Almanac Footy: Why the Eagles and Dockers Should Think About Quitting the AFL
I realise this is a crazy idea on the face of it, but bear with me.
Firstly, the Dockers and Eagles would have more chance of winning a premiership or even getting into the finals. The AFL is heading for a 20-team competition. The WAFL is a 10-team comp. That’s double your chances of winning or making finals.
Moreover, the deck would no longer be stacked against you. Your players wouldn’t have to spend half their footballing lives on aeroplanes or recovering from flights. You wouldn’t have a massive travel disadvantage with the other clubs. The worst travel you’d face is driving down the freeway to Mandurah—the Geelong of the WAFL, just with extra car chases.
Secondly, Eagles and Dockers fans, you would see more of your team. They would play at home every week of the season. That would be even more than Collingwood!
Thirdly, you would get to go to different ovals to watch footy. Being a travelling fan is a great part of being a football fan in any code, and your average Eagles and Dockers fan rarely gets to do that. Only the financially blessed can make it to Gather Round.
Fourthly, I think we overreacted in the 1980s to Ken Hunter leaving Claremont to play for Carlton and Gary Buckenara leaving Subiaco to play for Hawthorn. In the early and mid-1980s, WA footy fans were worried about players like Maurice Rioli and Murray Rance heading over to Melbourne to play in the VFL. These cases were hard to take and, at the time, seemed to be increasing. Ultimately, the Eagles were created in 1987 to, among other things, stem this tide of talent going over east.
Today, the Dockers have joined the Eagles, and instead of free-for-all recruiting between clubs across the country, we have a series of drafts. I’ve been getting AI (Grok) to help me research draft numbers, and we’ve come up with a figure of, on average, about 10 WA draft picks a year across all of the draft types—e.g., mid-season, main draft, pre-season, etc. Of these, around 44% play for the Dockers and Eagles. That leaves around 5 to 6 WA boys leaving the state every year.
So, the question is, have the Eagles and Dockers helped stem the tide of departures? I suppose we might be able to argue that they have roughly halved the number of players who might have left each year. That is something. Although, even the 5 to 6 a year leaving the state now is more than left in the early 1980s. Of course, a lot of those don’t end up getting much of a game at Carlton or the Gold Coast and would probably never have nominated for the draft if there were a local alternative.
Enter a reborn Western Australian Football League, WAFL. We’d have three Fremantles: South, East, and the Dockers, with three times as many derbies—the highlight of the home and away season. The Eagles and Dockers would need their own zones, which might be tricky to organise, but let’s face that bridge when we come to it.
Now, young WA talent wouldn’t have to disappear to Sydney or Hobart. Also, because the Eagles and Dockers wouldn’t be able to rely on young Victorian and South Australian talent, we would focus more attention on junior football in WA. Let’s face it, Harley Reid is being held hostage in Perth, and we should, morally, let him go back to Victoria where he really wants to be.
No longer being able to kidnap young Victorians would force us to shore up the game’s future in WA. OK, the superstars like Patrick Cripps would still leave WA for the bright lights and bigger pay packets of the AFL, but the lesser stars would have the better option of plying their trade in front of their friends, families, and local fans, and perhaps we’d all be better off for it.
More from Mark Simms can be read Here.
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About Mark Simms
Um, i think there are Eagles and Dockers teams in the WAFL, one is the Eagles B team which has gone nowhere, and the other is Peel Thunder. Back in the day you could visit South Fremantle to see Peter Sumich on his day off, or Subiaco to see Karl Langdon. This ended when, rather than have players tied to clubs all over town, the WA commissioners amalgamated everybody into 2 places – Peel and Eagles.
The fact is that the Eagles and the Dockers have been in a state of experimentation ever since day one, with tinkering from the Victorian Cardinals to make sure the new football team wouldn’t be too powerful, to the 1989 WA super draft, to brown paper bags from the Showponies, to the largess of Wayne “fairy godfather” Jackson which ensured that the interstate clubs would dominate the comp through the early 2000’s. Basically instead of moaning about air travel you mob should be making Optus Stadium the fortress that the Northern Clubs have done with Carrara and the Gabba.
And get your act together. Every time a WA club looks set to dominate the comp, they shoot themselves in the foot.
Enjoyed this piece and your previous one on the lack of WA midfielders. Wrote a lengthy comment but forgot to login and it disappeared into cyberspace. Ho hum.
Your left field take on matters gets me thinking, which is the purpose of communication – to provoke reflection and not to preach. You’ve already sucked in one Colliwobbler still bleeding over 2018. Well played.
That said – your argument about Eagles, Dockers and WAFL is total crap. Intentional? A counter factual to illustrate the folly of your argument?
Tariffs and trade barriers for footy? Donald would be proud of you.
The lack of good footballers (as you correctly argued in the midfielders piece) and good teams is partly cyclical (draft equalisation) and partly structural. The structural problem we can control is poor talent development at youth level.
VFL and SANFL now have $100k salary caps higher than WAFL and full time coaches and football departments. WAFL clubs still have part time car salesmen doing a 60 hour a week football job on 20 hours pay. No wonder we have fewer and fewer AFL draftees and now get flogged in interstate games. The fact that most of the money comes from robbing pensioners blind through pokies doesn’t bother eastern states footy clubs or the predatory AFL a jot.
WA young guys are too busy making money and living the high life in the FIFO economy and its spinoffs to bother with playing WAFL for less than you can make delivering pizzas.
WA has a comfortable insular culture. Victorian footy culture is a pack of hungry dogs fighting for the next feed. NSW and Queensland strive to keep talent away from NRL and soccer.
In WA we still think talent grows on trees. And that innate talent (particularly indigenous) drops away when the training, physical and competitive demands of AFL level kick in at draft age.
I love the camaraderie and human connection of the WAFL and local footy, but it has fallen a long way from 1980’s standards and its not coming back.
If you want West Australians to watch local footy in large numbers you’ll need to close down all the TV stations and lock down the internet. Why go out to eat sausages when you can have rump steak at home?
Fair enough Peter. Nice work. I maintain that the sausages would still have some advantages over the steak.
I think we are over 2018, even though we wuz robbed, because a mere 18 months ago, after being scrod by pharisees, Cardinals and the Inquisition for years we finally won the close one. And oh yes, what happened to your mob in 2020?
Mark totally understand where your coming from – I would -LOVE to have the strong tribal warfare SANFL competition of days gone bye alas it’s not to be and never will be again
I like the premise of your piece and agree with Rulebook re: the SANFL.
Our sausages were fine, but the steak became too tempting for some.