Putting this in here, plenty of Essendon, a little bit of blitz too.
Demise of the dream for football indigenous talent PAUL TOOHEY SUNDAY HERALD SUN JUNE 13, 2015 10:36PM SHARETHE kid bursts into the Northern Territory Football League with the Tiwi Bombers. Never seen before, he’s 18 and loaded with the same island talent that produced players such as Michael Long and Cyril Rioli.
The AFL recruiter sees him collect 38 possessions and kick five goals.
After making some inquiries, he learns the Aboriginal kid really is raw — he’s never played in a rep side or attended an academy, and has only been playing island footy for two years.
He crosses him off his list.
“Readiness” is what the clubs are now looking for in indigenous players, because freakish skills are no longer enough.
Only one indigenous player, Nakia Cockatoo, a highly self-primed individual, has been drafted from north Australia in the last two years, picked up by Geelong; while Jake Long was rookie-listed by Essendon under the father-son rule.
There have been lean draft years in the past, but this is supposedly a time of high engagement by the AFL in indigenous football, from its Indigenous Round to the placement of full-time community engagement officers in remote communities.
Yet remote players are not lasting in the game, or being recruited. The Wikipedia statement that the NT “produces more professional Australian footballers per capita in the Australian Football League than any other state or territory” is out of date. There is no question clubs are exercising wariness following the Liam Jurrah experience with Melbourne, where his hometown tribal demands became so strong they cost him his career.
The recent list of young Aboriginal players from the north who have cashed in their dreams early for reasons of homesickness, returned home because of cultural responsibilities, or been delisted without having fired a shot, is a substantial one.
One such player is Tiwi player Ross Tungatalum, who St Kilda saw playing for Darwin club St Mary’s in 2009, the same year that Jurrah was firing up for Melbourne. Like Jurrah, he was recruited purely for his talent, but spent the following year on the Saints’ rookie list without playing a game.
Part of Tungatalum’s problem was that the Saints were a premiership-bound team, partly that the Saints didn’t invest in him.
“I wanted to stay another year, but I didn’t get a contract,” says Tungatalum, who now divides his time with the Tiwi Bombers and the Wodonga Raiders.
The AFL advises clubs — on the strength of that experience, and that of Relton Roberts, another bush star recruited to Richmond with disastrous results — that they should give remote players more than one year on the rookie list to acclimatise to the big league.
“Relton Roberts was the classic,” says Grey Morris, chief football writer for the NT News.
“They put him in a house in Melbourne with three or four others and told him to look after himself.
“It came to the point where Dean Rioli — who was with Essendon — put his hand up and said, ‘Come and live with me.’ That’s disgraceful. The kid was back in Darwin after two games of AFL.
“The clubs pump their chests and say, ‘We’re right into indigenous players, they’ve got the x-factor,’ but they’ve got to look after them.”
The AFL’s community engagement officer, Jason Misfud, says lessons have been learned — but the price is that there is now little prospect for a bush star to be signed on spec, even if the public embraces such players.
The thinking now is that any kid, but especially an indigenous kid, must be engaged from at least the age of 14 in “interventions”, or engagements, such as playing in local comps, rep sides, academies, learning the set-plays of football, and showing strong school attendance as part of a “better person, better player” philosophy.
“If he emerges at 18, plays with the NTFL and then gets drafted, the evidence is telling us the likelihood of him staying with the AFL is a less than if that boy was identified at 14 and went through those engagement points,” says Misfud.
Remarks by Adelaide Crow’s recruitment manager Matt Rendell in 2012 suggested unless an Aboriginal player had one parent of white heritage, they’d never make it in the AFL.
The Crows ditched Rendell for his comments, which he claimed were taken out of context. But they are holding true in the post-Jurrah years.
True bush players are no longer deemed employable by clubs unless they’ve spent years in the hands of junior football managers.
Only two indigenous players took to the field in the recent “Dreamtime at the G” game between Essendon and Richmond, but Misfud says more indigenous players — whether drafted or rookie-listed — are being picked up than ever before.
“We’ve had 34 indigenous players in the last two drafts and that’s a record for us,” says Misfud. But with the exception of Cockatoo and Long, they are from the southern realms.
