The “go-home” factor in the AFL trade period has become a theme for everyone in the family

EMOTIONAL pressure on AFL clubs in the trade period has risen with family members getting their say

WAITING GAME. Contracted Melbourne key position player Jack Watts with his manager Paul Conners, who has added a new dimension to the AFL trade period by highlighting the emotional torment with players’ families during the transfer window. Picture: Nicole Garmston

LONG-SERVING SA football administrator - Hall of Famer - John Condon noted during the heady start-up days of the Crows that all footballers should be orphans.

Condon’s thought was based on how parents often become clouded by their care for the individual - their son - while coaches must focus on the team.

This is the AFL trade period of “family” - and families becoming involved in the incredibly expanding circus that is the elite-football transfer window.

There has been Jake Lever’s father with his outbursts in the fall-out of the Crows defender making his move to Melbourne - and his absence from the Adelaide club champion count. And on Monday leading player agent Paul Connors in a business breakfast in Melbourne had the fathers of two of his clients - Jake Stringer (Western Bulldogs) and Jack Watts (Melbourne) - on centre stage feeding the furnace of trade talk.

As the contracted Watts patiently waits for his trade - increasingly likely at Port Adelaide rather Geelong - his father Andrew offered the impression his son had been treated as a “reprobate” by the Demons.

“What we don’t understand is we feel Jack’s been put out there as a bit of a reprobate, a misfit in not turning up fit, not putting in a good effort, being a bad influence on younger kids,” Watts’ father said.

At this point, Condon’s “all footballers should be orphans” gained total context.

Stringer’s father John declared his son had been subjected to a “public stoning” while being put on the trade table by the Bulldogs.

“The human face of the whole football industry sometimes gets forgotten a little bit, particularly in Jake’s case,” he said at Connors’ breakfast with Collins Street pinstripe-suit executives. “It’s very easy for people to cast aspersions and say this has happened, or that’s happened.

“At the end of the day, you’re dealing with a human being.”

There is nothing like the emotional card. It has become the billboard of this trade period.

Contracted Crows speedster Charlie Cameron wants a “compassionate” release from his contract to be reunited with his family and mates in Brisbane. Fremantle midfielder Lachie Weller has joined the same train to get to his family base at the Gold Coast.

At this point, Cameron and Weller have not needed their fathers on a platform with a live radio broadcast to make their case. Cameron did it himself with Adelaide coach Don Pyke on Friday - but it is questionable if Pyke has grasped Cameron’s point of view, particularly of how there is life beyond an AFL club “bubble”.

Premiership coach Michael Malthouse senses the “go-home” factor has become a convenient theme in the trade period.

“If there is a real reason,” he says, “then the humanity side of you has got to say, ‘Right, let’s let this kid go home’.

“(But if) it’s just the fact that ‘All my friends are there and that’s where I grew up’, then that’s just bad luck. You have got to gut it out.”

Condon is right. It would be easier if every AFL player was an orphan. But reality is very different.

[e-mail]

Originally published as The “go-home” factor in the AFL trade period has become a theme for everyone in the family