for the Carlton game, they brought in a young player in Tyson Stengle and he did OK, but then the next week, they bring Eddie back and Tyson goes. It just didn’t seem to be a co-ordinated strategy. I think people got confused with that.
GC: There was an admission that was a mistake.
MB: I feel blokes like Eddie Betts, Sam Jacobs, David Mackay, all those guys, you will play them if they are there and performing.
But if Eddie were to play ahead of Chayce Jones, Ned McHenry, Jordan Gallucci, Lachlan Murphy, you’re doing yourself a disservice, because you are not really having an eye on the future.
Eddie is the most selfless player and the best personality and what he brings off the field, the intangibles, are enormous. But unfortunately where Adelaide are right now, they have to get games into young players because over the last two years they haven’t.
LW: Graham, you are the only coach so far to survive consecutive non-finals appearances in 1991/92:
GC: Expectations escalated after the prelim final (in 1993) and they definitely escalated after two premierships. The expectation is success.
MB: The narrative from the club from here is going to be really important. It has to be: “We need go through regeneration and we have to be really smart with the way we do it and we have to be ruthless”.
So, there’s going to be a lot of discussion about players like Betts and Jacobs and that’s going to be very emotive. But right now the most important thing for Adelaide is to get the on-field stuff right and that’s never easy.
Footy is littered with stories of players who thought they could play longer, even great clubs like Hawthorn: to think Sam Mitchell, Luke Hodge and Jordan Lewis didn’t finish their careers there.
Regeneration is never easy, but if you are a supporter, you want your club to move forward and unfortunately someone has to make hard calls.