Ollie Henry has joined his brother Jack at premiers Geelong.Credit:Getty Images
The Cats were already 10 goals up,in trading terms,before they snared Ollie Henry from Collingwood at the death;the Magpies,having stood firm until the final hours,finally yielded and took a pragmatic approach,tying the acquisition of Tom Mitchell to the Henry trade,with the Hawks swapping Mitchell for Geelong’s Cooper Stephens.
While Collingwood didn’t fare badly,the Pies didn’t gain the return they wanted for Henry either.
Normally,a team at the head of the ladder would not have the salary cap room to pull off the once-in-a-decade heist of recruiting Jack Bowes and pick seven in exchange for picking up a heavily back-loaded Gold Coast contract.
That they won the auction for Bowes was a measure of Geelong’s unmatched capacity to:a) pay players less than their rivals;and b) sell their wares to players. Bowes chose the Cats when he might have gone to Essendon or Hawthorn,clubs where one would think he would be more assured of a game.
When the AFL changed the rules to allow salary-cap dumps this year,they cannot have envisaged that an expansion team would be the party giving up the high draft pick and the player (and Bowes was promising in his first few years) to the premiers. The AFL hierarchy was – and should be – embarrassed that the system worked in favour of the top team.
If the salary-cap dumping system worked,Bowes would be a Bomber or Hawk. But the AFL has given players control of their destiny and just as no one can make a player like Jaeger O’Meara play for the Giants (whom he spurned for Fremantle),Bowes wasn’t compelled to join a bottom team,as the AFL would prefer. The league must re-think how the salary dumps work.