Can an end-of-year shake-up by CEO Mark Evans and chairman Tony Cochrane revive Gold Coast?
FROM off-field dramas to poor on-field form and good players departing the club, Gold Coast is far from where the AFL needs it to be. Can an end-of-year shake-up revive the club?
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JARROD Harbrow isn’t playing at the MCG on Saturday.
The in-form Gold Coast Suns defender was picked up for drink driving by Queensland Police at 8.50am on Monday, recording a blood-alcohol reading of 0.108.
“That’s the sort of stuff that just kills footy clubs,” Brisbane Lions great Jonathan Brown declared this week.
Harbrow is an original Sun and a former member of the AFL expansion club’s leadership group.
His early-morning shocker came just hours after helping Gold Coast get its season back on track with a gutsy win over West Coast.
Teammate Jack Martin was also the victim of an assault in Broadbeach in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It’s been the story of the $100 million Suns — one step forward and two steps back — across their first seven seasons.
Brown says leadership — on and off the field — will be the critical focus when chief executive Mark Evans gets to work on an anticipated end-of-season shake-up.
Almost every senior football department official, including coach Rodney Eade, footy manager Marcus Ashcroft, list boss Scott Clayton and four assistant coaches are out of contract.
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Gary Ablett has already signalled his intention to leave, captain Steven May is yet to commit and co-skipper Tom Lynch becomes eligible for free agency at the end of next year.
“Part of the problem they talk about is culture,” Brown says of the Suns.
“But what is culture? It’s a funny word. Culture is just a thing created by leadership and to me it seems like they already have a pretty good crop of young leaders in Tommy Lynch and Steven May.
“They look like strong characters — vocal and demonstrative.
“You would hope that sort of strength was shown to Jarrod Harbrow this week, even though he’s a peer.”
GRAEME Downie’s biggest concern these days is playing to his handicap on the fairways of the Grand Golf Club at the foot of the Gold Coast hinterland.
But few know more about the challenges facing Australian rules football in southeast Queensland.
Downie was chairman of the Brisbane Lions during their historic 2001-03 premiership three-peat.
He was later recruited to help lead the GC17 bid team and establish the Suns.
“You have to be successful and they haven’t been successful,” Downie says of he club he helped create.
“Their supporters are seeing too many disappointing performances.
“It’s a very difficult market ... but from an AFL perspective you don’t just want to roll over and let rugby league take the area because there is a hell of a lot of interest in AFL footy.”
Reflecting on the Lions glory years, Downie identifies coach Leigh Matthews and skipper Michael Voss as the cornerstones of rock-solid club culture.
“The stars aligned for us at Brisbane,” he said.
“We got a hold of one of the biggest names in footy, while he was still in his prime as a coach, in Leigh Matthews.
“Leigh obviously had a tremendous affect on our marketing and the players themselves. He just corralled them and made them into a very good team, but he had the talent to work with, of course.
“I’m not saying Rocket (Eade) isn’t doing a great job, not for a minute, I’m not close enough to know, but I think it’s going to be really hard in this market at the moment with what he’s got to work with to look at premierships in the near future.
“At the end of the day it comes down to personnel.
“You’ve got to have the right coach, the right players and the right facilities.
“Mark (Evans) will need to do a full review of all that and make sure he’s got the right people in the right places.
“That’s the first step I would have thought.”
Suns foundation chairman John Witheriff scoffs at suggestions the club, which still boast less than 12,000 members, is in trouble.
“They’ve got some good people there and they’ll get the right answers on field,” Witheriff said.
“Certainly off-field it is in incredible shape.
“There is no other club in the league with the facilities or the infrastructure or the support of the three tiers of government necessary to make a successful club.
“Clubs take a long time to get to where they need to in a progressive sort of environment and the Gold Coast Suns will be a great club. They are a great club.”
On the theory that sporting clubs fail to thrive in the glitzy surf coast market, Witheriff said: “It’s a complete furphy. I’ve lived on the Gold Coast all my life — it’s the fastest growing region in Australia.
“That is the commentary of people who have no understanding of the dynamic environment that exists on the Gold Coast.
“It’s one of those myths that you can generally follow with a nice bikini shot and that sells newspapers.
“But this is a city that has nearly 700,000 permanent residents — and growing — and has a tourist strip of about 3km. The rest of it is a city of deep substance with a strong business community and a great sense of community spirit.
“The Gold Coast Suns will go very well.”
Ex-AFL boss Andrew Demetriou raised eyebrows in a rare public appearance in Adelaide last month when he said the Suns would always be a “small football club” operating in a provincial centre similar to Geelong.
But Greater Western Sydney, Demetriou said, which started 12 months after the Suns, could “potentially” become one of Australia’s most powerful clubs.
“In 20 years the Giants could be one of the biggest clubs in the land,” Demetriou said.
The comparisons to GWS are a sore point for many Gold Coast figures.
“The fundamental difference was the nature of the concessions that were provided — and the amount of money — at the start-up stage,” one former Suns official said this week.
