‘It’s bigger than that’: The match the AFL wants to revive after a decade in the wilderness

Venues under consideration include Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium, Carlton’s Ikon Park and even Adelaide Oval, where the South Australian government is looking at a deal involving Port Adelaide taking on the All-Stars. The last Indigenous All Stars clash took place at Leederville in 2015, where West Coast won by eight points against captain Shaun Burgoyne’s side.

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Previously the All-Stars, coached by Michael O’Loughlin, toured Ireland in an international rules series in an event only cautiously supported by some AFL bosses. That team suffered heavy defeats. That golden era of players included Adam Goodes, Lance Franklin, Burgoyne and Eddie Betts.

A joint venture between the AFL and the NRL was pushed during the Indigenous players’ camp in Broome in 2017, and again in 2019 by O’Loughlin and former AFL staffers Chris Johnson and Mathew Stokes, along with rugby league’s Johnathan Thurston, Nathan Merritt and Justin Hodges.

It was cautiously supported by former AFL boss Gillon McLachlan but ultimately rejected by both codes.

The AFL has put the All-Stars proposal to the 18 clubs and has been buoyed by the relatively strong levels of support. But Collingwood, whose reigning Norm Smith medallist Bobby Hill would be on top of the All-Stars wish-list, have already voiced some misgivings.

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Said the AFL’s inclusion and social policy boss Tanya Hosch: “It’s a challenging thing, to get the players released. But the players consistently tell us they want to do it and that includes the bigger names and the more experienced players.

“I don’t think it’s insurmountable. We know the communities love it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders love seeing their heroes in the one team. And they’re happy to give back to the communities to inspire young people coming into the game.

“There’s always a concern about a player going down or wanting to protect the player and I completely understand that, but I really hope we can do this.

“This is my eighth season at the AFL and there hasn’t been an All Stars game in my time.”

Kane confirmed that a raft of recommendations to reform the Next Generation academies has been sitting with the AFL Commission since last August. The recommendations included a proposal to remove the draft restrictions on NGA talent, which currently mean clubs are unable to recruit their own academy products before pick No.40, and return it to anywhere from pick No.1.

The recommendations put to the commission last year in a report authored by Xavier Moloney and Vandenbergh also proposed that clubs be forced to commit for more than one year to category B rookies and redress the radical funding cuts to Next Generation academies.

While the AFL’s northern academies for Sydney, Greater Western Sydney, the Brisbane Lions and Gold Coast each receive annual AFL funding of about $600,000 respectively, the NGAs – designed to attract Indigenous and multicultural athletes with no Australian rules background – each receive one-tenth of that amount. Their funding was slashed from $120,000 to $60,000 a club during the pandemic.

Fremantle, who invest about $1 million a year into their Kimberley region, have lost two academy players – Jesse Motlop (Carlton) and more recently Mitch Edwards (Geelong) – since the AFL changed the rules in 2020.

However, those proposed academy reforms, according to the league’s football boss, would form part of a wider restructure that would include a rectified approach from the industry towards development of junior talent.

“Aboriginal players have made such a big contribution to our game, but there has been a disconnect from the pathway to the elite,” said Kane. “It’s going to take a lot of time. It can’t be fixed overnight but we will fix it.”

Then CEO-elect Andrew Dillon conceded to this masthead last July that the competition had perhaps overreacted in toughening up the Next Generation academy rules in 2020 after the Western Bulldogs took their star academy recruit Jamarra Ugle-Hagan at pick No. 1 in the national draft.

In 2020, 87 Indigenous footballers were playing at AFL clubs. Numbers since then have continued to decline on an annual basis with just 71 players currently listed. Those figures have also been reflected at national under-18 and under-16 levels with Indigenous coaching and other leadership roles in football’s pathways few and far between. State leagues remain unwilling or disincentivised to employ Indigenous staff.

Kane agreed the decision to toughen the academy rules had been a contributing factor to the falling Indigenous numbers, along with cost-of-living issues and the fallout from the COVID pandemic.

“Long-standing connections through the pathways were lost,” she said, “… and financial constraints challenged that family support which sees so many junior footballers from remote areas transported to and from training and competitions.”

Clarke, who this year moved from Richmond to North Melbourne, remains the only full-time assistant coach in the men’s competition despite affirmative action by head office which has seen a portion of Clarke’s – and any other indigenous or female coaches’ – wage placed outside the football soft cap.

Giants boss Dave Matthews has pushed the AFL to make Sydney’s west exempt from the bidding system, pointing to the 50,000-strong Indigenous population in western Sydney where talented athletes have traditionally chosen NRL.

While now placed in the AFL’s recent past, the treatment of Adam Goodes, Collingwood’s cultural issues as outlined in the Do Better report, the Taylor Walker racist slur, and historic allegations directed at Hawthorn by former First Nations players and their families have been identified as potential AFL red flags by some Indigenous leaders.

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