Loyalty’s Dead, Mate: Greene, the Giants and Footy’s New Rules

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I’ve watched a lot of footy come and go in this life, and I’ll tell you what hasn’t changed – when a bloke walks out on his teammates for a bigger club with a better postcode, somebody’s going to say something about it. This week it was Joe Fonti, former GWS teammate of Toby Greene, having a crack at his old skipper for shooting through to Geelong, and fair dinkum, you could see this one coming from a mile off.

The Captain Who Left the Building

Greene was GWS through and through, or so we were led to believe. Captain, premiership-less but premiership-calibre, the bloke who copped more Tribunal time than half the competition combined and wore it like a badge of honour out at Giants Stadium. Now he’s off to Geelong, chasing a flag with a club that’s never had to build anything from scratch the way the Giants did, and his old teammate Fonti isn’t having a bar of it. He reckons Greene’s turned his back on the blokes who grew up with him in that orange and charcoal, and look, I don’t think you can blame him for feeling that way.

Back in my day – and I know, here we go, the old bloke’s going to bang on about the VFL again – a captain didn’t leave. He couldn’t, for one thing, because the competition wouldn’t let him without the two clubs shaking hands and agreeing on a bag of money or a player swap that made everyone grumble for a fortnight. But it was more than the rules. There was an understanding that you built something with your teammates and you saw it through, win, lose or ladder-bottom. Greene had thirteen years of building a club from a car park in Olympic Park, excuse me, Blacktown, into a genuine finals outfit, and now he’s handing the keys to whoever’s left holding the clipboard.