Western Bulldogs president Peter Gordon on Good Friday footy, AFLX overlapping AFLW and more
Peter Gordon rates current AFL chief Gillon McLachlan ahead of his predecessors. But the Western Bulldogs president isn’t rapt with a couple of decisions in which he believes his club has been shut out. Plus the Dogs boss on AFLX, Luke Beveridge and the 2016 hangover.
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It’s 30 years since Peter Gordon took charge for the first time at Whitten Oval. As his second coming nears the end, the Dogs boss rips the Band-Aid off some sores and slaps a few backs. A new contract also beckons for coach Luke Beveridge, MICHAEL WARNER reports.
BAD FRIDAY
Fresh off their historic 2016 premiership, the Western Bulldogs played North Melbourne in footy’s inaugural Good Friday clash at Marvel Stadium. Last year they were dumped from the coveted fixture for St Kilda and this year Essendon got the nod.
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So why did the Dogs get stripped of Good Friday football?
“I’m the wrong person to ask. I think that decision defies logic,” Gordon told the Herald Sun.
How did you guys find out?
“The draw came out,” he said.
“If you count local derbies as marquee games, there are really only three clubs that don’t have any — North Melbourne, St Kilda and the Bulldogs.
“Good Friday was a virgin opportunity to create a blockbuster marquee opportunity and it has been completely squandered for no rational reason at all.
“There was a much bigger crowd for the Bulldogs-North Melbourne game in 2017 than the one in 2018 and now it has been changed again.
“I had some serious words to say to (AFL chief executive) Gillon McLachlan and (fixture boss) Travis Auld when we were first excluded from it, but I don’t think any arguments I can make to the AFL, no matter how rational, are going to be influential in what they choose to do with Good Friday.
“I like to spend my time these days fighting for what I can actually make a difference to, and I’m not going to waste anymore time on Good Friday for that reason.”
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XTREME FOLLY
Gordon makes no secret of his disdain for the staging of a Mickey Mouse AFLX men’s tournament in the heart of the AFLW season.
“I do not understand why AFLX is continued to be permitted to compete with — and even overshadow — the fantastic, fledgling women’s competition that we’ve got,” Gordon said.
“The only justification for it that I’ve heard is that the players really like it …
“Well, we’re talking about 10 per cent of the most elite players in the AFL, whose life in general ain’t that bad anyway.
“And I’m not sure that providing a really fulfilling experience for the top 10 per cent of players is a good enough reason to compete with AFLW and take up the time, focus and money of players, clubs and the AFL executive — and occupy the space that it does.”
BACK IN BLACK
Once the financial scraggers of the competition, Gordon revealed the Bulldogs were on track to become debt free for the first time in the club’s history “probably by the end of the season”.
Debt had climbed beyond $12 million when he replaced David Smorgon at the end of 2012.
“With or without the sale of the pokies, we have budgeted to be totally debt-free by the end of the year — and I’m pretty proud of it,” Gordon said.
Talks are advancing on the sale of the club’s two poker machine venues at Footscray and Dromana, while the move to play one preseason and two premiership games (Rounds 8 and 23) in Ballarat draws about $1.5 million a season.
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But Gordon said the league’s revamped competitive balance system was the biggest game changer for struggling clubs.
“The AFL is the single biggest economic contributor to every club now,” he said.
“If you viewed it as shareholders, it would be the majority shareholder in every club, which has its complications, of course, in terms of influence and lines of accountability.
“But that mechanism of competitive balance is the single element that has made the competition exponentially better.
“It means that at the start of every season virtually every club and every supporter thinks their team is a reasonable chance.”
THE HANGOVER
“Winning the flag after 62 years — and as a club that had been written off in so many ways — had a really profound emotional effect on everyone involved, including me,” Gordon said.
“Everyone has done the best that they can with that … I spent most of my life thinking that that ambition was some sort of Quixotic dream that would never come to fruition.
“All of a sudden we were premiers and it was a life-changing event.
“You can either say to yourself, ‘Gee, I’ve been really knocked around by this, I better resign and let someone else have a go, or you can get on with it and do the best that you can’. And that’s what we all did.
“I don’t think we behaved catastrophically, by any means, we were in the finals race with a few rounds to go in 2017 and it wasn’t far off where we finished in 2016. We finished seventh and then we had an exceptional month.
“We are in this cutthroat competition where people are forever stealing each other’s IP and there were some unique things that we did that people copied: Bevo’s mantra of ‘one and a-half men’, the team defence thing that he did and the building of trust and love amongst the playing group.
“Everyone is doing that these days as though it was their own idea — but it was Bevo who introduced those things.”
BEVO REBOOTED
Gordon says premiership coach Luke Beveridge is entering his fifth year at the Kennel with a renewed enthusiasm.
“I don’t have the frequency of contact that I had with him in 2015 and 2016, because in 2015 I was pretty much an executive chairman …
“I was there every day and that probably was a year where we developed a really close friendship, and our wives have, too.
“They stayed with us over Christmas at our place down at Sorrento for a night … and I will say in my catch ups with him since he got back from his end of season education, he seems to have come back with a real enthusiasm and positivity that I am really pleased to see.
“I did catch up with one of our best young players for coffee last week and he told me that he was really, really excited about the vibe amongst the group — and felt that that younger group of players were ready to assume leadership of the place and take responsibility for it.”