Academic Sean Gorman, who wrote Brother Boys about Jim and Phil Krakouer, and helped the AFL Players Association draft its guidelines for recruiting indigenous players, says Jurrah was considered “the poster boy for the remote recruitment push”.
Jurrah was doing well early on and, with Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney coming into the scene and getting the lion’s share of young draft talent, clubs went searching for more Jurrahs.
“Some other clubs got creative and tried to go remote, looking for that indigenous champion,” says Gorman. “That’s gone on the backburner given the issues around Jurrah and young Dayle Garlett.”
Garlett was no remote boy but a Noongar from Perth (Swan Districts) who was recruited by Hawthorn in late 2013, and almost immediately ran into problems with training no-shows. Meth was his problem.
The fact is that clubs look at Aboriginal players differently. The AFL doesn’t call it racism, but positive discrimination.
Michael Long with then Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy.
Michael Long with then Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy.
“There is a perception that indigenous players get additional scrutiny,” says Misfud.“My understanding is that it’s only done as due diligence to give extra support, rather than as a result of stereotypes. It’s incumbent on us that we don’t set young Aboriginal players up to fail once they are drafted. We need to learn and we’re addressing that.”
Two years ago, 12 per cent of players in the AFL were indigenous. It has dropped to 10 per cent, but as Misfud says: “Producing 10 per cent out of two and a half per cent of the population is still an extraordinarily positive over-representation of indigenous people.”
That is no doubt right, yet not everyone would agree with Misfud’s view that Liam Jurrah’s story is ultimately a positive one.
“Liam’s story enriched the AFL more generally and gave us a more intimate understanding so we can better support such players,” he says.
So often, the failure of remote bush players to cut it is described as “homesickness”, but Gorman says it’s not just about being away from your family: it goes to issues of identity.
“To put that in perspective, Liam Jurrah was getting phone calls from people in Alice Springs who were making threats to his extended and nuclear family, that they would take to them with machetes. That must weigh heavily on you, given issues of payback are real.”
The evidence shows clubs still want indigenous players, but young Aboriginal men with entrenched tribal responsibilities — and that means almost anyone from a remote Territory or north WA communities — are looked at cautiously.
“Unless you’re a blue-chip indigenous player who’s met significant benchmarks, it seems players aren’t being picked up,” says Gorman.
“Recruiters seem to have become hesitant. Clubs may not want to expend their energies going further out to the bush for, maybe, little return.”
Former Darwin player and Crows star Andrew McLeod says recruitment figures from the north may look low, but suggests it could be cyclical, or about the players themselves.
He cites the case of Amos Frank, from the APY Lands in central Australia, who was a rookie listed by the Hawks in 2011 and delisted in 2013 without ever playing.
“I know Hawthorn did everything they could for Amos, but unfortunately he didn’t cut it in the end,” says McLeod.
“It’s a massive step up going from APY Lands to the SANFL to AFL. Sometimes it’s a bit too much. Amos had a couple of years in the system and he didn’t quite make it.
“But he’s taken a lot from that experience, he’s working for the SANFL in the APY Lands. So something good has come from it.”
Kevin Sheedy says the current low numbers from the north are quite unusual. We should be better than back in 1988 when we drafted Michael Long.
That’s over a quarter of a century back.
“Are the kids playing soccer? I don’t think so. Big-bash cricket? Don’t reckon. NRL? Maybe,” he says.
But Sheedy is also prepared to allow that it might be cyclical, pointing out there were times in his early days when they couldn’t find any (white) players in the Victorian bush league, which was a problem because teams were only allowed to recruit two interstate players in any year.
Willie Rioli Sr, who coaches the Tiwi Bombers, says he’s noticed the AFL clubs taking less interest in his players in recent years. “I don’t know why the AFL aren’t focusing on our Territory boys,” he says. But Rioli agrees it cuts two ways.
“I don’t know whether they want our boys to click on to AFL straight away, and whether our boys are quite capable of adjusting to that.
“Just the thought of leaving their home is hard. A lot of the Tiwi boys — and all indigenous boys — have families at a young age. That holds them back a little bit.
“The AFL have got to invest in that. I also tell the boys it’s not about getting on a plane and making it. There’s a lot of hard work.”
