The Giant eclipse of the Suns

A little over ten years ago, the AFL’s obsession with expansion, new markets and the lure of treasure prompted its decision to insert teams into the Gold Coast and Western Sydney.

Despite neither destination having a strong AFL footprint - nor heritage in the sport, the league interpreted data pertaining to population growth surges and became positively woozy with the thought of all that cash rolling in.

After almost ten years we can see the results as very much a mixed bag.

The GWS Giants have morphed themselves into an ultra-competitive, powerful unit with one of the competition’s strongest lists, ensuring they'll remain in AFL Premiership calculations for years to come.

The Gold Coast Suns…. not so much.

READ: How every team ranks in six key performance metrics

Due to a decade of overwhelming underachievement, most of what happens with the Suns takes place in the shadows.

Outside of gamblers, fantasy players, three confused surfers and the AFL’s polo enthusiast CEO, few genuinely care about the Suns, which is why most of their exploits happen well out of the spotlight.

And, it is unfortunately like this because the Suns are - and have been - simply terrible; they have been ever since they were shoehorned into a competition whose expansion may have been better served by a team in Tasmania, Traralgon or even Tunisia.

No, the Suns aren’t bottom of the ladder at the moment and have somehow stumbled upon ‘only’ one wooden spoon over their eight completed seasons, yet they’re comfortably the league’s worst team with the very worst list. 

Where the Giants used their seemingly bottomless bucket of league draft concessions to assemble a team chock-full of seriously talented footballers, the Suns used theirs on a heap of square pegs which they’ve never seemed to be able to stop trying to shove into round holes.

Where the Giants zeroed in on the unwavering imperative of culture and actual team building, the Suns have been beset by recreational drug issues, they’ve cycled through coaches like cheap suits while their water supply of talented youth has been routinely spiked by homesickness.

The Stats Insider AFL Futures (as of Round 13) projects the Giants as a 16.5% chance of premiership glory in 2019, while suggesting they’re a 32% of chance of contesting their first ever AFL Grand Final. Not bad for a team in just their eighth season of football, with only Geelong and Collingwood considered higher Grand Final probabilities.

Our famed AFL Sackometer considers coach Leon Cameron the second safest in the game, while GWS crowds, though still relatively low, continue to progress.

The Suns. 

Well, the Suns are projected at just a 0.3% chance of even making the AFL Finals. 

Let's be honest, you’re (probably) more likely to share a strong latte with an alien from Mars than you are to see the Gold Coast playing into September 2019.

The Giants have become everything the AFL had hoped. A textbook story of a small market team rapidly spreading it's youthful wings to become a genuine part of the AFL's furniture.

The Suns, meanwhile, have become an unmitigated disaster.

Sure, the Suns have won three games this season, yet they’ve been by margins of 3 points, 5 points and 2 points, against teams who’ll have no say whatsoever on finals football.

No team gets their hands on the football less than the Suns’ average of 349 disposals per game. They’ve built easily the worst attack in the league, scoring 14 goals less than Carlton's season total. 

They are the least efficient team in the competition, with a disposal efficiency of just 68.3%.

Interestingly, their metrics regarding one-percent acts - and which work to measure how ‘desperate’ a team is - comes in at a stunningly poor -10 pressure acts per game than their opponents. A damning indictment on a team who has nothing to play for but one percent'ers.

If Gold Coast stakeholders want to cling to those three wins - or the fact they’re not in last place - and that they actually beat Carlton in Round 4, then go ahead, knock yourselves out.

While the Blues have indeed been awful, and, for quite some time now, they at least have a storied past and a fan base which - though tormented - is significant enough to care about what it does each week.

The Suns have neither. 

Carlton also has Patrick Cripps and Sam Walsh, Harry McKay and Charlie Curnow. Is there a single player on the Gold Coast playing list who fills you with any kind of optimism - or any player, for that matter, which may suggest they have an A-grade star on their hands? 

They’ve had just four Rising Star nominations over the past four and half years, which simply isn’t good enough for a team who’ve had that many swings at the draft piñata. 

In the same time span, the Blues have had nine.

The Suns started out the season with something resembling hope, in spite of their 'Chernobyl-ed' list. There were encouraging performances (and yes, those three wins), yet they’ve quickly turned into the trainwreck most expected pre-season.

While the remainder of the Giants season will be filled with the expectation of another deep Premiership assault, the Suns will be counting down the days of what’s left in their season.

With ten matches to go (starting with this Saturday’s Townsville clash against the Saints), they’ll be outsiders in every game they play from here on in, and there is every chance they won’t win another game this season.

Genuinely, there comes a point when a team who has been in the competition for almost a decade now can no longer have its hand held by the league any longer.

While we’ve seen the Giants collect their own knocks and emerge into a thriving, functioning member of the AFL Community, we continually see the Suns act like the league’s degenerate child, with the AFL repeatedly having to pick them up from the Police station.

There will too come a time when the league will simply have to admit they have a seriously big problem with their Gold Coast franchise. And when they finally do it’ll be an announcement which can’t be cushioned with the promise of more concessions, but rather a decision that must be both harsh and bold.

While Tasmania, a state with a deep connection to the sport, existing fan passion and an established infrastructure screams out for a team, the league continues to persist with an experiment which has clearly failed, and frankly, continues to make them look silly.

The AFL was once infatuated by the siren song of expansion.

Relocation, however, might be the more sensible path from here.

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