Sacked: Guy McKenna on why he didn’t want Karmichael Hunt at Gold Coast Suns

Former Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna says he tried to convince AFL and club powerbrokers to send rugby convert Karmichael Hunt to a more established club. But his arrival wasn’t all bad. LISTEN

Glenn McFarlane and Jon Ralph

2 min read

July 22, 2019 - 10:23AM

Former Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna has revealed he did not want Karmichael Hunt at the Suns.

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Inaugural Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna has revealed he didn’t want Karmichael Hunt at the Suns, saying the cross code convert would have been far better suited at an established club, such as Brisbane.

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In the latest edition of the Sacked podcast, a candid McKenna said he initially argued against Hunt’s recruitment in mid-2009, believing the fledgling club was ill-equipped to fast-track the development of a sportsman who hadn’t played Australian rules football since he was a teenager.

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But others at the club and the AFL — who were bankrolling Gold Coast and contributing to Hunt’s three-year, almost $3 million deal — were desperate to sign him, believing the Brisbane Broncos star could make the successful switch.

Guy McKenna and Karmichael Hunt have stars in their eyes at the former NRL star’s conversion to Aussie rules.

“My point was ‘send him up the road (to Brisbane)’,” McKenna explained.

“In all due respects, Brisbane are a football club, and ‘Vossy’ (Michael Voss) had been there (as coach) for maybe three years, at least.

“Not that I wanted to throw him up to Vossy and say ‘you can have this fellow, or this headache, or whatever it was going to be’.

“But I was thinking ‘send him to an experienced coach, an experienced club. Why us? We are just starting off and we needed everything going for us’.”

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At times Ken Hinkley, one of the club’s assistant coaches and now Port Adelaide coach, had to be pulled out of training sessions to work almost exclusively with Hunt.

McKenna said of the clandestine attempts to lure Hunt: “Bucks (Nathan Buckley) had seen him kick. I watched him kick.”

“Yep, he could kick, but that’s (only) one part of AFL football.”

McKenna says Hunt did a lot of the bullocking work for the Suns in the early days. Picture: Darren England

Hunt would go on to play 44 games for the Suns across four seasons, with his most memorable moment coming when he kicked the winning goal in a massive upset of Richmond in 2012.

But while he was a hugely marketable face in a tough Queensland market, Hunt struggled to make an impact.

When he quit the Suns at the end of the 2014 season, AFL legend Leigh Matthews called the Hunt exercise “an ill-advised, ill-fated experiment.”

Hunt later cited the difficulties in switching codes as one of the reasons behind the drugs and alcohol issues which overshadowed the latter part of his career.

He was arrested and charged with drug offences in the months after leaving the Suns, but McKenna insisted he had not seen any evidence of this behaviour.

Former Gold Coast assistant, now Port Adelaide mentor Ken Hinkley spent plenty of time trying to turn Hunt into an AFL footballer.

“There were no real challenges on or off the field with ‘K’,” McKenna said.

He denied the Hunt experiment became a circus for the club, saying that while he struggled on the field, he was at least a mature body in a team of young kids.

“As far as a circus goes with Karmichael, there was no special treatment (for him),” he said.

“He would do his training with us, then if there were any extra skill sessions, that’s where Kenny (Hinkley) would come in and take him.

“He just had one coach to upskill him as best as we possibly could.

“(On the field) he would throw himself in like a human cannon ball, that actually helped, because it saved one of our kids from doing it.

“Obviously his physical numbers weren’t going to help us a great deal.

“We had to heavily rotate him which again we could because that’s where the game was going.”