Austin Wonaeamirri was a self-starter who took himself through the SANFL before being picked by Melbourne, playing 31 games until he was delisted in 2011. His form had suffered due to an ankle injury but also due to the death of his father on the Tiwi Islands, which he felt badly.
Wonaeamirri and Jurrah both played for the winning Kilcunda Bass Panthers last Saturday. After the game, Wonaeamirri explained how during his time with the Demons he felt he had neglected his cultural responsibilities too long.
“Being away for eight years from home, I lost a bit of my culture as well,” he says.
“Going back and reconnecting is very strong for me.” He does not blame the clubs, saying: “They’ve got welfare people and even indigenous welfare as well, the clubs are doing the best they can to keep indigenous players in the system.”
Yet he and Jurrah both said they felt clubs were now shying away from recruiting remote players. “But from my point of view,” said Wonaeamirri, “keep recruiting young indigenous players because now the system is better and more organised and there’s more help for us around the club.”
Jurrah said getting remote players into the AFL was a big commitment for players and clubs.
“I just think it is the indigenous and remote communities, they’re really not used to city life, it takes a while to get used to it,” he says.
“For myself, coming from a remote community to a big city it took me a while to get used to it. I had friends in the city like (Darwin-raised teammate) Aaron Davey who made me feel welcome and took me under his wings.
“That’s why I’ve got a lot of respect for Aaron Davey.
“I reckon clubs should give support and get to know their background and get to know what their lifestyle is back home and know that it will take a long time for indigenous people to get used to things here.
“For myself, when I was first recruited I wasn’t even talking that much, I was a bit shy, I kept to myself.”
Jurrah says Melbourne coach Dean Bailey did make the effort, going to his home town of Yuendumu, which he says was good for him and the club.
For Jurrah, the weekend game was his first trip back to Victoria “after a couple of years”. He plays in Alice Springs and says, at 26, he’s not sure what his future holds.
“I’ve got a little boy, I’ll see what happens with my short-term or long-term career,” he says. “I’m just back home with my family.”
Joel Bowden, now back in the Territory as general manager of community football at AFL NT after 14 years at Richmond, says the aim is not solely to produce draft picks for the AFL each year. The NT State Academy and the Michael Long Learning and Leadership Centre, which opened in Darwin this year, is about taking young people and “developing self-worth, confidence and ultimately attaining community leadership positions”, he says.
Outback communities can be hard, conflicted places of high unemployment and, sometimes, outright despair.
Football is one thing that brings people together; and many kids and families see making the AFL as the ultimate attainment.
Now, the AFL in the north considers it has responsibilities that go beyond just producing good footballers. The thinking is that you can’t develop a player unless you develop the person.
“We want to offer them a high-performance program that provides a clear pathway, but that clear pathway will not result in the majority being drafted,” says Bowden. “We need to build that leadership capacity, to give employment opportunities.”
People are watching closely, to see what the AFL-auspiced Michael Long centre will bring.
Ben Licht is a social worker for indigenous youth who has watched the stream of players coming out of the north and heading back home after short stays in the AFL. He believes the academy approach is fine, but says wildcard bush players can’t be lost to football.
Licht is just a punter, with no position in the AFL, no commentator’s gig.
On that basis, he can have the last word.
His idea is to cut the north into zones and allocate clubs their own areas in order to force them to invest in remote areas. This would mean, for instance, that West Coast got the Kimberley; the Crows got the APY Lands; Essendon got the Tiwi Islands (which it already, kind of, has); Carlton got the mid-central NT; and so on.
Licht argues clubs could recruit remote kids and put them on their rookie B-list from the age of 17, for two years, with a maximum attendance requirement of, say, 10 weeks a year.
After that, the player could be elevated to a Category A rookie for another two years, when the player would hit the optimum 19-to-21-year-old recruiting age, and everyone — clubs and players — could make informed decisions about each other.
“What we’re missing is people playing the game the natural way,” says Licht.
“If you vox-pop 100 people going into the ’G, they want to see people who kick freak goals, tuck the ball under their arm and go for a run and take freak marks.
“They don’t want to see rolling mauls and full-zone defences where all 36 are in one third of the ground.
If the AFL is serious about wanting to repair the game, they need to go to the Tiwi Island grand final, because that will have two stoppages in the whole game.”