Before any of you have a go at me for posting one of Mike Sheahan's stories here, read it.
I totally agree with it. Why on earth are teams changing from their traditional team colours when the club signs a one off, money-grab deal? The blues did it. Norff are about to. I always thought that to put on your clubs guernsey (with traditional colours) was something to be proud of. Maybe I was wrong??
Any thoughts?
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Jaffa-roos melt down tradition
By Mike Sheahan
Wednesday, July 26, 2000
'The Roos will look like the result of a dropped box of Jaffas at Colonial on Sunday'
THE AFL continues to turn a blind eye to a couple of football's richest traditions, not to mention condoning a fashion scandal on one front.
Its willingness to allow clubs to make significant changes to match guernseys is a major and growing concern.
So, too, the trend of Victorian clubs playing home games at interstate venues, as the Roos and Bulldogs do, as Melbourne will do from next year, as Collingwood is planning to do.
First, the guernsey. There's only one orange in football vernacular, and it should appear at three-quarter-time, not as the color of the North Melbourne kangaroo.
The enlightened marketeers urge us to get with the times, crying ''who cares?'' when a jumper is changed for only one game?
I do.
The AFL is ignoring a clear responsibility to stop clubs tampering with the most recognisable symbols of Australian football.
The money's irresistible, the clubs cry, and God knows how much the Kangaroos -- and others -- need money.
Up to six Victorian clubs expect to trade in the red this year. That's more than half of them.
But, if there's not enough money to go round, cut costs. Address the mad inflation in player payments.
Prominent player manager Craig Kelly said on Talking Footy on Monday 25-30 players would receive $400,000-plus from football this year.
Player payments have soared from $22.52 million in 1990 to $80 million this year (including $4 million to the Players' Welfare Fund).
Why should jumpers be desecrated simply to sustain rampant inflation in player salaries?
As Kevin Sheedy has warned for years, if two clubs go under, 80 players instantly lose their jobs.
Selling off the jumper provides instant relief, but not a permanent solution.
Kelly and his ilk ask what damage is done by a one-off alteration to a jumper, be it the dramatic shift in blue for Carlton in 1997, the addition of orange to the Roos' strip next weekend.
Andrew Balkwill can tell his grandkids he represented Carlton, but he won't be able to say he wore ''the old dark navy blue'', his only game coming when the Blues masqueraded as M and Ms. Perhaps he won't bother telling his grandkids.
The Roos will look like the result of a dropped box of Jaffas at Colonial on Sunday.
The club will sell the idea on the basis of the need for an alternate strip for one team when the Roos and Collingwood play, and play in their blue and white/black and white stripes.
But the Roos already have an alternate strip, and they're the home team, anyway.
In the United States, where anything with room for a price tag carries one, the football jumper is sacred.
It carries nothing more than the player's name in extraneous information.
Given the Roos' decision to take a sponsorship from a betting group and now to sell the colors for a week, can Kelly and company suggest with any confidence there is a limit to commercialism?
The old Fitzroy Football Club once knocked back a sponsorship offer from the Daily Planet (no, not the newspaper) on the basis of good taste, and there hasn't been a club in history that needed money more.
As for clubs leaving town to play home games, what happens if all the rich non-Victorian clubs make irresistible offers to all the poor Victorian clubs to play a home game or two in non-Victorian venues?
Get the picture?
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"Good Old Collingwood Forever"
Changing guernseys for a one off money grab??
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