“They were limited to obtain consensus from the other clubs but when the decision was made to move into the western Sydney area there was a thought that it was going to be more challenging than the Gold Coast, and so the concessions were materially increased and done over a two-year period.
“There was substantially more money put into football than there was on the Gold Coast.
“And so what’s happened is they have ended up with a much deeper range of talent to deal with and to trade.
“There just isn’t the depth at the Suns.
“You can go back and ask yourself the question: ‘Well, why isn’t there the depth?’ And the answer is the difference in concessions between the two clubs’.”
Downie says the Suns’ hand was not disputed at the time.
“The Giants were looked after better than the Gold Coast — I think everyone has acknowledged that ... but at the time I thought the Gold Coast got a fairly good deal,” he says.
“We were reasonably comfortable with it all, but I think if we had our time over again we might have done a few things differently.
“They had the worst facilities in the competition by a long way.”
Gold Coast has worked hard on its “culture” since the Karmichael Hunt drugs debacle in 2015.
Hunt, the AFL’s star signing from the rival NRL, was arrested and charged with cocaine possession, implicating up to a dozen AFL and NRL teammates in a secret interview with the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission.
The Suns briefly employed controversial sports scientist Stephen Dank, who later admitted injecting star signing Nathan Bock with the prohibited peptide CJC-1295.
Photographs of former Suns midfielder Harley Bennell splashed across national newspapers two years ago showed him racking up five lines of white powder on a hotel desk while holding a rolled-up banknote.
A litany of professional sporting clubs across soccer, basketball and rugby union have failed in the Gold Coast market over the last two decades.
“It’s an interesting one,’’ Eade said of the trend in February. “It can’t just be the lack of passion and support. I don’t think there is distraction in the lifestyle with the surf and sand.
“Perth has good sunshine and beaches and so does Sydney. Maybe it’s that clubs haven’t been set up the right way.
“At the weekend we had a family day and I wondered how many would turn up and we had about 2000 people and 40 per cent of them were under 10.
“That was a big indicator that these kids want to get involved. So whichever sport can get a foothold as being successful, the Gold Coast people will jump on.”
Outspoken Suns chairman and former V8 Supercars boss Tony Cochrane will help Evans drive the expected changes.
“Tony is a salesman and a very innovative sort of guy,” Downie says.
“I think he’s a good fit for the Coast. The Coast always sees itself as a get up and go type region and encourages his type of enthusiasm.”
Cochrane raised eyebrows last year by declaring the AFL had made a major mistake appointing Guy McKenna as the club’s inaugural coach.
“I think they made some chronic errors and with great respect to our inaugural coach, there is no way we should have had a junior coach,” Cochrane said.
“One of the outstanding things they did in Sydney was putting Kevin Sheedy up there (at GWS) and Mark Williams for those first couple of years.
“That really would have helped enormously with what was a group of young boys. Let’s face it 17 and 18 year olds need enormous direction and purpose in life.
“And it’s just a shame the AFL didn’t make a similar decision up here and perhaps given us Leigh Matthews for those first couple of years.”
Brown agrees the club paid a price for a lack of leadership in its formative seasons.
Ablett was a first-time captain, McKenna a rookie coach, Travis Auld a newbie chief executive and Marcus Ashcroft untried as football boss.
“Ablett has been a great player but I can’t imagine him doing that (collaring Harbow this week),” Brown says.
“They didn’t have enough strong personalities and leaders in their first few years.
“I look at those GWS guys and they have some hard-arsed characters, even though they are younger fellas.
“One of the other challenges for the Suns is obviously the location — it's a very relaxed culture up there.”
So what will Evans do?
“There has to be some change through the administration and through the coaching department,” Brown says.
“We’ve seen how well that has worked at Richmond this year, but I’m not as negative on Rocket as some people are.
“I don’t think you can stamp his papers now but if it dosen’t work out and Mark Evans wants to make changes all the way through, the person coming in will obviously need to be a fantastic coach but they’ll also need to be a big name and statesman-type figure.
“It’s just so hard to get the cut through up there.
“Leigh Matthews transcended the codes and was happy to play to play the role of an AFL ambassador.
“If it does happen, there’s a couple — there’s Paul Roos, Al Clarkson and probably Luke Beveridge is at that level now.”
Brown says the club should also target players with premiership experience from Hawthorn and Sydney.
“I’d love to see them grab two or three veteran premiership players — reliable characters that you know can still justify getting a game.
“And you have to draft kids that have some swagger about them.
“To be able to survive in that environment outside the comforts of AFL central, the kids need to have a bit of in-built confidence.”
SUN SETS
Gold Coast ladder positions since 2011 debut season
2011 17th
2012 17th
2013 14th
2014 12th
2015 16th
2016 15th
2017 15th*
Originally published as Can an end-of-year shake-up by CEO Mark Evans and chairman Tony Cochrane revive Gold Coast?
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