Captains ready to launch into AFL season
Club captains descend upon Etihad stadium for the AFL season launch and talk up their team's prospects in 2015.
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Nick Riewoldt calculated that it was his 11th season-launching captain's call. He looked over at the mob surrounding his Essendon counterpart with genuine compassion. "Poor Jobe, the last three years ..."
Michael Rischitelli was on debut, subbing for Gold Coast skipper Gary Ablett, who stayed home to work on his fitness and left peers who could doubtless also think of better ways to spend their time to front the cameras. "There's a bit of sunshine up on the Goldy apparently," Rischitelli said of possible Wednesday morning alternatives.
Callan Ward fronted as a foundation GWS captain whose appetite for the contest entering his club's fourth season is growing in time with his hair. Beyond Ablett, a dozen of the other 17 captains have tipped Gold Coast to play finals for the first time in 2015. Ward spoke like he was one of them.
![Lone star: Jobe Watson (right) and AFL captains at the season launch at Etihad Stadium.](/web/20150326221021im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/m/7/r/s/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.1m7lp6.png/1427283184189.jpg)
Lone star: Jobe Watson (right) and AFL captains at the season launch at Etihad Stadium. Photo: Wayne Taylor
While not wanting to thrust the Giants into the crystal ball conversation - "because if things go bad everyone freaks out" - he thinks the competition's newest club poses a similar threat.
"I reckon we're probably almost even," Ward said of the two clubs' development. "They've got a great list, they're ready to take the next step. Development-wise I think we're on a par with them."
Rischitelli said the Suns were sick of watching the September action on TV, and shouldn't be setting a ceiling on where they wind up. "When you see two other teams playing (in the grand final) and you're not, you just want to get back to training. If it's top four or top six, we just want to play finals."
And then there was Jobe Watson, again the admirable public face of a club with a massive asterisk beside its name. Calmly, hands clasped behind his back, he fielded questions about how far players with nary a pre-season game of substance to their names might take a team whose 2015 fate will either be heavily influenced or effectively decided two days before the season begins.
"We've got challenges like any other," Watson said. If only life was so simple.
The anxiety he admitted all at Essendon are feeling aside, his analysis of his team could have been Rischitelli speaking about Gold Coast or Ward musing on GWS. The demographic is ripe to produce results, experience has been enlisted in a conscious effort to add meat to a youthful skeleton. Flexibility and midfield depth are plusses, developing more consistency within games a targetted area of improvement.
By consensus this is a year in which the Suns should be making the eight, and the Giants making further inroads towards a seemingly inevitable era befitting their name. If not for a saga that now has an end date but no definitive finish line, the Bombers should have been approaching 2015 believing they are in contention to go the whole way.
Instead, there is more certainty and hope for followers of start-up clubs with seven seasons of history between them, than one that insists it has stood strong for 142 years largely thanks to the passion of its fans.
The Giants and Suns are going places. As Watson admitted of his club, "We're just waiting."