Beveridge is out of contract at the end of next season, but an extension sometime this year is all but certain.
“I expect and hope that Bevo will be senior coach for a long time,” Gordon said.
“He has sufficient trust in me and I have sufficient trust in him that we’ll get around to talking about that at the right time.
“(Chief executive) Ameet Bains and (footy boss) Chris Grant are obviously a part of that, but one of the things that we’ve really got going for us is that there’s a really strong bond between the four of us, so I don’t think he is at all nervous about that, and neither are we.”
At a club function held at Gordon’s Hawthorn mansion attended by staff, players and their parents in late February, Beveridge and his wife Dana and Easton Wood’s dad Phil and his partner Maureen were the last to leave.
“I got my record player out and we were doing old Beatles LPs,” Gordon said.
INSIDE JOB
Anger lingers at the Bulldogs over the AFL’s handling of the 2015 Talia brothers investigation.
After a 63-day integrity unit probe, the league cleared Dogs defender Michael Talia and his brother, Adelaide backman Daniel Talia, of leaking inside information in the days leading up to the Dogs-Crows elimination final.
Secret documents later exposed the Dogs’ fury at the AFL’s investigation and its exoneration of the brothers.
“Obviously, the club felt very strongly about what happened there,” Gordon said.
“It was the worst time possible for those documents to come out for us — three weeks after we’d won the flag — but there was nothing that the Herald Sun found and published that I still don’t believe to be true.”
Does he expect more information on the scandal to come to light?
“It’s often the way, isn’t it?” he said.
THE CHOSEN FEW
The creation of the AFL’s hand-picked Competition Committee does not sit well with the Bulldogs president.
“There is certainly no basis for it in the rules,” Gordon said.
“I was sitting around the AFL table in 1993 when the modern iteration of the AFL commission was set up — and there’s no provision for an industry governance committee in the Articles of Association. It’s an executive fiat by the CEO and the football manager.”
The committee includes club presidents Colin Carter (Geelong), Eddie McGuire (Collingwood) and Peggy O’Neal (Richmond), chief executives Andrew Fagan (Adelaide) and Justin Reeves (Hawthorn), coaches Chris Fagan (Brisbane) and Brad Scott (North Melbourne), football managers Chris Davies (Port Adelaide) and Craig Vozzo (West Coast) and Sydney director Andrew Ireland.
Carlton, Essendon, Fremantle, Greater Western Sydney, Melbourne, St Kilda and the Bulldogs do not have representatives.
“The people on the competition committee are hand-picked by Gillon McLachlan and (footy operations boss) Steve Hocking, and after they were selected it was announced that they would all hold their positions for three years,” Gordon said.
“All of a sudden you’ve got three presidents who get consulted about everything that goes on and none of the other 15 does.
“Now all those people are good people, but the traditional way in which clubs exercised a fair degree of say and control over basic AFL policy is really diminishing year by year.
“The centralisation of power and decision making away from the clubs and towards the AFL executive appears to be unstoppable and is as much a reflection of the economics of the competition as anything else.
“Club boards now effectively have to compete for the right to govern their clubs and their CEOs with AFL management.
“I’ve read some of (Hawthorn president) Jeff Kennett’s recent comments and I think that he obviously feels the frustration of being a president whose voice, compared to the way that it used to be for presidents, is just not listened to in the same way.
“I think he is railing against it because he can’t accept it, but I accept that it ain’t gonna change.”
GILL IS GOOD
They’ve had their moments, but Gordon rates AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan ahead of Andrew Demetriou, Wayne Jackson and Ross Oakley during his time in footy.
“I like Gill and as an overall assessment I think he is the best CEO of the AFL/VFL in the 30 years since I first became a president,” Gordon said.
“What he has done in AFLW is outstanding, but he also had a better understanding for the need of competitive balance across the 18 clubs.
“And the deal that he did with (Premier) Daniel Andrews is an outstanding deal with respect to Marvel Stadium and the MCG.
“In the area of respect and responsibility towards women and the continued fight against racism in our code, although it hasn’t been perfect and there have been some pretty obvious imperfections in the game, he and the people he has hired have driven a really progressive approach.
“Whenever his time comes, and whatever great achievements he can look at, the one that stands out is that he has been the one true champion of creating a national competition for women.”
DRUGS SCOURGE
Gordon and Kennett were the most outspoken club bosses when the illicit drugs debate raged last month.
A review of the contentious two-strike policy was announced by Hocking within hours of Gordon’s plea for clubs to be given access to information about the abuse of drugs at clubs.
“The policy was brought in by Andrew Demetriou in 2004 and it was entirely about AFL reputation protection,” Gordon said.
“I don’t think it’s at all inappropriate for the AFL to want to protect its reputation and its brand.
“If you’ve got a group of very high-profile players who are seen to be frequently drunk or abusing drugs or abusing women, then ultimately that is going to affect the code itself … but the principal concern that I’ve got is that the cohort of young men and women that we now have responsibility for — almost parental responsibility — means that they can sometimes be put in harm’s way and we need to be in a position to be able to minimise the risk of that harm.
“ (AFLPA boss) Paul Marsh’s threats of ‘we’ll just walk away from it’ don’t really address that issue as they should.”
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