Tasmanian Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, has this morning released the agreement between Tasmania and the AFL for the establishment of the VFL, VFLW and AFL and AFLW teams including the provision for the new stadium.
This has been released as one of the conditions of the two former Liberal MPs who quit the party last week over the stadium to sit out their terms as independents but yesterday reached an agreement to guarantee supply and to not support the Green’s motion they’ll put forward to block the funding from the budget.
So, for anyone who loves dozens of pages of legal agreements.
I follow local football and this North Melbourne issue reminds me of something that happened to my club about 15 years ago.
Most grounds are constructed and maintained by local councils and some aren’t as good as they should be. This particular ground was higher in the centre and then got lower towards the fence. We’d joked earlier in the day that you could only see players on the opposite side of the ground from the knees up, so it was quite a lot lower than the centre.
Fast forward to ten minutes into the last quarter. We were up by six goals and kicking with the wind. One of our players was injured over the opposite side of the ground and the trainer signalled the bench that he was coming off, so they got the replacement player ready to go. The ball came close to were the injured player and trainer were standing so the trainer took him back toward the boundary, out of the path of play - but not over the boundary line. Unfortunately the bench couldn’t see properly and thought he’d crossed the line, so they let the replacement player go onto the field. For less than 60 seconds we inadvertently had 19 players on the ground while the injured player came off but that didn’t stop the opposition runner screaming ‘head count, head count’ to the umpire, who correctly identified we had 19 players on the field. So despite neither player going near the ball in that time, our score was wiped to zero.
We appealed to the league but ultimately the other club wanted the ruling to stick so there was nothing we could do. Pretty much every other club sided with us, but rules are rules. The league didn’t change the rule until the following year when another club had 19 players on the ground for over 10 minutes.
A few weeks ago in the NRL, South Sydney had 1 too many players on the field for about 30 seconds, but all they copped was a ($15,000) fine… they won the game and kept their competition points for the win etc.
Weird how these sorts of indiscretions are treated differently across codes when it’s all basically the same thing.
Not really, they are different codes after all, with different people running the comps so it is not unusual to have different attitudes to punishments and fines sometimes.
But by the same token, there are a lot of similarities to approaches in other things, like salary caps and related indiscretions, penalties for drug use, treatment of concussions… the NRL would have had a draft too until that got thrown out in the courts.
The bottom of the ladder clash between Hawthron and West Coast was very dreadful. The Eagles have lost to the Hawks by a whopping 116 points at Launceston. West Coast Started the game well with Jamaine JOnes kicking the opening goal of the match. After that, Hawthorn piled on more goals and never looked back, kicking the last 12 straight goals to extend the lead to triple figures. West Coast’s season has been dreadful with substantial number of injuries and very poor form. The Eagles season couldn’t get any worse where they will face the Bombers at Oputs stadium.
In my opinion, Adam Simpson will be sacked as Eagles coach. West Coast Eagles will finish the season with a wooden spoon and a very low percentage.
Its still got the AFL commanding some pretty crap terms, but not as bad as the selective screenshot makes out
(the clause prior is pretty crap too - it requires the Tasmanian Government to provide access to any stadium that the AFL wants to use for the playing of AFL games and cost shifts back to the Government any excess costs of meeting the agreed number of games played in the state per year)
The agreement pretty well puts Tasmania on the hook for everything and leaves the AFL with little liability.
Not sure if we can include Gold Coast and GWS as brand new teams in non-traditional markets? Though former doing pretty solid at the moment and latter saw success late 2010s/early 2020s including a Grand Final appearance.
Swans and Brisbane Bears/Lions (?) were woeful in the early 90s. I think the Swans lost 27 in a row or something like that and nearly got kicked out of the competition as they were only getting 4,000 spectators to a game.
Re West Coast- I saw a super on FOX Footy tonight that said they have lost 33 of their last 36 games. Didn’t realise it was that bad!
Makes me think it’s only going to get worse if there is a 19th team, and as we’ve already been some heavy defeats this year.
