Brad Crouch puts free agency prospects in jeopardy with off-season indiscretion
Linked with Geelong and Essendon as a free agent, Brad Crouch has put a bumper payday at risk after allegedly being caught with cocaine. Jon Ralph looks at what it means for his value and whether clubs will still be interested.
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Brad Crouch might well have committed the AFL’s version of lighting a barrel of $100 notes on fire during his ill-fated night out with Tyson Stengle and alleged possession of cocaine.
In the grand scheme of AFL misadventures players behaving badly in the off-season, this alleged offence is normally the kind to draw weeks of controversy and a trail of AFL drug-testers for the 2021 season.
In 2015, Jake Carlisle accepted a drug strike for snorting white powder in the off-season, only days into his time at St Kilda.
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Carlisle’s punishment was accepting that strike as well as education and target-testing for the seasons to come.
The Herald Sun understands under the current illicit drugs code Crouch appears certain to be handed a strike by the AFL given the code operates 12 months a year.
Off-season testing is only hair-testing used for research and target-testing of players, but if a player is caught with drugs or makes admissions about their use it is the AFL’s decision about whether to hand out a strike.
But Crouch isn’t just any old player, he is one that is trying to orchestrate a free agency contract that will see a suitor throw vast sums of money at him for up to the next five seasons.
AFL clubs will forgive all manner of sins from players if they believe they will win them a premiership.
Richmond even signed Ben Cousins after a meeting with Terry Wallace when the Tigers head coach suspected the Eagles star was using drugs in the meeting where he was supposed to be winning over his prospective club.
In Wallace’s case, he believed signing Cousins might help give him the AFL regime that would get him off drugs, even if only for the time he was at Punt Road.
But Crouch’s problem is the jury is still out on his footballing talents at a time when clubs such as Geelong and Port Adelaide will have to not only commit to him, but convince their supporters he is worth that cash too.
The football jungle drums are beating loud that Crouch is heading to Geelong, but they would need to offer as much as $700,000 a season for him to secure safe passage through free agency.
Any less and Adelaide will likely match that free agency offer given second-round compensation and then force a trade where they would start asking for Adelaide-based players like Brandan Parfitt in exchange.
But how can Geelong convince their fans that he is worth that cash when he didn’t finish top-10 in the club’s best and fairest and has just proven himself to be far from a clean-skin?
The culture Brian Cook has built at Geelong is a values-based one where the club attracts and develops great people.
Geelong was able to argue that securing Jack Steven despite the clear baggage he was carrying — over and above his mental health issues — was about bringing him closer to family on the surf coast.
Steven’s recruitment hasn’t worked out yet but they got him for very little – pick 58 – and he might still star in a final and justify their decision.
If Crouch was to find his way to Geelong, it would take a significant public mea culpa and presumably need the approval of club leaders such as Joel Selwood, Patrick Dangerfield and Tom Hawkins.
Dangerfield has been working hard to get Crouch to Geelong given his ties to his old club.
But while the AFLPA president knows Crouch isn’t the only player in football to allegedly take illicit drugs in the off-season, it still resembles a backhander from Crouch to a senior Cats player trying so hard to get him to his club of choice.
The start of free agency remains 32 days away, a month in which Crouch has much work to do to redeem his reputation and apologise for his sins.
A good start would be to bare his soul in a legitimate public apology – not the kind where he apologises if he might have offended anyone.
For prospective clubs until now his worst offence was that in a competition that puts a premium on precise skills he could spray it like few others of the very elite ball winners.
Now an off-season where he had hoped to set himself up for life financially if he could traverse the vagaries of the AFL’s free agency system couldn’t have got off to a worse possible start.
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