The AFL Commission chair is demanding a return to high standards, and it's about time. Someone finally had the guts to say our players have gotten incredibly lazy at hiding their tracks.
AFL Commission chair Craig Drummond finally stepped up to the microphone this week and said what every real fan has been screaming at their television for years: if you want to play professional Australian rules football, you need to know how to run a clandestine hotel operation without the authorities getting involved.
The Sydney Swans’ decision to stand down five players for drinking and inviting women back to their Melbourne hotel room is exactly the kind of tough love this game desperately needs. It is a massive victory for the front office. For too long, we’ve watched a generation of highly paid athletes completely disregard the basic mechanics of plausible deniability.
You look at the tape of this Melbourne incident, and it is just fundamentally sloppy. Leaving a paper trail? Walking non-contracted personnel through the main lobby without signing non-disclosure agreements? Relying on hotel Wi-Fi to coordinate the logistics? This league has a problem. We are drafting physical specimens who can kick a Sherrin fifty metres on the run, but they completely freeze up the moment they have to slide a fifty-dollar note to a night concierge and ask him to forget what floor they’re on. It is an embarrassing lack of situational awareness, and Drummond is right to put them on notice. If you can’t execute under the pressure of a 2:00 a.m. bed check, you don't belong in the finals.
Back in my day, a postgame bender was an exercise in tactical discipline. You had your key forwards securing the perimeter, the ruckman negotiating with local law enforcement, and the midfield pacing the drinks so everyone could still pass a concussion test on Monday morning. We respected the badge. We respected the game. Most importantly, we respected the club’s PR department enough to make sure the only witnesses were financially compensated before the sun came up. You can't teach that kind of team culture. It has to be built over years of shared trauma and complicity.
I was having a steak with an old-school list manager at a pub in Richmond the other day, and he was nearly in tears over his pint. He told me the modern player is so obsessed with their brand, their TikToks, and their recovery ice baths that they’ve completely lost the art of the cover-up. They expect the club to do everything for them. When a crisis hits, they just sit back in their designer tracksuits and wait for executives to draft a grovelling apology. There is no grit. There is no personal accountability to destroy the evidence.
We spend millions developing these kids' athletic profiles, but nobody is teaching them how to confiscate a smartphone at the door.
Drummond noted this zero-tolerance stance was running parallel to a separate police investigation into an allegation of sexual assault at the same hotel. Now, I am not a legal expert, but from a purely strategic standpoint, having multiple, overlapping, career-ending incidents occurring in the exact same facility is just terrible spacing. It’s poor communication. If you don't know where your teammates are committing their respective breaches of the criminal code, you aren't playing as a cohesive unit. You’re just a bunch of individuals making selfish decisions in separate suites, crowding the zone for the detectives.
The real victims in all of this, of course, are executives like Craig Drummond. Do you know how exhausting it is for a man in his tax bracket to have to stand at a podium and talk about "values"? He should be on a golf course. He should be enjoying a quiet Shiraz in a corporate box. Instead, he’s doing administrative clean-up because a few twenty-somethings don't have the intangibles to handle their own messes. The emotional toll this takes on the board of directors is completely ignored by the mainstream media.
We need to get back to the basics. It’s time for recruiters to stop looking at vertical leaps and start looking at pure instinct. We need to draft kids who know how to locate the service elevator. We need players who understand that "what happens on tour" is not just a catchy slogan, but a legally binding operational directive. Until the Swans figure that out, they are going to struggle in October, and quite frankly, they deserve to.