AFANA News - 03/13/2000

Provided by our man in Melbourne, Johnson Leung

Hello fans:

After six long days and nights, the first round of the AFL season for the new century (or so it seems) is finally over. The first round produced a lot of firsts: first match in Melbourne's new Colonial Stadium, first wins to new coaches Danny Frawley (Richmond), Ken Judge (West Coast), Mark Thompson (Geelong). North Melbourne's title defence hit a triple whammy. Not only they suffered a shock 43-point loss to a rejuvenated West Coast (although their new jumper looks ugly and rather like Adelaide's away jumper). The most bizarre injury goes to midfielder and dual premiership player Anthony Stevens. Stevens was having a few drinks with his teammates and relatives in Redback Gardens Hotel, part owned by captain Wayne Carey, on early Saturday morning after the Kangaroos' loss. It was understood that there was a party on the second floor of the hotel, and was becoming very rowdy and disorderly, with glasses thorwn out of windows. As Stevens' group left the hotel, he went back to warn the hotel staff when a window on the second floor broke loose for whatever reason and hit Stevens' head. Blood began to flow profusely as the glass shattered around the group. Fortunately, the hotel is directly opposite the Royal Melbourne Hospital, so friends promptly put Stevens into a car and sent him for treatment.

Stevens suffered a 30cm cut on his left face from the corner of the mouth across his cheek to the neck and an artery was cut in the process, and was fortunate to survive after emergency surgery and two blood transfusions. He was released from hospital today (Monday) and, despite having 30 stitches on his face, was still able to smile. The facial injury, plus his injured left shoulder were enough to see him out for six weeks. Police is investigating the incident. Stevens will be joined on the sidelines by his captain Wayne Carey, who torn his AC joint and will miss at least one week.

Kangaroos also suffered last week after the sudden resignation of Mark Dawson as chairman of selectors. The actual reason is still unknown, although it could be related to the promotion of Ryan Pagan, son of Kangaroos' coach Denis, to the senior list. Dawson and Pagan Sr. were teammates in North Melbourne in 1972 and had been best friends since. Although Roos' CEO Greg Miller denied there had been a rift in the club's match committee regarding Ryan's promotion, it would be sad if the long standing friendship just because a coach promoted his son to the senior team.

Don't forget though: last year North Melbourne lost the first four matches of the regular season before going on to win the premiership, so don't be panic.

Colonial Stadium update
Melbourne's new A$460-million Colonial Stadium opened for business for Essendon-Port Adelaide clash (in which the Bombers thrashed Port by 94 points), with many facilities still unavailable due to recent industrial disputes. Nevertheless, most of 43,012 visitors gave the stadium a thumbs up, although a number of people complained of long queues outside the gates and the ticket booths, the difficulty of finding their allocated seats, and the prices of food and drink in the stadium. There were also some congestion outside the stadium as fans caught public transport after the game, as Spencer Street railway station is just across the tracks. The AFL was also impressed with the crowd reaction. However, the stadium has been criticized by legendary rock singer Roger Daltry (of The Who fame). He said: "This would make a great place for football, but f--k it for music." He later indicated sound was hitting the far side of the stadium and "bouncing back", affecting the quality of the music. A number of concert-goers interviewed at the weekend also complained of sound quality, and echos around the stage.

Ms Alison Theobald, head of sales and marketing at Colonial stadium, said there had been some "teething problems" at Saturday night's concert, but said sound problems had been experienced by few of the audience. She said that while sound testing had been carried out it was difficult to determine how the stadium would perform under concert conditions.said the stadium was full of echo with the roof closed. The stadium hosted the Ultimate Rock Symphony concert on Saturday night.

Carlton vs AFL on TV rights
Carlton and the AFL are at loggerheads again, this time on TV coverage. It was sparked by Carlton president John Elliott's threat to block the telecast of Monday's Carlton-Brisbane match into Melbourne metro by Channel Seven's pay-TV arm C7, but had allowed interstate coverage and a replay on Seven Melbourne. Elliott said the local telecast would greatly discourage fans from paying to watch the game at the ground, thus reducing gate revenue, and stated that Carlton Cricket and Football Social Club, as manager of Optus Oval, has control of broadcast rights. Seven replied that it might withdraw equipment and camera crew from Optus Oval, thus withdrawing the coverage altogether because C7 and Seven share the same signal. The local telecast went ahead today (Monday) as planned, and so Elliott is preparing to go to court to seek compensation. AFL chief executive Wayne Jackson said Carlton was actually attempting to break existing broadcasting agreement between the league and Seven, signed back in 1996 and due to expire next year, and includes free-to-air and pay-TV coverage. According to a press statement, he said Carlton's action jeopadises future agreements between AFL and Seven, and "will significantly reduce the revenue we are able to distribute to our clubs which in turn will cast serious doubt over the ability of most clubs, including several in Victoria, to survive in the long term."

