Another Demon Cut Loose — Eight Games, One New Address

Eight games. That’s the sort of number that used to get you a watch and a quiet word from the coach, not a one-way ticket out of Gosch’s Paddock. But here we are — another delisted Demon has found himself a new footy home, and the news barely caused a ripple outside the people who actually still read the depth charts.

I say this with the full authority of a man who has watched his own club cut blokes loose who went on to play 150 games elsewhere, so forgive me if I don’t treat this as some shocking injustice. It’s just the machine doing what the machine does.

Eight games and out the door

Let’s sit with that number for a second, because it tells you everything about where the competition is at. Eight senior games isn’t nothing — it’s eight more than plenty of blokes who get taken at pick 40 and never sniff a jumper. But in this day and age, eight games is apparently enough rope for a club to decide you’re surplus to requirements and move on to the next bright-eyed kid with a good vertical leap and a manager who’s already fielding calls.

Melbourne, like every other club in this competition, is playing a numbers game. Lists are capped, salary caps are real, and somewhere in a meeting room some list manager pulled up a spreadsheet and decided the math didn’t add up for this bloke anymore. It’s not personal. It’s never personal. That’s the bit that should scare every young player coming through — the clinical nature of it all.

Richmond fans know this song and dance

I’m not going to pretend my club has some moral high ground here. We’ve delisted our fair share of kids who went on to find a bit of form elsewhere, and we’ve brought in our own collection of cast-offs who’ve repaid the faith. That’s footy. One club’s rubbish is, occasionally, another club’s premiership cog — though let’s not get carried away, most of the time it’s just a bloke adding depth to a reserves side and chasing one more crack at it.

What I will say is that watching this cycle repeat itself every October is one of the more sobering rituals of the footy calendar. Finals are barely cold, the Brownlow medallist’s been crowned, and suddenly you’re reading lists of names who’ve just found out their dream is either paused or over, depending on who picks up the phone.

The new home

So where’s he landed? A new club has taken a punt, which is exactly what should happen in cases like this — eight games is a small sample, hardly a proper verdict on whether someone can play at this level. Clubs further down the ladder, or those with gaps in certain positions, are often the ones willing to have a look at a player who’s shown some promise but hasn’t had a real crack at nailing down a spot.

It’s the classic tale of the competition doing its own version of recycling. One list’s cut is another list’s bargain buy, and every single year there’s at least one story of a delisted player turning into a genuine contributor — sometimes even a best and fairest winner — somewhere else entirely. Doesn’t happen every time, mind you. For every success story there’s a dozen blokes playing out their footy in the local league wondering what might have been, but the ones that do work out are enough to keep the whole system believing in second chances.

What this says about Melbourne’s list

Every delisting tells you something about where a club thinks it’s at. Are they rebuilding? Are they trying to find room for kids they rate higher? Are they just making space because the cap’s tight and someone’s got to go? You can read whatever you like into it, and plenty of fans will — that’s the beauty and the curse of modern footy discourse, everyone’s a list manager on social media the second a name gets released.

I’d be careful reading too much doom and gloom into one name leaving a list of forty-plus players. It happens at every single club, every single year, and it will keep happening long after all of us have stopped caring about who’s on an unders-22 list somewhere. The clubs that manage it well are the ones who find the right balance between giving kids a fair crack and not hanging onto blokes out of sentiment alone.

A word for the bloke himself

Whatever you think about the broader system, spare a thought for the actual human in the middle of it. Eight games of AFL footy is eight games more than most people will ever play, and it’s also nowhere near enough to build a career, a house deposit, or much of a highlight reel. Getting delisted stings no matter how many times you’ve seen it happen to other blokes on the news — it’s your career, your mates, your routine, all of it up in the air with one phone call.

So good luck to him at the new address. Genuinely. The competition’s better when there’s a bit of fluidity in it, when blokes get a second crack somewhere else and either prove the first club wrong or prove them right. Either outcome is fine by me — I’m just here for the stories, and this is as good a footy story as any: bloke gets cut, bloke doesn’t sulk, bloke signs somewhere new and has a crack all over again.

The bigger picture

At the end of the day this is just one more name in the churn of list changes that happens every spring. It won’t make headlines beyond the news cycle it’s already had, and in twelve months nobody outside the die-hards will remember the specifics. But multiply this story by the dozens of similar ones happening across the competition right now and you start to understand just how brutal — and how quietly ordinary — the business side of our game really is.

As a Tiger fan who’s sat through the lean years and still somehow ended up with three flags to show for it, I can tell you the long way round usually makes for a better story anyway. Here’s hoping this bloke’s new chapter reads a bit like that — delisted, written off, and then good enough to make someone look silly for letting him go. It’s happened before. It’ll happen again. That’s footy, and frankly I wouldn’t have it any other way.