Michelangelo Rucci has no doubt player feedback was influential in sacking of Brenton Sanderson

CROWS co-captain Patrick Dangerfield has avoided profiling the new Adelaide Football Club senior coach saying: “The board chooses the coach”.

05/06/2014 CHP: 05/06/2014 CHP: AFL - Lights on at Adelaide for the first night match on Thursday night when Patrick Dangerfield will captain the Crows against Collingwood. PIC SARAH REED.

CROWS co-captain Patrick Dangerfield yesterday avoided profiling the new Adelaide Football Club senior coach saying: “The board chooses the coach.”

“The players then get on with learning his game plan,” he added.

And somewhere in the background, someone was thinking: “And later the players sack the coach.”

RUCCI: CROWS BOARD SHOWS ITS STRENGTH

Strangely, FIVEaa breakfast announcer and Crows ambassador David Penberthy did not try this question yesterday morning in his radio segment with Dangerfield.

Considering he was the one who put on the agenda that a select group of Crows players had handed an ultimatum — Brenton Sanderson must go or there would be a walkout by the players — it is surprising he did not ask the hard question yesterday.

“Patrick, did you sack the coach?”

Penberthy has tainted Dangerfield, Rory Sloane, Taylor Walker, Richard Douglas and — most, most unfairly — brothers Brad and Matt Crouch.

Already, Collingwood premiership captain Tony Shaw — a member of the Sacked Coaches Club — has portrayed the Crows players as boys who pack tissues in their kit bags in case the coach hurts their feelings.

This is unfair considering the players’ feedback was only a part — and not the total nor only — influence on the Adelaide board when it met during late August and early this month to question where the club was placed, particularly in an ever-competitive market that has the real threat of Port Adelaide next season beating the Crows to the 60,000 membership mark.

Although the Adelaide Football Club uses rather strange terms — such as “stakeholders” — the so-called “review” of football operations at West Lakes did take into account the views of some longstanding and much-respected men.

One had seen the same issues emerge at Port Adelaide — and everyone knows how that ended and why the warning of history repeating at Adelaide would send the chill down the back of any Crows director.

There is no doubt that the so-called “exit interviews” from Rory Sloane, Walker, Dangerfield and van Berlo — pretty much the core of the Adelaide team today — were critical in leading the Crows board to its decision.

But did they load a gun? Did they issue an ultimatum? Or did they just relay how the last six weeks of the season had presented issues that strained and then broke the critical player-coach bond, particularly along the lines of trust and faith?

So far, Dangerfield (twice in paid media appearances) and injured captain Nathan van Berlo (once in a club-filmed video) are the only Crows players who have publicly spoken on the Sanderson sacking.

They have stuck to the script, particularly with the image of AFL football being a “performance-based” industry.

Surely, the players silence on the coach for the second half of the season and the lack of emotive speak from the players since the sacking is, as they say, deafening. For Walker to be silent on Twitter says it all.

Clearly, we all will have to wait for an autobiography — as was the case with Andrew McLeod book “Black Crow” and its revelations on Gary Ayres — before the full story will be told.