The AFL media, post-season for the main game, desperately kept the balls in the air in terms of public attention. AFL trade week: Stretching truth and substance. Let’s face it fans of the game hate to let it go after the grand final and everything has been decided. Tacking on these franchise extensions like trade week are an attempt to maintain the fervour and the ratings with their audience. The fact that there is little substance to much of what they are offering is neither here or there for those running the show.
The Truth About AFL Trade Week
Scuttlebutt and hearsay are the currency for many in the AFL media – it is their stock in trade. Especially those on Channel Nine, who are not part of the billion dollar broadcasting rights deal. Imagine making your money from rumours and whispers. Please park your integrity at the door prior to entering.
The smug visage of Tom Morris on Nine has players checking their teeth for missing gold fillings.
Captains leaving their AFL teams for more successful shores. Is there no sanctity left in the game? Does loyalty have no currency anymore?
The Demise Of AFL Club Loyalty At Trade Week
The fans and club members still bleed whatever colours their team jerseys display. Captains are pretty important to those that love their clubs and teams. The players, it seems, are in a different rarified air from the rest of us. These expensive sides of beef are traded by the butchers, I mean player agents and managers, for the profits their percentages entitle them to. Australia loves to copy America, despite seeing the damage that one Donald Trump is doing over there. The ruthless behaviours of American sports’ clubs and officials are held up as aspirational things to mimic downunder. There is not an original bone in their bodies, when it coms to greed and avarice in the business world. Little men cashing in on the popularity and love of the game by the fans.
“The frantic final minutes saw clubs and agents scrambling to negotiate key trades, but several fell through as clubs including Essendon, St Kilda and Brisbane held their ground and refused to give into trade requests. “
Putting Individuals Above Teams
America is all about the individual. It elevates star players above and beyond the teams and clubs. The fact is, however, that without the loyal love of the fans for their teams, you will not get star players in the first place. Putting the cart before the horse, so that you can ride on the back of adulation for commercial profits, may end up being a dangerous practice. AFL trade week: Stretching truth and substance. Bring in the talking heads to measure the worth of these sides of beef, sorry AFL players.
TV experts telling their viewers that so and so is at best an ordinary footballer and only worth a second round pick. Who are these ‘has beens’ from other eras to judge the current crop? What would they really know, apart from their prejudices, like the rest of us?
Hawthorn Are A Disgrace
AFL trade week was a thin soup with little meat on the bone. Those fronting the cameras stretched their smiles to cover the absence of any real content, as best they could. Rehashing the same few trades again and again.
Voicing opinions like farts in the bed after beans.
Zach Merrett has been the captain of Essendon and wins their BnF like it was made for him. The idea that he would waltz over to join Hawthorn, as a contracted player and longtime captain of the club, for peanuts was an insult to the very fabric of AFL tradition. Hawthorn have a lot to answer for, as their behaviour has been disrespectful to both Merrett and Essendon. Why stir up trouble if you are not prepared to put your money and quality players for trade where your mouth is?
AFL trade week: Stretching truth and substance. A few home truths. Players get traded most often when they need or want a fresh start to reignite their careers. Thus, evaluating them on most recent form is not really doing them justice in many instances. It will never be a perfect science, of course. Locker room ill feeling can be a very real occurrence. In most cases, it takes a season or two for a transiting player to find his feet at the new club. AFL is a team sport, not an individual sport, therefore, your new team mates have to kick the ball to you. Think on that for a minute.
American Capitalism Infecting Everything
“It is not a fair fight. It is manipulated capitalism, American style, now under the aegis of Donald Trump and his regime. The multinationals refuse to pay their fair share of tax wherever they trade by shifting profits to tax havens. The economic life of citizens is no longer front and centre for governments, as they have sold out to lobbyists representing big business. Zombie neoliberalism infects everything they do, as they abdicate their responsibilities to ‘market forces’. The market has been rigged in favour of billionaires and oligarchs. Our democratically elected leaders do not listen to voices that are not backed by big money.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of The Stoic Golfer; What Price Life?; Money Matters; and America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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