The club that has been defined by misplaced hope for its whole existence has, again, misplaced hope a few times this year– namely the round 3 win over Geelong and more recently the round 11 win over the Bulldogs and round 12 win over Adelaide. Only Carlton and Guy Pearce from Memento have had more false dawns than Gold Coast in the last few years.
As a result, their current coach Stuart Dew is in the crosshairs.
This is not restricted to Dew. The Suns have had three full-time coaches in their history. Not one has coached 100 games. Not one has won 25 games. Not one has a winning percentage higher than 28%. Guy McKenna, their first ever coach, is also their most successful by winning percentage with 27.27% of his career games won.
Not great.
But it’s not just that the Gold Coast Suns have been terminally unsuccessful in their time in the AFL. This point has been made ad nauseum, but sports teams that live on the Gold Coast have almost invariably been some variety of calamity.
My personal favourite of the calamities was Gold Coast United, where Clive Palmer got ahead of the story that Succession tried to tell: Billionaires aren’t all geniuses.
To that end, people forget about when big Clive punished Gold Coast United’s 11 fans for throwing a flare by…closing the northern, eastern and southern stands of the stadium.
People also forget about when he fancied himself a modern-day Kerry Packer after the FFA revoked his club’s A-League licence, so he decided he should come up with a new competing football organisation for Australia. That organisation was creatively named “Football Australia”. Hilariously, their slogan was “we kick harder”.
Clive Palmer must be such a gift to this country’s economy. Unlimited pockets and limited cognitive ability. A search firm’s dream.
That survived from March 2012 until June 2012.
LIV Golf it was not.
So, based on the history of the club and the history of the Gold Coast, which appears to be a city built on a foundation of fake tan and TRT, isn’t Gold Coast obviously a bad job? I would say no, or at least not entirely.
Let’s look at the positives.
Firstly, the weather.
Okay, secondly…
I’m kidding, although not really given that I am writing this in Melbourne where it currently feels like 3 degrees.
Anyway, onto more substantive matters, the Suns’ list is better than you think. At least down the spine. Down back Charlie Ballard has shown real flashes of being a genuine AFL footballer and a building block of a one day good defence.
Rowell is perhaps the best inside mid in the AFL and a good complement to Noah Anderson who is going at virtually a goal game for the season. Both are in the top 20 for stoppage clearances per game, but Anderson is also a highly effective outside player. Beyond those two, Touk Miller who has been injured for much of season 2023, is one of the better players in football when on song.
The midfield trio of Rowell, Anderson and Miller being fed by a still good Jarrod Witts would be one of the most formidable in the competition.
Up forward they are less established outside of Ben King, who has kicked 31 goals this year at a rate of 2.4 per game. Not bad for a team that generates only the 13th most shots at goal per game.
Around him is the incredibly hot Levi Casboult, who is playing well now that he’s finally in a stable organisation, and the tantalising Mabior Chol who is still raw enough to be fashioned into a good second banana in a functioning forward line if King sticks around long term. Jack Lukoscious is another who has shown real flashes, ranking in the top 20 in football in each of score involvements, total goals and total inside 50s and punctuated his season so far with a dominant 5 goal display against the Crows in round 13.
The bones of the list are there, and outside of Casboult and Witts not one of the players that I mentioned is over 30.
Another positive of the Gold Coast job is that there is no expectation. Any success is gravy. Gold Coast does not have a history, it has a past littered with failure.
If and when you fail, you’re just football’s Macbeth (another one on the Gold Coast). You weren’t meant to succeed, and you didn’t. A footnote in a tortured past.
On the other hand, imagine you’re the guy that turns Gold Coast around!
The applause when you head down Cavill Ave would be…like a rat pissing on cotton. Nobody would care.
But you know where you would be paraded around? AFL house. You would be the person to make the AFL right. And the AFL wants to be right, especially about their rapid expansion into non-AFL states, especially before Tasmania enters the competition.
The whole situation reminds me of James Gunn taking over DC studios. He’s a guy who is coming from Marvel, having directed The Guardians of The Galaxy trilogy which are apparently quite good. I am not 7 years old so I have grown out of adults playing dress up, but other people seem to like them for whatever reason and the movies made a fortune.
DC studios is a bit like the Suns. That’s not to say that the Lions are Marvel, but it is to say that they are clearly a lower tier film company in the superhero movie industrial complex that is ruining cinema in the same way that the Suns are a bottom run AFL club.
Move on GWLS. We get it. You’re excited for Killers of The Flower Moon. Original.
DC has good bones, like Gold Coast, with iconic characters like Batman, Superman and their respective villains, but they have been remarkably unsuccessful in recent years. Really since the Nolan Batman films. James Gunn has now been brought in as the guy to fix DC.
If he does, he’s a genius. If he doesn’t, well, he just fell victim to the decay emanating off a decaying property. Not his fault. It’s no-lose.
Having said all of that, surely that very first game day as your opponent kicks their 11th goal of the first quarter, Gob Bluth must pop into that coaches’ head with 5 words: “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
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