Andrew Dillon meets with coaches as frustrations towards league HQ grow

The fish pie is a local’s favourite at the Builders Arms in Fitzroy, but it was the AFL’s finance pie that was the hot topic when Andrew Dillon met with only a few senior coaches on Monday.

The fish pie is a local’s favourite at the Builders Arms in Fitzroy, but it was the AFL’s finance pie that was being divided up over dinner hosted by league CEO Andrew Dillon and four experienced coaches on Monday.

The AFL crew of Dillon, football department boss Laura Kane and her offsider Josh Mahoney sat on one side of the table at the Fitzroy pub for most of the night, chatting amicably with coaches Brad Scott, Simon Goodwin, Alastair Clarkson and Chris Scott.

Where Gillon McLachlan used to host all 18 coaches at once at his house, Dillon prefers smaller meetings for more intimate discussion.

The grouping wasn’t a deliberate shunning of other coaches.

It’s expected there will be three such meals with Victorian coaches, with Sam Mitchell, Adem Yze and Luke Beveridge already ticked off earlier this month on the other side of the city in South Melbourne, leaving Ross Lyon, Craig McRae and Michael Voss waiting on an invitation.

The crew sat in the pub’s upstairs private dining room, billed online as “ideal for smaller gatherings” and “featuring a collection of art, eclectic objects and a vintage record player”.

Brad Scott revealed on Tuesday that lamb shoulder “was solid”.

Lamb shoulder is not present on the pub’s online menu.

Scott, who used to work at league HQ in the football department, raved about the meeting as “the best AFL meeting I can recall”.

The soft cap, and the pressure that puts on salaries for assistant coaches and others in the football department.

So was recruiting across the league, tying into how academies are working and where talent is coming from.

The talent question has been prevalent through Sir Doug Nicholls Round so far, with the celebration of the Indigenous impact on football coming as the number of Indigenous AFL players steadily declines.

“I was certainly very clear in my own personal opinions that football departments have been placed pretty low on the priority list in terms of AFL expenditure,” Brad Scott said.

“That feeds into things like development players and recruiting pathways and all of those sort of things.

“We didn’t ask for anything, we were just talking about priorities. The AFL generates a certain amount of revenue and chooses to distribute that revenue into different parts of the game.”

In other words, Scott and coaches pondered how can the league “divide up the pie”.

Dillon and the AFL has experienced a rocky month amid umpiring controversies and questions about how the league handled a rolling saga around Port Adelaide player Willie Rioli.

But Scott backed in Dillon.

“He is an exceptional administrator. I have seen first hand how talented he is,” Scott said.