Hardwick’s Suns Might Be a Problem Too Big for Dimma

Damien Hardwick had a go at the umpires and the Geelong crowd last week, and honestly, good on him — at least someone in the competition is still willing to say something worth printing. But if you peel back the theatre of it all, you start to wonder whether the grumbling is actually a man who knows, deep down, that the sand is shifting under his feet at Carrara.

I’ve been watching this game since before most AFL head office staff were born, back when we still called it the VFL and the word “brand” had no place in a footy conversation. I’ve seen coaches come and go, seen great ones walk into impossible situations and walk out again looking ten years older. Hardwick is a great one. Three premierships at Richmond speak for themselves. But greatness doesn’t always conquer geography.

The Umpires Aren’t the Problem, Dimma

Let me be straight with you: I have absolutely no time for sycophantic umpire-worshipping. Umpires make poor decisions. They always have, they always will, and anyone who sat through some of the howlers in the old VFL would tell you that complaints about officiating are as old as the game itself. Hardwick raising his voice about a call in a loss to Geelong is totally legitimate — in my view the free-kick counts at that venue have raised plenty of eyebrows over the years, and fans across the competition have long felt that the Cat Country factor exists, even if the AFL insists otherwise.

But here’s the grumble building in the back of my throat: if Hardwick is spending his media time pointing at the umpires and the Geelong crowd noise, he’s pointing in the wrong direction. The fundamental challenge at the Gold Coast Suns is structural, cultural and geographic. A few fifty-metre penalties going the other way won’t fix it.

What Hardwick Actually Inherited

Back in my day, you built a football club over decades. You had a suburb, a history, a social club where blokes argued about the back pocket over a pot. Gold Coast has none of that, and I don’t say it to be cruel — I say it because it’s the truth that the AFL spent fifteen years pretending wasn’t a truth. The Suns were built on AFL money and AFL optimism, and for a long time those two things papered over an awful lot of cracks.

What Hardwick walked into when he took the job was a list with genuine talent scattered through it — Touk Miller is the real deal, Izak Rankine can make the ball do things that shouldn’t be physically possible — but also a club that has never quite figured out what it is. The culture Richmond built under Hardwick was years in the making, forged through failure and resilience and a shared identity that the Tigers could trace back generations. You can’t import that in a removal truck from Punt Road.

And yet, stubbornly, you get the feeling Hardwick genuinely believes he can manufacture it. That’s either the most admirable thing about him or the most worrying, depending on your mood.

The List Is Better Than the Ladder Suggests

I’ll give Hardwick this: he’s not working with nothing. When the Suns click, they can move the ball at a pace that makes your eyes water. The midfield brigade has genuine depth, and the forward line, on a good day, can pile on a score that shocks better-fancied opponents. The problem isn’t talent. The problem is that talent without a reliable defensive structure and a team that trusts each other under pressure is just potential, and the VFL — sorry, the AFL — is littered with clubs that turned potential into very expensive heartbreak.

Gold Coast’s inside-50 numbers in good patches this season have been encouraging. Their ability to sustain pressure for four quarters has been the issue, and that is a culture and conditioning problem as much as it is a tactical one. That’s the bit that keeps coming back to Hardwick’s credibility. He fixed the same problem at Richmond, but Richmond in 2016 was a sleeping giant. Gold Coast in 2024 is still trying to convincde itself it’s a giant at all.

The Fixture Doesn’t Help, and Neither Does the AFL

Now, I’m no apologist for clubs that cry poor about their circumstances — Carlton have had enough tough nights in the last twenty years without blaming the fixturing gods — but I’ll concede that the Suns operate under a genuinely different set of pressures to the traditional clubs. The travel load is real. The opposition supporter advantage when they play “home” games that feel like away games is real. The difficulty retaining talent when Melbourne and Sydney are a phone call away is very, very real.

The AFL’s response to these pressures has been, characteristically, a mixture of financial concessions, hand-wringing and the occasional rule tweak that helps nobody. Head office is not exactly renowned for coherent long-term thinking — this is, after all, the same organisation that keeps tinkering with the interchange and has spent a decade trying to solve the congestion problem by making the ground feel more like a pinball machine. Trusting them to solve the Gold Coast problem with any urgency would be like trusting a committee to write a good poem.

Hardwick’s Greatest Weapon Might Also Be His Weakness

What’s always made Hardwick special is the force of his personality. Players run through walls for him. His emotional investment in winning is so obvious, so unambiguous, that it becomes infectious. The man genuinely cares, and in a modern football landscape full of polished corporate coaches who sound like they’re reading from a risk-management handbook, that is refreshing.

But that same intensity — the kind that has him popping off at umpire decisions and Geelong crowd noise — can occasionally look, from the outside, like deflection. When things go wrong, a coach with that much pride is always going to look for external explanations. Some of those explanations are fair. Some of them are a man not wanting to confront the harder questions about whether the project itself is workable on his timetable.

The Suns need Hardwick to be honest with himslef about what kind of job this actually is. It isn’t Richmond. It isn’t a sleeping giant waiting to be woken. It might be a club that improves incrementally over five to eight years, which is not the kind of timeline a three-time premiership coach necessarily has the patience — or the time — to see through.

The Verdict from an Old VFL Hand

I want to be clear: I’m not writing Hardwick off, and I’m not writing the Suns off either. I’ve watched enough football to know that predictions are mostly fool’s errands. There will come a day when the Suns field a team that grew up in Queensland, bleeds that gold and red, and fights like they’ve got something truly personal on the line. That day isn’t far away, and Hardwick might yet be the man who drags them over the line before it arrives naturally.

But the grumbling about umpires and crowd noise, while understandable and occasionally justified, tells me the pressure is getting to even the great Dimma. The challenge at Gold Coast is bigger than a bad call in a loss at GMHBA Stadium. It is bigger, perhaps, than any single coach can solve alone. And acknowledging that wouldn’t be weakness — it’d be the most honest thing anyone connected with that club has said in years.

Back in my day we called it like we saw it. I’m calling this one: the Suns are a work in progress, Hardwick is their best chance, and the AFL owes them a damn sight more support than it’s giving. Fix that first, and then we’ll talk about the umpiring.