I can’t 5hink of any player in the last 3 or four years of player trades -especially this last ‘mammoth trade season’, where a player who has wanted out of any club - let alone Freo - has publicly stated that ‘he wants out becuse of the coach’s gameplan / coach.’
It never gets said, but surely, their must be reasons other than wanting to go home,the money, the chance of a premiership, or, the want of greater opportunity, that a player would want out of a club.
We all know this, and it would be foolish to think that in ANY club with a 40-odd group of ambitious 18-35 young men - let alone high profile sportsman - didn’t have players amongst them that did not have ‘disgruntlement’ with ‘the coach’ or ‘the gameplan’. at some point or other.
Freo is no different - no one can tell me their hasn’t been questions raised by players about gamestyle during the period of any coach in our history, let alone Ross Lyons’.
And vice versa, no coach/player manager is going to publicly chop / move on a player because ‘he didn’t like or adhere to our gameplan’
But again, don’t tell me thats not a reason why players find themselves on a trade table.
Will any of this ever be publicly stated by a player - or a coach - whilst they are currently active in the game. ? No!
But history tells us that they soon get the knives out after they leave the game. To take Freo as an example, there has been plently of comment by a lot of ex-players after they and their coach have moved out of the game. Don’t tell me that Messers Neesham, Drum, Connelly or Harvey haven’t copped flak for their styles/methods/approaches/gameplans, because whether by public comment/book/sportsmans nights etc they have.
And don’t think there’ll be similar ‘revelations’ about what the playing group ‘really thought’ after RoLy’s tenure has finished.
But, are we going to hear of any of this now? -certainly not! Its just not the way the footy industry works.
All we can say now, is that there are enough rumours and innuendo, to suggest that players who question/don’t adhere get limited opportunity or moved on.
Now, I place very little currency in rumours or innuendo - even though there is plenty of this stuff posted on DL that I love reading and pondering upon - and we have all experienced the conversation where a mate of a mate who’s brother is a mate of Players X’s sister, reckons Player X hates Coach Y,
Its all stuff that invokes interest and a comtinuation of rumours that could all be ‘fake news’.....however.......”where there is smoke, there is generally fire!”
And, lets just say, that despite all the public statements about how good a coach & bloke RoLy is, theres enough smoke around the place to suggest that Exceed doeas not need to post much evidence, Larkin.
