The Phone Call That Started Tasmania’s Long Game
Every so often a small, almost throwaway story tells you more about an institution than its annual report ever could. The tale of Lachy Hay, the Tasmanian footballer who reportedly assumed the phone call informing him of his selection on Tasmania’s inaugural VFL list was some mate having a lend, is one of those stories.
It is a gentle, human anecdote on its face. But sitting here in Adelaide, several thousand kilometres and several footy cultures removed from Launceston or Hobart, I think it is worth pausing on, because it captures something the AFL Commission’s various taskforces and feasibility studies rarely manage to put into words: what it actually feels like, at ground level, when a competition finally decides a place matters.
A call nobody expected to be real
The details, as reported, are simple enough. Hay had been playing his local footy, presumably without much expectation that a representative phone call was imminent, and when word came through that he had earned a position on the state’s new VFL list, his first instinct was disbelief. He is said to have treated it as a prank. That reaction, more than any marketing campaign the league could commission, tells you about the gap that has existed between Tasmanian footballers and anything resembling a genuine second-tier pathway.
For decades, Tasmania’s best young talent has either been plucked early by mainland clubs through the draft, or left to find its level in local competitions with no reliable bridge to anything higher. The VFL list, however modest it may look on paper this inaugural season, is that bridge. A player like Hay, not necessarily a highly touted academy prospect with his face on a TV graphic, now has somewhere to go that did not exist twelve months ago.
Why this matters more than the ladder position
I will resist the temptation to get carried away about one player’s prospects, because that is not really the point of this column, and because the Tribunal of public opinion tends to move faster than actual football development. What matters is the structural shift. Tasmania’s entry to the VFL is not simply about fielding a reserves-style side to keep the eventual AFL licence ticking over administratively. It is about creating exactly the kind of moment Hay experienced: a bloke sitting at home, not on anyone’s radar in the usual sense, getting a call that changes his sense of what is possible.
The AFL Commission has, to its credit, been reasonably disciplined about not overselling the Tasmanian project in the short term. The messaging from head office has largely stuck to the practicalities: the stadium at Macquarie Point, the licence conditions, the 2028 entry timeline. But the lived experience of a pathway is found in stories like this one, not in the Commission’s quarterly updates or the latest broadcast deal commentary. You cannot legislate belief into a state’s footballing culture. You can only build the structures and wait to see who walks through the door.
The pathway problem the AFL has never quite solved
It is worth remembering that Tasmania’s predicament was not unique in theory, even if it was unique in degree. Other non-traditional AFL markets, particularly in parts of Western Sydney and South East Queensland, have grappled with similar questions about how a young player without an obvious club feeder system gets seen, gets coached properly, and gets a genuine crack at higher honours. Tasmania’s difference was always that the football culture itself was never in doubt; it was the infrastructure around it that lagged.
A VFL licence does not fix everything overnight. Recruiting, coaching depth, facilities, and the simple logistics of a team based on an island competing on the mainland all present genuine challenges, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But what it does is formalise a signal that has been missing: that there is now an actual, defined next step for a promising twenty-something who might otherwise have drifted out of the game entirely, assuming, not unreasonably, that nobody mainland was ever going to come looking.
A reasonable dose of perspective
None of this guarantees Hay, or any of his new teammates, an AFL career. The VFL is a notoriously difficult competition, stacked with mature-bodied men who have been playing at a high level for years, some of them delisted from AFL lists and plenty more with genuine senior experience. Making a VFL list is a meaningful first step, not a guarantee of anything. It would be doing Hay no favours, and would frankly be bad journalism, to suggest his inclusion on this list is some inevitable staircase to AFL selection.
What I would say, with the measured optimism I try to bring to these columns, is that pathways work in aggregate, not in individual cases. Not every player who gets the phone call ends up playing senior football. Some will find the step up too much, others will be squeezed out by better-credentialled recruits as the Tasmanian program matures and inevitably becomes more competitive for list spots. That is simply how football development functions, in Adelaide or Alice Springs or anywhere else. The value of the pathway is not that it guarantees Lachy Hay an AFL debut. The value is that it now exists at all, for him and for the next kid who gets a similarly unexpected call in twelve months’ time.
What the Commission should take from this
If there is a lesson here for the people running the game nationally, it is one about patience and proof of concept rather than headline-chasing. The temptation with any new licence, particularly one as politically and financially significant as Tasmania’s, is to reach for the big symbolic wins: marquee signings, high draft picks, instant on-field success. Those things matter for the brand. But the quieter metric, the one that actually indicates whether a pathway is functioning as intended, is whether local talent who would previously have fallen through the cracks is now being found, contacted, and given a genuine opportunity.
By that measure, whatever becomes of Hay’s own career, the early signs from Tasmania’s VFL entry look sound. A player assumed a phone call about his footballing future was a joke. Soon enough, if the structures hold and the competition matures as planned, that kind of disbelief should become the exception rather than something worth writing a column about. That, more than any licence fee or stadium deal, is the real measure of whether this project succeeds.
