Take a moment to consider the heavy artillery thrown at saving sport on the Gold Coast.
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The Centre of Excellence. Graham Annesley, the referee, turned NSW MP, turned rugby league powerbroker and now club administrator, sticking his fingers in as many holes on this sinking ship as possible.
The Penrith premiership player John Cartwright took the Titans to a preliminary final, then Neil Henry has tried and failed.
Jarryd Hayne followed one of his lucid sporting dreams all the way to the gates of Sea World. The NRL’s strategic desperation is only matched by the other codes.
The AFL’s expansion and plans for unlikely world domination started with trying to annex western Sydney and the even wilder, supposedly lucrative glitter strip and its surrounds.
West Coast premiership player Guy McKenna took the reins, then the veteran Rodney Eade.
While the GWS Giants are now a premiership force, the Suns are such a basket case – even with the great Gary Ablett involved – the AFL sent their own man Mark Evans to take control and save the day, like Jaime Lannister confronting a fully-grown dragon.
Every favour possible. For what? When you consider all the cash and resources – and the decades of failure with the Gold Coast Giants, Seagulls, Chargers and the South Queensland Crushers, before the Titans – surely this great expansion area of sport is running out of time. This is all without even considering Clive Palmer’s A-League effort Gold Coast United. The same Clive Palmer, former federal MP, now most famous for the barely comprehensible rhymes posted on Twitter.
What does the Gold Coast have to with the Illawarra?
Well, despite private investment, both are in debt, effectively wards of the NRL state.
Yet we, as an NRL heartland, are offered four games a year and the tourist precinct all the resources in the known sporting world.
The comparison says a lot things, including the dangers of expansion.
NRL heavyweights like Phil Gould talk about not wanting to move into the Perth market, as if doing so would reduce their slice of the pie, rather than expand the economic pastry. And yet here we are, tolerating the ongoing failures of an area which has less history than the Steelers, let alone the Illawarra’s ongoing contribution to rugby league.
If the Gold Coast were an American franchise, they’d long since have been moved, like the Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis.
And yet, Australian sporting administrators keep ‘fishing where the fish’ are, as Football Federation Australia boss David Gallop coined.
All that glitters is not gold.