Mr Jackson said Carlton's real agenda was to set up a "Super League" (a la Australian rugby league in 1995 when Rupert Murdoch's News Limited paid a number of rugby league clubs to set up his own competition for TV coverage), which will hurt the league, 15 other clubs and the development of Aussie Rules football, and the AFL may take further action as necessary, including fines or forfeitment of premiership points. He said pay-TV contracts were a significant part of the league's revenue, and dismissed Mr Elliott's claim Carlton did not get a cent from the AFL's agreement with Seven, saying a significant portion of the A$3.163 million it received from the league came from the agreement.

Today (Monday), the match day, Mr Jackson reiterated that Carlton is trying to control its own broadcast rights (a la the MCC), and the power of the AFL to negotiate broadcast rights on behalf of the 16 clubs, Carlton included. He said the Blues were setting double standards by trying to stop matches shown in Victoria live against the gate, yet were planning to show their home matches on the Net and ask members to pay to watch them. For background info, C7, Channel Seven's pay-TV channel, can be seen in metro areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane on Optus Vision, and in regional Australia on Austar. C7's predecessor, Sports AFL, had been showing AFL matches live since 1996, when Optus Vision was set up, but always blacked out the live coverage into Victoria. However, when Sportsvision, the company producing Sports AFL channel, collapsed in 1998 due to financial troubles, Seven took over and hastily set up two C7 channels, with AFL matches integrated into the schedule. C7 shows more than 20 matches live around Australia every year, including some matches in Melbourne.

AFL 1999 Annual Report highlights
*The AFL is to break with its stringent debt-reduction program to borrow the A$30 million it requires to make the first down payment on Colonial Stadium. AFL chief executive Wayne Jackson revealed at the recent annual general meeting that because the sale of Waverley Park was being delayed, the league would have to raise the money for its investment the stadium through borrowing at a time when it was also budgeting to lose A$15 million over the next two years.

The apparent departure from recent AFL financial policy was, Jackson conceded, "unusual" but not any harbinger of future difficulties. Anticipated losses of A$4 million this year and A$11 million the next were instead, he said, the consequences of a decision to advance dividends to the 16 clubs so that they could meet a A$15 million increase in player payments that will occur over the next two years. Total player payments, which amounted to A$68 million in 1999, will rise to A$76 million (A$4.75 million per club) in 2000, and A$83 million (A$5.185 million per club) in 2001, a rise outstripping even the rapid increase in payments over the past 10 years, during which time the average footballer's wage of A$42,000 in 1990 reached A$117,398 last year. Figures released in the report show that last year 249 players received more than A$100,000 compared with just eight in 1990. Four players -- believed to be Wayne Carey, James Hird, Tony Lockett and Nathan Buckley -- received more than $400,000. And payments are set to continue to escalate. Mr Jackson said that with a new television rights deal on the horizon and an underwritten minimum for those rights of at least A$100 million from Channel Seven, the league was comfortable with the advance. "Those two losses have been borne because we have chosen to pay extra dividends to our clubs in order to enable them to pay payments to their players," he said. "We are pretty confident about where our revenue will be going in the next couple of years, therefore we are prepared to share that with the players."

Last year the AFL returned a dividend of A$2.22 million to each club but by next year it will be forwarding A$3.158 million. Mr Jackson said the league's financial forecast was for a return to profit in 2002, and before then it hopes to have sold Waverley Park and reduced, or eliminated, the borrowings it is about to make. The sale of Waverley Park - for which the league is expecting at least A$30million - was expected to open this year but has been set back by the City of Greater Dandenong's attempt to have the site heritage listed and, if possible, retained. Neighbouring City of Monash (which includes Waverley Park) has also applied for a heritage listing. If successful, the application could reduce the price of the site and therefore reduce returns to the league and the clubs.

*AFL chief executive Wayne Jackson has denied the league was actively trying to reduce the number of clubs in Melbourne. He said the league was happy with the number of clubs in the competition and, in fact, had policies in place to promote the well being of the 10 Melbourne-based teams. However, Mr Jackson said the league did want more matches played in both Sydney and Brisbane.

"We're pretty happy with our 16-team competition and there is certainly no policy being pursued by the AFL to reduce the number of teams in Victoria," he said, pointing that the success of North Melbourne - a club with limited resources - proved the league had no deliberate strategy to reduce the number of Melbourne based clubs. However, in its annual report the AFL warned there were still financial pressures on the Melbourne clubs. "Ten clubs will struggle to survive long term in the Victorian market due to revenue required to sustain an AFL club. These pressures have been evident since the early 1980s and have resulted in two (South Melbourne and Fitzroy) fewer teams in Melbourne," said the report.

