Bone’s beef: Adelaide Crows need to start at top end if they are to keep Rory Sloane

THERE are no guarantees at Adelaide Football Club, especially when it comes to their playing list. Chris McDermott writes the club needs to change its game plan on contracts.

Rory Sloane signs autographs at the Adelaide Crows season launch at West Lakes. Picture: Tom Huntley

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HERE we go again.

There is one certainty about the Adelaide Football Club in its 28-year history, nothing is certain.

There are no guarantees, especially when it comes to their playing list.

It has been a problem since day one back in the late ’90s when Darren Jarman chose Hawthorn over his home state and a place in the inaugural Crows team.

It is still a problem in 2018.

Fud made the right choice for himself but I will never be convinced he should ever have been in that position. His was a signature that had to be secured.

It was not.

The legacy continues.

Kurt Tippett, Jack Gunston, Phil Davis, Nathan Bock, Patrick Dangerfield and more recently Jake Lever and Charlie Cameron have all followed Jarman’s lead and moved interstate at the peak of their powers.

Inability to maintain key players — players who could have won you a premiership — has been the Crows’ biggest weakness over the years and with all the speculation on Rory Sloane, it looks set to continue in 2018.

Rory Sloane is top of the tree at the Crows. Picture: Michael Klein

Crows star Ben Hart takes on Darren Jarman playing for Hawthorn in 1995.

Despite the mixed messages coming from a variety of different parties with different agendas, it appears Sloane has not agreed to anything and is not even close to signing.

This decision is still at stage one, but be concerned Crows supporters, be very concerned.

The club has been here many times before with ‘key players’ and the outcome has always been the same.

The club once made a stance not to pay any player over a certain figure.

This is good in theory.

But it has been disastrous in practice and very costly.

The reality is, there is always, and always will be, a pecking order. Such is life! Not the $50 million-a-season contract for the very best in the NBA but a pecking order nonetheless.

Sloane deserves to be at the top of the Crows tree.

There can be no debate.

That’s where this discussion must start, not end. Start.

It didn’t start there with Darren Jarman back in the 1990s and he left.

It definitely didn’t start there with Jake Lever.

It didn’t start there with Patrick Dangerfield, and it didn’t start there with Rory Sloane.

The Crows outsmarted themselves and lost as they have lost before and as they will lose again unless something changes.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

Its time for the Adelaide Football Club to do something different.

If they don’t, we know where this is heading.

Originally published as Bone’s beef: Adelaide Crows need to start at top end if they are to keep Rory Sloane