In the late afternoon of Saturday 27 September 2003, Brisbane Lions supporters were in a dream. The club built from a merge of two of the battlers of the competition had just won its third flag in succession and its team was now being talked about as the greatest of all time.
Fast forward almost eight years to Sunday 3 July 2011 and Lions supporters were again celebrating a victory. This time, the circumstances were slightly different with the team beating Port Adelaide in what could prove to be decisive in the ‘race’ for the wooden spoon.
How times change. The mighty had fallen.
What often gets forgotten in the daily analysis of a football club’s fortunes is that this is the way it’s supposed to be. A club should expect to win, on average, one flag every 17 years. Clubs should take their turn to enjoy the highs of finals before accepting that the cycle will soon mean that they have to bottom out. This is footy socialism or ‘equalisation’ as the AFL head honchos describe it.
Like socialist governments, the AFL applies rules designed to give everyone an equal go. The draft ensures that sides at the bottom gets first crack at the best young players. The salary cap ensures that clubs don’t always get to keep their better players. The AFL tops up the balance sheet of struggling clubs to ensure that they get their turn at the top. Every child wins a prize.
The Lions’ premiership era was always going to come at a price. Footy socialism ensured that. When other clubs were drafting the likes of Hodge, Goddard and Cooney in 2001-2003, the Lions were actually losing quality players like Craig Bolton, as AFL equalisation took effect.
For Lions’ supporters, this then becomes the price to pay for the successes of the early 2000s. Having experienced the highest of highs, it is time to suffer the lows. A rebuild, still in progress seven years after the club last played a Grand Final, is actually a fairly small price to pay for three premierships. If you take equalisation to its logical conclusion, then we can’t expect another flag until 2050, or thereabouts. Isn’t that a horrid thought?
The equalisation policy might be the fair way of running football at the senior level. It doesn’t make the pain for supporters any easier to handle though. This perhaps gets lost in the rational analysis of the AFL. Equalisation doesn’t make it any easier to wear a loss on a Monday morning and doesn’t get you through summer after your club misses the finals. For supporters, football isn’t about cold analysis - it is about irrational passion. It is about turning up to the ground every week with the same hope for a victory, whether your club is running first or last. You ride the bumps with the players and you feel the pain of a loss just as much. Equalisation gives you nothing on game day!
What equalisation can do is give supporters some small comfort that success may be just around the corner. When your side bottoms out, the system dictates that the only way is up. The emergence of Fremantle as a flag challenger in recent years is proof that even the worst performing side can make it back to the top echelon. That’s the way it is supposed to work.
Unfortunately for the Lions, its timing couldn’t be worse. It is incredibly unlucky to be bottoming out just as the AFL is looking to build new clubs by taking from the old. The Gold Coast Suns and the Greater Western Sydney Giants have been given numerous advantages to build competitive sides quickly. Those advantages come at a cost to the other clubs. And the clubs at the bottom of the ladder feel the pain most of all. Instead of receiving Pick No.1 in last year’s draft, the wooden spooners got Pick No.4, with the Suns receiving the first three selections. The Lions, having finished in the bottom four in 2010, initially received Pick No.10 when, in a ‘normal’ season, would have expected a top five pick.
In other words, the AFL has, to an extent, put aside its equalisation policy in the pursuit of expansion. There is no doubt that the AFL has good reasons for this and all clubs will benefit from the increased media rights that an 18-team competition brings. But someone had to be the loser and, as a side ‘bottoming out’ when the expansion has occurred, the Lions look to have copped the brunt of the impact.
There is one ray of light for the club. Whilst the equalisation policy is supposed to ensure fairness, there is still plenty of scope for clubs to control their own destiny. Quality list management is one area that a club can make a difference. In Graeme Hadley, the Lions look to have one of the best recruiters in the business. Every Lions supporter who enjoys watching Rich, Redden, Rockliff and co develop should express their thanks to Hadley and his team. Draft selections are irrelevant if a club can pick the diamonds in the rough. And Hadley looks to have made an art form of that.
- John (Member #1107811)
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Club
