200 Games? Son, Earn Your First Fifty First

Some young fella who hasn’t even had his name read out yet is already telling anyone with a microphone that he sees himself as a “200-game player.” Geelong’s latest draft bauble, apparently, and good luck to him — but forgive an old Carlton man for raising an eyebrow so high it nearly left the premises.

Back in My Day You Just Hoped to Get a Game

I’ll date myself here, and I don’t care. Back in my day — and yes, I still catch myself calling it the VFL, sue me — a kid getting drafted was happy to make the twenties, let alone start mapping out a two-decade career before he’d kicked a ball in anger at the top level. You earned your stripes. You didn’t hand out your retirement speech in the same press conference as your draft interview.

Now I’m not having a go at the kid specifically. Ambition’s not a crime, and if he’s got the self-belief to back himself in, more power to him. But it says something about the state of the modern game that a teenager can stand up and talk about 200 games like it’s a formality, like it’s a netflix subscription he’s just signed up to, rather than something that has to be fought for every single week against blokes twice his size trying to knock his head off.

The Geelong Factor

Course it’s Geelong, isn’t it. Say what you like about the Cats — and I say plenty, believe me, especially round September when they seem to turn up fresher than everyone else — but they do build a culture that makes a young fella feel like the world’s his oyster. They’ve had that steady hand down there for years, the old heads mentoring the new ones, and clearly this kid’s been filled with confidence by whichever former star has taken him under his wing. Good on Geelong for that, genuinely. It’s no accident they keep pumping out players who stick around.

But there’s a difference between instilling confidence and encouraging a draft prospect to start measuring himself against Hall of Fame numbers before he’s even got a locker. I’d wager some of that famous Geelong polish has rubbed off a little too early here. It’s all well and good to dream big, but somebody in that football department ought to be having a quiet word about managing expectations — his own, and everyone else’s.

Leadership Talk From a Kid Who Hasn’t Played a Game

He’s also apparently spoken about leadership, which again — fine, nothing wrong with a young man having ambitions beyond just kicking the pill. But I’ll tell you what leadership actually looks like: it’s blokes like Kouta, like the old Carlton leadership groups of my era, blokes who led by doing the hard yards for a decade before anyone asked their opinion on culture or standards. Leadership isn’t a talking point you roll out in a draft puff piece. It’s something that gets conferred on you by your teammates after you’ve bled for the jumper, not something you self-nominate for in week one.

I’m not saying this kid’s being arrogant — by all accounts he seems a decent, well-spoken type, and that counts for plenty in my book. But the way these interviews get set up these days, with the clubs’ media departments practically writing the quotes for them, it does the kids no favours. They’re set up to sound like they’ve already arrived, when the truth is the hard bit — actually getting a senior game, then another, then another, then another one hundred and ninety six times after that — hasn’t even started.

Playing Through Injury — Now THAT I’ll Give Him

To his credit, from what I’ve read he’s also talked about playing through injury, about toughing it out, about not wanting to be wrapped in cotton wool. Now that’s more like it. That’s the stuff that actually gets you to 200 games, not the talking about it beforehand. You want to know how you get to 200? You get there by playing through the dodgy hammy in round fourteen when it’s bucketing down at Kardinia Park and the coach needs a body. You get there by not whinging to the club doctor every time something tweaks.

If this young man genuinely has that attitude in him — and not just the media-trained version of it — then fair enough, I’ll happily eat a bit of humble pie down the track. But I’ve seen plenty of kids talk the talk about toughness in the draft process and then suddenly discover a soft-tissue strain the minute the contest gets willing. The AFL system these days, with its load management and its rotation policies, doesn’t half make it easy for a bloke to find reasons to sit out a few weeks here and there. Back in my day — there I go again — you played with a broken finger taped to the next one and nobody blinked.

Head Office Will Love This Stuff

And here’s my real gripe, if I’m honest. The AFL head office absolutely loves these bold draft quotes, because it gives the draft coverage a storyline, gives the TV boys something to build a graphics package around, gives everyone something to debate on the panel shows for a week. It’s content, pure and simple. The game’s been turned into a content mill where a throwaway quote from an eighteen-year-old becomes a headline story, rather than, you know, actually judging players on form once they’ve played thirty or forty games and we’ve got something solid to go on.

I don’t blame the kid for any of this. I blame a system that’s obsessed with hype over substance, that wants its draftees pre-packaged as the next superstar before they’ve even trained with the senior list. It wasn’t like this when I was following the Blues as a tacker — you found out who was any good by watching them play, not by reading their draft-week press conferences.

The Verdict

Look, I hope the kid gets his 200 games, I really do. Footy needs good, durable, honest triers who stick around long enough to actually mean something to a club rather than floating through for sixty-odd games and disappearing into whatever comes after. But let’s see him get his first game first, let him get through a full pre-season proper, let him cop a whack from a genuine senior player and see how he fronts up the following week. Then we’ll talk numbers.

Until then, it’s just words — and as any old Navy Blue will tell you, in this caper words have never kicked a goal or saved one eihter.