Five key questions Gold Coast Suns facing ahead of AFL season return
“We aren’t making a judgement around people’s ability or character.” The players are back, but what about other staff? How do the Suns navigate through list cuts? Here are the answers to the five key questions the club is facing.
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THE AFL is about to resume and Gold Coast are in the midst of finalising their preparations for their first game back on June 13 against West Coast.
We sit down with Suns football manager Jon Haines to ask the five key questions they team is facing ahead of the season’s resumption.
Do you believe having three of your first four games back at Metricon Stadium will provide you an advantage when it comes to things like a reduction in injury risk, recovery and performance?
“We love playing at home,” Haines said.
“We would much rather play in front of our fans but the second best option is playing at Metricon.
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“I don’t think it will have a significant impact on injury rates. Most injuries come as a function of contact or soft tissue through load. We don’t think the travel impacts on injury rate at all.”
With 25 staff allowed at the club, how did you decide who to bring in and who remains stood down?
“Like most clubs we had to decide on that and it was by function more than anything,” Haines said.
“The academy program isn’t running so it doesn’t make sense for the academy guys to come in yet.
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“AFLW is at the end of its season so that doesn’t make sense either. The NEAFL competition won’t affect us so the guys in that program don’t necessarily need to come in.
“We aren’t making a judgement around people’s ability or character, it’s purely by function. “You would see normal faces down at training, the AFL line coaches, high performance staff, medical staff, footy operations and personal excellence. It’s a normal structure in that sense but just a little less in each of those areas.
“The physios and medical and high performance we have tried to maintain as best we can given the uncertainty around the season in terms of potentially shorter breaks, hubs, all those question marks still sit there from an industry perspective so the health of your group is really important.
“We have tried to maintain resources and expertise as much as we can in that department.”
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With speculation list sizes could be cut to around 35 players from 2021 onwards, how will you navigate through the challenge considering you have 51 players on the list?
“In the short term, whatever decision is made by the AFL, it will be a transitional and progressive process to get to that point,” Haines said.
“Whatever the number ends up being, we don’t feel it will be a strict cut for next year, it will be a progressive process to get to that number.
“That would be our suggestion as well as our sense of what might happen.
“We have just over 40 players contracted beyond this year. They are contracted for a reason and contracts mean something.
“There is going to have to be a process to get to whatever list number the AFL determines as the best number for the game.
“Just because a player is out of contract this year it doesn’t mean that player won’t be at the club next year too. There is a range of considerations in place from a contracting process.
“We have to wait and see where that lands.
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“We have done some contingency planning on where that lands once we have clarity on the direction.
“Then we can start to move towards that in a really measured way.”
Have you had any feedback from players concerned about their futures?
“I don’t think they are any different to the staff in some ways,” Haines said.
“They are all human beings and there is a level of uncertainty in the industry at the moment in terms of what it looks like.
“While players haven’t directly had that conversation with us, there is no doubt there would be a sense of anxiety and complexity that it might hold. Once we get that certainty that will help us move forward with a level of comfort.”
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You have a relatively healthy list on the back of the break from football, who is set to come out of rehab and challenge for a spot in the best 22?
“We have had 48 in full training on the track.
“Mitch Riordan is out for the year with an ACL injury and Luke Towey is back from Ireland. “We are expecting if the good health continues then we will have a full compliment to choose from come Round 2 which is great.
“There is some risk over the next couple of weeks in terms of the escalation of the program and reintegrating contact and all those things but all those guys who were in rehab at the start of the year like Wil Powell, Charlie Ballard, Anthony Miles, Rory Thompson, Izak Rankine, and Sam Flanders are all going really well.
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