Richmond turns up soap factor on glitter strip
RICHMOND’S season has morphed into a bizarre TV episode of Kardashians Do The Gold Coast.
The wild child rookie and the emerging ruckman in a boozy scuffle outside a strip club then put on the next flight home to locked down Victoria.
The senior coach involved in petty squabbles with the media as he tries to boast about past glories.
And the wives of the club boss and the captain exchanging pot shots after a “beauty treatment” gone wrong, all of it played out in the gossip pages.
Yet like the filthy rich Kardashians, so far the Teflon Tigers have shown no indication it is about to ruin their shot at a dynasty.
Yesterday’s juicy update involved youngsters Sydney Stack and Cameron ColemanJones trying to break every COVID rule set by the AFL.
And in the process giving off the worst possible perception: that the AFL could stampede into Queensland with wives and families, mocking COVID safety when they were not lounging by the pool sipping a cocktail.
If stumbling out of a strip club at 3.30am and heading to the souva joint is not the perfect place to find a drunken scuffle then it is hard to know where to find a better one.
The penalties came with a premium that showed the AFL is aware its presence in this state is on a knife-edge: 10match bans for the pair and a $100,000 fine for Richmond.
AFL boss Gillon McLachlan had only just defended bringing his own family into the hub as drones hovered overhead on Thursday, with Queensland media painting the hard quarantine centre as a party hub.
Say what you want about the AFL’s attempt to keep its season alive, but even McLachlan could not defend the AFL’s treatment while families missed lifesaving treatment because of locked down borders. So at the very least now Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk gets to come down hard on the AFL.
Palaszczuk tweeted on Friday: “AFL players caught breaking COVID rules should be sent home. Queensland won’t tolerate it.”
And the league gets to boast it used a big stick on the latest covidiots.
But the AFL was not the only one betrayed.
Richmond has joined Geelong as an AFL club desperate to keep all of its coaches together in this COVID storm while rivals have jettisoned as many as five assistants.
Already Richmond will have to make hard decisions on how to cut more than $3m out of its cap for next year.
Before they get on the plane home, Coleman-Jones and Stack will likely have to look a staffer or coach in the eye, aware there is not money in the football cap for that person next year because of their actions.