Melbourne midfielder Clayton Oliver (left) gets a handball away with St Kilda’s Zak Jones hot on his hammer in Alice Springs on Sunday. Picture: AFL MEDIA
Teams selling home games interstate is hardly a new phenomenon in the AFL.
Back in the early 1990s, Fitzroy hosted opponents at the picturesque North Hobart Oval as well as West Coast at Canberra’s Bruce Stadium in 1995.
Later that decade, the “Travelling” Kangaroos, as they were dubbed, began a journey that would see them sell games all over the country – a journey that shows no sign of stopping to this very day.
Over an 11-year period, they played home games in the nation’s capital, the SCG and Carrara, and for the last 14 seasons, have sold two to four games a year to Bellerive Oval, while starting this year, they will sell two matches a season to WA until 2027.
And then there is the real home-away-home success story in Hawthorn which has turned Launceston into a fortress by winning 62 out of 83 games there in the last 25 years. At one stage, they won 19 matches in a row in the northern Tasmania town.
Gold Coast is making a real fist of emulating what the Hawks have done on the Apple Isle by becoming a similarly difficult team to beat in Darwin where it has now won its last eight games.
Other notable examples have been St Kilda hosting games in New Zealand, the Western Bulldogs in Ballarat, Port Adelaide in China and GWS in Canberra.
Melbourne hasn’t been immune from the allure of big cash rewards for sacrificing home-ground advantage either.
At the start of the millennium it agreed to the seemingly suicidal deal of playing ultimately seven “home” games against Brisbane at the Gabba at the height of the Lions’ dominance during their premiership era.
To the Demons’ credit, they pinched a couple of wins during that period, including in 2002 – the second season of Brisbane’s famous three-peat.
Three years after that arrangement ended in 2010, Melbourne agreed to a similar deal in Darwin, which was beefed up in 2014 to include a game in Alice Springs as well.
For six seasons, the Demons hosted two games in the Top End, until their agreement with the Northern Territory capital ended in 2019 and since then it’s been back to one game a year in the red centre at Traeger Park.
Each home game that Melbourne stages in the Alice reportedly nets the club $600,000 and while that’s a chunk of change that certainly can’t be sneezed at, surely the Demons top brass is starting to question the viability of the deal from a purely football perspective after another terrible performance there against struggling St Kilda on Sunday.
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These kind of arrangements are all well and good when the “home” club produces a dominant win-loss record at the venue in question over a long period of time, but the problem for the Demons is that they’re not very good in the Alice.
In fact, they’ve now lost their last three games there and have only won four of 11 such matches. That is hardly a glowing endorsement for a renewal of the contract.
And making their most recent loss against the Saints even more agonising for them is that they had actually begun building some meaningful momentum after working their backsides off to turn their faltering season around.
Melbourne started the year 0-5 and its finals hopes were seemingly up in smoke, but Simon Goodwin’s men admirably won five of their next six games, including a sensational win over reigning premier Brisbane at the Gabba (ala 2002) to reinject themselves into the top-eight race.
Based on form, and hot off the heels of a comprehensive obliteration of Sydney, if the Demons had hosted St Kilda, which had lost six of its previous seven games, at the MCG, they would’ve been near certainties to square their ledger at 6-6 heading into the second half of the season.
But as this writer warned last week, by hosting the game in the Alice, the door opened for the Saints to cause an upset, and they came charging through to win by 28 points.
Melbourne really shot itself in the foot and is now back behind the eight ball with a 5-7 record. The result runs the risk of cancelling out all the good work it achieved in the previous six rounds and derailing its season.
The same thing happened last year at Traeger Park against Fremantle.
The Demons headed into the game in fantastic shape with seven wins from their first 11 games to be sitting pretty in the top four.
Then, out of nowhere, the Dockers smashed Melbourne by 92 points – a result so devastating the Demons dropped from fourth to 10th in one round – and it was a result that Goodwin’s side would not recover from.
Melbourne could only manage four wins from its last 11 games to miss out on the finals.
If a similar story unfolds in the second half of this season, the microscope will surely be applied to the Alice Springs deal with more vigour than ever before by club supporters an administrators alike.
1 goal 12 after half time, why would they have kicked any straighter on the MCG?