AFL legend Sheedy leads charge for Pacific recruits
Updated
The Australian Football League is now turning its attention to the Pacific for recruits, and it has enlisted one of the sport's most famous characters to lead the charge, Kevin Sheedy. A team of internationally-born players will compete in the AFL under-16 championships starting next year.
The person whose job that it is to recruit the players is former Essendon coach and legend more popularly known as 'Sheeds'. Mad fan Geraldine Coutts began by asking why he has thrown his support behind the project.
Presenter: Geraldine 'Collingwood' Coutts
Speaker: Kevin Sheedy, former coach of the Essendon Football Club
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SHEEDY: Well first of all it is to encourage the AFL to make sure that we get this up and running. It is an opportunity to, on behalf of all the clubs in the AFL, to make sure that these new teams have got a fair amount of opportunity to bring some excitement into AFL from an international level, and when you look at the population of obviously New Guinea and New Zealand, there is virtually ten to eleven million people there for a start off, just under a million in Fiji, and probably another million or so around the other islands, so there has been a talent pool sitting there and it's just been drifting into the AFL without any real control. Basically in the end, the parents have shifted to Australia and this has obviously happened with the NRL. So it's about time we actually started make some opportunities for these kids, because the AFL is a very exciting game and their athletic ability is obvious as we could see with Nick Naitanui getting drafted at number two in the national draft.
COUTTS: And Noel Michael who is formerly from Papua New Guinea or one of his parents are from Papua New Guinea, but are there many Pacific Islanders currently playing in the AFL?
SHEEDY: There was actually about three at the present time. We've had another two boys in New Guinea are to believed to be listed in the last couple of months, after we had last year we had our AFL International Cup here in Melbourne and Victoria, where approximately a couple of thousand people came out from around the world and 16 nations play and two of those young kids got drafted onto lists and so that sort of really opened the door and made everybody sit up and have a look, because these people raised their own money to come out here, probably about a million and a half dollars to tell Australia that they love Aussie Rules, and I thought to myself, well, everybody in the AFL was very impressed with it, and they sat down with international development with David Matthews and obviously Andrew Demetrio, and said we've really got to open up this talent with more innovative ideas and really the competition, the national under-16s championships are going to be held out of Blacktown, where the A team has been nominated to play in the AFL.
COUTTS: And so what will you actually doing? Will you be travelling around the Pacific and actively recruiting players?
SHEEDY: Oh we definitely think, that well first of all, there are recruiting officers of clubs doing that now and I personally I would like to see a more concerted effort into the development of the game in the islands and therefore that we own the right to say that we have performed our duties and given a pathway to these kids to have a chance.
COUTTS: And we're talking with Kevin Sheedy, former Essendon coach and now his job is to spearhead a recruitment drive across the Pacific to get more Pacific players into the AFL. Now the bottom line, is it one day hoped that there will be a whole team made up just of Pacific Island players?
SHEEDY: That would not be a hopeless idea. Look, if you have seen what has happened in our game in the last 25 years, we've become a national game. We've moved. We've built a stadium with a roof on it. We've bought in four more sides from basically the West Coast and Adelaide and we're bringing in another two teams into make it 18. So at the moment, we would be the only game probably in Australia that would have now looking at about 800 professional playing contracts, let alone the coaching staff and the enormous economy that it is building in the country. So it's been an enormous change.
COUTTS: Is part of this due to the fact that the AFL has changed its face well, over the last ten or 20 years constantly and there are more and more teams, two new teams as we suggested in the intro, that they are having problems getting and maintaining a standard of players now because so many players are required and so you have got to look to foreign pastures to keep that standard up and get good quality players?
SHEEDY: I think it's a great opportunity to bring a mixture of player in and a mixture of talent and athlete. I mean what we were able to achieve very clearly in the last two decades, is we've brought in 80 indigenous players that made our game so much greater and I think that has led to an enormous amount of confidence for us to make this next step. I have got no doubt that the AFL Commission, Andrew Demetrio and David Matthews are really looking at ramping it up in the next 10 to 20 years, so that we are actually really truly are a very, very powerful game internationally.
