Football’s worst kept secret became official on Monday when the Gold Coast Suns unveiled Damien Hardwick as their new coach. The former Richmond master coach has had plenty of time to draft his plans while roaming through Europe with his partner, Alex. Here are five things he might have jotted down in his travel journal – things he needs to address to make the AFL expansion team, which has never played a final, a success.
Close the gap between their best and worst
What do the Suns stand for? They’ve been in the competition for a decade, but from one week to the next, you’d have to flip a coin to predict which version of the team was going to turn up.
Young guns like Ben King need to stick around.Credit: Getty Images
Towards the end of his coaching tenure, Stuart Dew mused after the Suns’ catastrophic loss to ladder leaders Collingwood in round 16 that he and his assistants had to find out why his players’ level of effort – reflected in the enormous gap between this team’s best and worst – remained so variable. Under Hardwick, you’d expect maximum effort to be the first absolute non-negotiable.
Get people through the gates
In his first press conference for the club, Hardwick outlined what he hoped would be an entertaining brand of football: they would be brazen in attack, and stingy in defence. All clubs aspire to some variation of that balance.
If bringing intensity to every contest is the first non-negotiable, that should help protect the Suns defensively, but if this club is to survive in the long term, it needs more members, and Heritage Bank Stadium (formerly Metricon) needs bums on seats. So they need to be attractive to watch. Hopefully, fans can look forward to an update on the helter-skelter, barely controlled chaos Hardwick turned into a winning formula at the Tigers.
Turn their home ground into a place other clubs fear to tread
To be fair, the Suns have already made ground in this regard – they’ve been a tricky prospect at home for a while – but winning the majority of their games at Heritage Bank Stadium would be a huge step towards making their first finals series.
This point is intertwined with the last two: winning more games at home creates a positive feedback loop that gets fans through the turnstiles and keeps them directly and passionately engaged with the club. The AFL market in Queensland is soft, and the Suns’ home ground unfortunately isn’t easy to get to. Win more games, watch the bandwagon fill up.
Improve team defence and balance between inside and outside play
Given the lack of consistent effort outlined above, it’s counter-intuitive that the Suns’ biggest on-field strength is at the coalface: ruckman Jarrod Witts, his co-captain and club champion Touk Miller, contested beast Matt Rowell and classy centreman Noah Anderson consistently give the Suns first use of the ball and an advantage in clearances. What happens after that, though, is anybody’s guess. Not enough players can be relied upon to hit targets and take their opportunities, and while key backs Charlie Ballard and Sam Collins are underrated, they’re not getting a lot of help by way of defensive run when the ball gets turned over.
Take a hard look at the list
Of course, every incoming coach does this. A marquee signing could get people through the gates, as Gary Ablett did when he flew north from Geelong, and Buddy Franklin did in his prime for the Swans. It’s almost irresistible to link Tigers champion Dustin Martin to a Gold Coast sea change under his former coach, but he should not be at the top of Hardwick’s list. The Suns are not short of top-end talent.
In addition, they currently hold pick four or five in the draft, depending on their ladder finish, but they’re open to trading it to accumulate the points required to secure a brace of highly rated academy juniors, especially young key forward Jed Walter, who could be the next Charlie Curnow. The Suns had a luckier than usual run with injuries in 2023, and that protected a very raw lower half of the list from exposure. While player retention has been a massive problem for the Suns, that won’t stop the notoriously ruthless Hardwick from looking at who is not delivering, who wants out, who has trade value, and who’s just not up to it.
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