Coaches struggle as wait goes on

CROWS coach Matthew Nicks admits his assistant coaches — whose jobs are in limbo as the AFL wades through the financial crisis brought on by the COVID-19 shutdown — are doing it tough while they wait to know if, rather than when, they can return to work.

The AFL has asked the 18 clubs to cut soft cap expenditure from $9.7 million to $8.7 million this year, and again to $6.7 million by the start of 2021 and Nicks said he was asking for more direction from the league as to what the soft cap would look like moving forward. But there’s one area of the footy department he doesn’t envisage shrinking: player welfare.

“If there are reasonably steep cuts in the soft cap and you’re going to have to take staff away, the key comes back to what’s best for our playing group and what allows them to progress and develop as people as well as footballers and straight away you look at welfare and player development,” Nicks said.

“That’s still a really key area to our game and it’s important we don’t take any of our resources out of there.

“We’ll look at how we structure our coaching department up. Analytics? How much stays in that area? Because that’s been an area that’s had a fair bit of commentary around it over the last two or three years as far as how many computers are in the box on game day.”

As the waiting game continues, Nicks was aware of how the uncertainty was affecting his assistants.

“They’re doing it quite tough at this point, but we’re sticking around each other,” he said. “We’ve got the opportunity to catch up over media platforms, we’ll ‘Zoom’ each other and continually talk about where things are at, we’re talking about game plan, we’re discussing how best to look after our players.”