Two years to show unity

THE AFL will partly fund Tasmania’s team in the VFL from 2021 but the state must stump up the rest.

AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan said the state had been granted a provisional licence to join the Victorianbased competition — a pseudo AFL reserves competition — and the state had two years to prove it can do it.

“The licence is provisional because we need to establish a unified push for the VFL team,” Mr McLachlan said.

“It needs unity. It needs to be sustainable, and there needs to be the talent there to support it.

“That is a challenge for all Tasmanian football.”

The Tassie Mariners state under-18 team will join the TAC Cup full-time next year, to be fully funded by the AFL under the banner of Team Tasmania — the AFL’s name for the new structure announced yesterday.

That gives the state two years to groom current and future Mariners to form the backbone of the VFL team, with mature-age Tasmanian State League players providing the physical grunt.

“We are committed to funding part of that,” Mr McLach- lan said. “But this Team Tasmania and the push to have a TAC Cup team, which will be fully funded by the AFL and then the push into the VFL, will deliberately be left in part for Tasmania to fund.

“It needs to be united from all of Tasmania — the North, South, North-West — to come in behind it and have an advisory board that harnesses the passion for football in this state, whether that is community support, corporate support, government support.

“It actually needs to be a unified push.

“That’s the challenge. Tasmanians need to rally behind this rather than be something plonked in from the AFL.”