Young guns like Ben King need to stick around.Credit:Getty Images
Towards the end of his coaching tenure,Stuart Dew mused after the Suns’ catastrophic loss to ladder leaders Collingwood in round 16 that he and his assistants had to find out why his players’ level of effort – reflected in the enormous gap between this team’s best and worst – remained so variable. Under Hardwick,you’d expect maximum effort to be the first absolute non-negotiable.
Get people through the gates
In his first press conference for the club,Hardwick outlined what he hoped would be an entertaining brand of football:they would be brazen in attack,and stingy in defence. All clubs aspire to some variation of that balance.
If bringing intensity to every contest is the first non-negotiable,that should help protect the Suns defensively,but if this club is to survive in the long term,it needs more members,and Heritage Bank Stadium (formerly Metricon) needs bums on seats. So they need to be attractive to watch. Hopefully,fans can look forward to an update on the helter-skelter,barely controlled chaos Hardwick turned into a winning formula at the Tigers.
Turn their home ground into a place other clubs fear to tread