Age old questions
Should the Suns go for experience over a new face for their next coach?
GOLD Coast have gone through two coaches in seven years and can’t afford to get it wrong with a third.
That is why the club must seek to appoint a senior coach with experience in the role, as dumped mentor Rodney Eade has voiced.
The risk is too great to bring in a rookie coach that is untried at the highest level. You know what you’re getting with the other.
Critics including former Suns captain Gary Ablett say the players weren’t developed properly in their earliest years under Guy McKenna and that they are still paying for it now.
They need a steady hand now more than ever, not only for onfield efforts but for player management and recruiting. Talk that they need an inexperienced coach who can oversee the young list’s development is flawed. As the old saying goes, you dress for the job you want not for the one you have. Suns CEO Mark Evans helped create the level 4 coaching course when he was at the AFL and could look to one of its graduates for the gig. It puts Suns assistant Dean Solomon, currently completing the course, right in the race and as he already has the complete respect of the club’s players and staff, he needs to be considered.
But while he is arguably ready, would he be able to make the tough decisions on the current list and assistants that he has worked with since the club’s inception into the AFL? They need an experienced outsider who can make the calls without an emotional link – like Evans has done since arriving this year.
TWO words: fresh ideas.
Sure, a coaching veteran who knows which set of posts to aim at would be handy, but nothing screams enthusiasm like new blood.
Few say a bad word about Rodney Eade. Yet the fact remains that for all the huffing and puffing about the recalibrating of a culture more in line with a Schoolies weekend than footy club, the results were the same. Not good. We’re seven seasons in to the Suns now. Frankly, it feels like the time has come and gone for an old head who will call a spade a spade and a bender a bender. That veteran coach was needed in 2011.
What the Suns must find now is not a way to catch up to the rest of the AFL, but surge beyond them. Why shoot for the pack when you can go racing past them?
Who says the next coach can’t actually turn this motley crew in to a force? New faces, fresh ideas, that’s what we’re talking about here.
The fresh plan of attack must start at the top. That means club boffins thinking beyond the old stayers on the AFL coaching race track and opting for a sprinter.
After all, what is the ultimate ambition here? Mid-table anonymity? Or a Western Bulldogs-style evolution that delivers flags faster than you can say “who is Luke Beveridge?”.
Coaches like Eade, or even Nathan Buckley for that matter, can re-establish the Suns as something more than a laughing stock.
A fresh face, however, that’s where the Suns can actually become a club envied by rivals.