Damien Hardwick had another one of his gripes last week, teeing off at the officiating and the clamorous Geelong crowd. Lots of things have raised his ire over the years – umpiring, rules, fixturing, trade speculation, panel show inanity, journalistic pestering and woke governments. We shouldn’t be too hard on him for that. We want coaches to speak their minds, and to hate losing. In the absence of proper leadership at the AFL, they’re often the ones best placed to drive change. The more premierships they’ve won, the more emboldened they are to be critical. Chris Scott does it with a studied passive aggression. Hardwick rarely bothers with the passive part.
Hardwick pushes back on the view that he and the Gold Coast Suns have had everything handed to them on a silver platter. “Mate, we don’t get much,” he said last year. But he’s enjoyed some of the softest fixturing an algorithm could conjure up. He has a dozen top-10 draft selections on his list, and half of those were top-three picks. He’s enjoyed all the fruits of the Suns academy. He has the reigning Brownlow medallist, a former Norm Smith medallist, and the current leader of the Coleman medal count. So why is there that familiar drift? And why are so many players angling to leave?
