Beaussie wrote:Raiderdave wrote:massacred ?
this is just another go at Phil Gould ... & his 15 year war with News Ltd
the Panthers are doing just fine
Yes massacred.
Raiderdave wrote:but here are the real facts
GWS ( Great Waste of Space ) Midgits
12K make believe members who paid next to nothing for the privilege.... 75% of these not even from Western Sydney
A fantasic achievement and set to grow much bigger than NRL clubs in western Sydney.
Raiderdave wrote:they have no permanent training facility
Umm, clearly you've not heard of Blacktown Olympic Park paid for by the NSW Government as a training base for GWS.
Raiderdave wrote:operate on a shoe string budget already ... even with their sponsors
How is this a bad thing. Costs kept down and a whopping $10 million in sponsorship already secured.
Raiderdave wrote:a roster that will ensure them the Wooden spoon in 2012... just behind the Thuns
Building for the future.
Raiderdave wrote:&
Key staff deserting the organisation in droves
"
get me the hell outta here
" being the motto of this new club
Rubbish
Raiderdave wrote:plus
the stench surrounding this club , with their dodgey ... questionable ... downright disgraceful activity in signing players making them a pariah amongst even the brain washed morons who follow this game in the Sthn States
Hmm, whatever. A better way of looking at it, a rivialry is already building which is great.
Raiderdave wrote:yeah ... going well this mob
Exactly. Worried much?
Ah
I'll post this again
& maybe you should pull your head out of your date .... & read it this time
K
http://www.smh.com.au/AFL/AFL-news/a-gi ... zz1ep8Zho5
IN A rare lapse of taste and judgment, AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou three days ago applauded the Greater Western Sydney decision to use Tom Scully's father Phil as a paid lure for the No. 1 draft pick as ''a stroke of genius''.
It was an extraordinary observation by Demetriou, which only served to accentuate again how the AFL's establishment rules for its two new clubs have created an environment of deception and mistrust.
Demetriou's comment cast a pall over the 2011 national draft and the Giants' big moment as they selected the nation's best young footballers. The circumstances of the Scully deal have left a sour aftertaste for the rest of the AFL.
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The competition did not force 20-year-old Scully to walk out on the club that sacrificed so much of its honour to win him in the first place, but in designing the rules and a once-secret ''window'' to sign players with a year remaining on their contracts, it has helped tarnish the reputation of the Greater Western Sydney poster boy.
In no way was the signing of Scully snr ''a stroke of genius''. It was a grubby and apparently dodgy deal that shows a lack of judgment by the parent involved and one recently revealed to have been put in place a year ago.
It also hardly requires ''genius'' to sign a footballer on the ridiculous sum that Scully will earn to play football.
In fact, so ingenious was the Giants' move to contract Phil Scully on a six-year, $680,000 wage as a full-time recruiter that the AFL's investigations department deemed the deal a total contrivance.
Phil Scully, in the eyes of the league's salary-cap watchdog Ken Wood, is worthless to GWS and his entire wage has been thrown in with his son's pay packet as part of the new club's total player payments. What a demeaning outcome for the family.
The Giants and the AFL insist the club was transparent in reporting of the Scully snr deal. That remains dubious and every other club is entitled to question why GWS was not fined or why, at the least, it took so long to reveal the agreement.
And young Scully? He claims he knew nothing of his father's deal until he left Melbourne two months ago. If Scully is telling the truth, then the father has done the son a grave disservice. If not, then the truth is what had become generally accepted - that despite the young man's protestations he was contracted to the new Sydney club late last year.
Not only was the father-son deal not clever, it exposed severe flaws in the club, which has been beset by bureaucratic obstacles and oversights. Inaugural CEO Dale Holmes was sacked on the day the Scully news broke and it emerged that while this was not Holmes' ultimate undoing, it did not help that no one in authority at the club had reported the Phil Scully agreement to the board.
Holmes' position had been in peril for some time. That Holmes was one of Demetriou's first big appointments when he became the league boss, landing a position on the AFL executive in the key role of running the game in New South Wales and then inaugural CEO of the Giants, must also have galled Demetriou, who continued to defend Holmes for most of this season.
The fact he was removed so soon before the club's final step suggests much time has been wasted by the club, which now has two major sponsors but has failed to secure a permanent summer training venue.
All year senior assistant coach Mark Williams has been agitating for a resolution on the club's failure to secure a central training facility and the frustration in the football department was starting to spill outside the inner sanctum.
It has also emerged that the Giants' first business operations manager, Ralph O'Shaughnessy, who departed shortly before Holmes, did not have a good working relationship with football boss Graeme Allan. Several other clubs, fined in the past for player contract compliance oversights, are now wondering why the Giants escaped fines given problems with some player marketing under O'Shaughnessy's watch.
Certainly the club is in no position to handle fines. Holmes, who believed
the new club was operating on a relatively shoestring budget, was known to be at odds with the AFL's chief financial officer, Ian Anderson.
That the AFL has moved one of its most talented executives, David Matthews,
into the position of Giants CEO is an acknowledgment of the challenges facing the club.Matthews has committed to the club for one year
and has identified securing a permanent year-round training precinct as his first priority. He has been responsible for some of the AFL's bravest and most innovative development strategies - an area that had negligible momentum before he took over.
That head office has moved key media adviser Nick Johnston to Blacktown is an acknowledgement GWS has an image problem, which could not be excused by its emergence in a potentially hostile region.
But Demetriou knows his latest baby needs to secure some new blood beyond overpaid, uncontracted footballers and code-hoppers. Tom Harley lasted several months in an administrative role at GWS, claiming he could not in all conscience work actively against Geelong. Now he is managing AFL NSW.
Paul Kelly, the face of the club's development in southern NSW, quit several days ago but has been uncomfortable with the Giants for some months. The AFL and GWS strove all year to appoint a key former player as football director. Figures ranging from Danny Frawley to Matthew Richardson have resisted, and while the club believed it had come close to securing Leigh Matthews, he also knocked back the role.
The GWS board is expected to make new appointments before 2012 with Matthews surely expected to work closely with his senior directors in the handling of Kevin Sheedy should a coaching handover take place at the end of season No. 1.
It is beyond dispute that the AFL's second Sydney club has failed to make the inroads achieved by the game's second team in Queensland in its lead-up season. Gold Coast had no image problem this time last year and the message to the competition as a whole was that the Suns were a team both on and off the field.
The same could not be said of the Giants. Now David Matthews must make up for lost time and work to unite his administration and centralise his football team.
But the club faces a tougher task repairing the damage done to Tom Scully and his once-perfect reputation. No wonder the player is so desperate to let his on-field work begin. Because off-field has been a messy thicket
