The latest strike in the bloodless coup launched almost three years ago by Gillon McLachlan against the football crisis in southern Queensland took place on Tuesday when the AFL's Mark Evans took over as chief executive of the Gold Coast Football Club.
It began in McLachlan's first week in the job back in 2014 when his first manoeuvre was to fly immediately to Brisbane, remove that club's CEO Malcolm Holmes and replace him with the experienced Greg Swann.
![New Gold Coast chief executive Mark Evans.](/web/20170308195221im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/n/h/1/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gungzg.png/1488273805247.jpg)
The Lions' problems did not end there and the AFL continued to spar with the club and its legendary football boss Leigh Matthews. To say the AFL was unimpressed that the club last year ignored its advice and extended Justin Leppitsch's contract, forcing a six-figure payout, would be an understatement. By July/August 2016 McLachlan, with Evans' help, took matters into their own hands.
The AFL headhunted Chris Fagan from Hawthorn and David Noble from Adelaide and appointed them coach and football boss respectively.
Matthews stood down as the club's football director. All this hands-on work from the AFL went some way to redressing the fact it had neglected its Queensland clubs the previous year. In 2015, over the first 22 rounds of the season not one league executive or commissioner managed to attend a pre-game function at the Gabba.
Interestingly Evans had been linked with a role at Brisbane and also previously at Greater Western Sydney, a club that has stood firm against a number of attempts by head office to shape the club in its own image. The most significant example came when chairman Tony Shepherd resisted AFL sentiment directed against his CEO David Matthews and extended his contract in 2015.
Although the league installed Wayne Campbell as the Giants' football boss last year, Matthews and his board have built something of a reputation of being anti-AFL itself and have resisted any number of attempts to pull the club into line. A preliminary finalist in 2016 and commercially on the up, GWS at present can get away with that.
Not Gold Coast. Low-key CEO Andrew Travis, whose contract expired this year, was on shaky ground and not only because of the club's poor performance on and off the field. The club believed its key role in the Port Adelaide China deal had secured it a major sponsor from that country but that has not eventuated and the Suns remain without a backer on their jumpers and sit 18th in AFL memberships.
This put Travis at odds with the AFL but also his own chairman, who sought a more dynamic, street-wise boss. Once Tony Cochrane replaced the less extroverted John Witheriff as head of Gold Coast, Travis' days were numbered.
The AFL harbours concerns about the outspoken and occasionally unpredictable Cochrane. But it will take solace in the fact that their man Evans is now running the pioneer club and has worked previously successfully under the erratic Jeff Kennett and over Alastair Clarkson at Hawthorn.
Now he must continue to build a club that made some poor early player choices and was ultimately exposed after the Karmichael Hunt scandal as being culturally bereft. It is one black mark against McLachlan that he never took a stand against Hunt, a member of the Suns leadership group who was caught doing drugs with significantly younger teammates including at least one teenager.
Cochrane at least has taken a public position against Hunt's betrayal while the AFL bosses continued to lamely protest he had been a good pioneer for the code. Now that the club has replaced Gary Ablett with two zealous young co-captains after witnessing too many player departures, Evans' big first-year task will be to make a call on coach Rodney Eade in the last year of his contract.
Re-signing co-captain Steven May will hopefully prove a formality for the new club boss, who told Gold Coast staff on Tuesday that he had "fallen in love" with the fact of the fledgling Suns and the promise of the players, the enthusiasm of their off-field team and their impressive new home.
Evans had not been officially offered the Hawthorn job although he had spoken to club president Richard Garvey. From this vantage point it would seem that with the Hawks, the job offered relatively little in the way of a challenge or an upside for an ambitious and already well-credentialled football executive.
Whereas at the Gold Coast, a club which has failed to fire a shot in six years despite so much early promise, the only way is up.
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