It also said: "Contrary to popular opinion, the AFL is not trying to reduce the number of teams in Victoria. In fact, our equalisation strategies promote their survival. "Our views purely relate to the capacity of the Victorian economy in general and the football community in particular to provide the support to secure the long term future of ten clubs". The report said while the AFL had a "national focus", it realised that Victoria was the cornerstone of the national competition. However, the league maintained that it would not be a "banker" for clubs. The league wants more football in the northern states but its seems, at least for the moment, that it is happy to achieve this with Melbourne teams playing games in Sydney and Brisbane. The league believes no new markets are currently attractive.

Mr Jackson also admitted the fixture would remain uneven because of the number of matches scheduled. "Unless you play each team once, that is have 15 games in the season, or unless you play every team twice ... have 30 games in the season, you can never have an absolutely equal and fair draw," he said. But the league is set to maintain the traditional "blockbusters" that pit Collingwood, Carlton and Essendon against each other twice a year for financial reasons.

*Collingwood's poor form, North Melbourne's Sydney experiment and the redevelopment of interstate grounds has been blamed for the AFL's drop in attendances during the 1999 season. After more than a decade of record crowds, the attendances at AFL matches dropped by nearly six per cent last year, the first decline since 1993. Last year 5,771,579 people walked through the gates, a drop on the record 1998 season when the league broke the six-million barrier for the first time. Last season's premiers North Melbourne experienced the largest drop in home crowd attendances, more than 27 per cent, their move to play several games in Sydney affecting their overall crowds. Lowly performed Melbourne and Collingwood also suffered at the gate, losing more than 20 per cent of their crowds. Brisbane enjoyed the greatest increase, more than 30 per cent, even though redevelopment works continue at their Gabba home ground.

Crowds during the 1999 finals series were also down by more than 100,000 spectators, a drop of more than 17 per cent. AFL chief executive Wayne Jackson said that while the league was not happy with the drop in attendances, the league saw nothing in the trend to persuade it from continuing with its present policies. He said shared success over the previous decade proved that AFL policies were working: "Of our 14 teams - I'm excluding Fremantle and Port Power - 11 played in grand finals in the 1990s, whereas only seven of the VFL clubs in the previous 20 years to 1987 played in grand finals."

To the other news:
*Melbourne has scuttled plans to introduce an away jumper after intervention by club president Joseph Gutnick, who said the thought of altering the jumper revived memories of the ill-fated Melbourne-Hawthorn merger in 1997, and would not allow the change while he is president. It was revealed in February Melbourne was designing a jumper for games against teams with similar colours, and the design was to consider dropping one or both of the Demons' traditional red and blue. Gutnick said Melbourne is the oldest Aussie Rules club in Australia so its traditions and colours have to be highly preserved.

*Hawthorn lost its long-serving administrator last Sunday week with the death of John Lauritz at the age of 69. Lauritz was appointed Hawks' chief executive in 1983 and led the club during their gloriest days of the 1980s. Current Hawthorn chief executive Michael Brown said Lauritz was "a brilliant administrator and a fantastic person" and a loyal friend to all people at the club.

*After Carlton president John Elliott's recent suggestion that the 16 AFL teams be divided into two divisions for easy scheduling, his Collingwood counterpart Eddie McGuire has called on the AFL to investigate the feasibility of axing the Ansett Cup and playing a 30-game home-and-away season. (this would mean each team plays the other 15 teams twice and, for example, if the season starts at the last weekend of February, the Grand Final will be played at mid-October.)

McGuire said the competition would always be lopsided and unfair to some teams until teams played each other twice. Magpies coach Mick Malthouse said the longer season would work if grounds were available early in the season (from cricket matches), the interchange bench was increased and the lead-up time to the season was cut. AFL media manager Patrick Keane said the 30-week schedule would add eight weeks to the season, and if the season was to end on the last Saturday of September it would have to start at the last weekend of January, which everyone agreed was too early for football.

That's all for today. See you soon.

Regards,

Johnson Leung

Main * AFANA Info * AFL Scores * Merchandise * N. American Footy * TV Info * FAQ * Links

Copyright © 1997 - 2003. The Australian Football Association of North America.
All rights reserved. Redistribution of this article is not allowed except by prior permission except for
limited quotes for journalistic purposes only and with proper credit. You cannot forward this article to a mailing
list, BBS, or listserv without prior permission. You must ask our permission before re-posting this information on the
web or distributing it via other means. Any other use, in whole or in part, without prior permission, is prohibited.
All trademarks acknowledged.