{"id":742698,"date":"2026-06-17T16:52:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T16:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/742698\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T16:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T16:52:12","slug":"from-the-pocket-damien-hardwicks-suns-face-a-challenge-that-may-be-beyond-even-him-afl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/742698\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Pocket: Damien Hardwick\u2019s Suns face a challenge that may be beyond even him | AFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Damien Hardwick had another one of his gripes last week, teeing off at the officiating and the clamorous Geelong crowd. Lots of things have raised his ire over the years \u2013 umpiring, rules, fixturing, trade speculation, panel show inanity, journalistic pestering and woke governments. We shouldn\u2019t be too hard on him for that. We want coaches to speak their minds, and to hate losing. In the absence of proper leadership at the AFL, they\u2019re often the ones best placed to drive change. The more premierships they\u2019ve won<\/a>, the more emboldened they are to be critical. Chris Scott does it with a studied passive aggression. Hardwick rarely bothers with the passive part.<\/p>\n

Hardwick pushes back on the view that he and the Gold Coast Suns<\/a> have had everything handed to them on a silver platter. \u201cMate, we don\u2019t get much,\u201d he said last year. But he\u2019s enjoyed some of the softest fixturing an algorithm could conjure up. He has a dozen top-10 draft selections on his list, and half of those were top-three picks. He\u2019s enjoyed all the fruits of the Suns academy. He has the reigning Brownlow medallist, a former Norm Smith medallist, and the current leader of the Coleman medal count. So why is there that familiar drift? And why are so many players angling to leave?<\/p>\n

Hardwick in 2020 before winning his third premiership in four years with Richmond. Photograph: Michael Willson\/AFL Photos\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Hardwick was in the Cinque Terre region on the Italian Riviera as he weighed up the pros and cons of taking on the job. He scoured the Wikipedia pages of players he barely knew. It was so tempting \u2013 the list, the climate, the challenge. There\u2019d be no more stories about his marriage, no more crap winters, no need to conjure up new stories for a tired playing group.<\/p>\n

But Hardwick had things at Richmond he doesn\u2019t have at the Suns. At Richmond, he\u2019d found the perfect balance of risk and reward, of the compassionate and the pitiless, of the champion and the jobber. They\u2019d grind the opposition to dust, and tidy up their changerooms afterwards. Crucially, he had what he called \u201cperimeter players\u201d \u2013 gut runners who would patrol a wing to maintain structure, small forwards who would devour space, defensive midfielders who would do the heavy lifting for the superstars. He had a handful of solar talents and a constellation of role-players orbiting around them. When Dustin Martin<\/a> is inducted into the Hall of Fame, he will thank the likes of Kane Lambert, Jack Graham and Jason Castagna in his acceptance speech.<\/p>\n

Hardwick doesn\u2019t have those kinds of players at the Suns. He has too many of what he calls \u201ctrudgers\u201d \u2013 footballers whose energy and pressure is conditional. He has too many colonels, and not enough privates. And so, when Matt Rowell injures himself in the state game, or Noah Anderson\u2019s output drops just a fraction, or Jarrod Witts is market corrected by the new rules, it exposes the next rung of players, and that rung is rickety.<\/p>\n

Gold Coast have lost their last three games and meet fifth-placed Hawthorn on Friday. Photograph: Adam Trafford\/AAP<\/p>\n

But his biggest challenge is the one that goes beyond structures and roles, and gets to the core of the club itself. At Richmond, he didn\u2019t have to sell the sport or the club. He could narrow his focus to his players and for half a decade he had them in the palm of his hand. It\u2019s questionable whether Gold Coast should be called a club at all. It\u2019s a franchise, a program, a punt. His preferred way of playing \u2013 the messiness, the \u201cschnell, schnell!\u201d tempo \u2013 relies on the total buy-in from the playing group. But it\u2019s hard to get that when your best players are being lured home, and when their managers are leaking to the media.<\/p>\n

Hardwick is a divisive figure. But he\u2019s one of the greatest coaches this sport has seen. You only have to listen to his half-time address in the 2020 grand final to realise why he\u2019s been so successful. In two minutes, he proves that you don\u2019t have to be a grand orator, or a raving lunatic, or a chess master to be a master coach. It\u2019s two minutes of clarity, calm and cohesion.<\/p>\n

But he is also a worrier. He keeps a notebook by the side of his bed, and will wake in the middle of the night to jot down ideas, hooks and anxieties. The worse the ladder position, the more he wakes up. When all was going well at Richmond, he\u2019d quote the Zen proverb \u201cchop wood, carry water\u201d. In other words \u2013 do the work, and keep it simple. He had a stable administration. He had a playing group with what he called \u201crole discipline\u201d. And he had Dusty<\/a>. At face value \u2013 and he emphasised this at his first press conference \u2013 the task at the Suns was even simpler. He had a lot of shiny toys, he just had to deploy them properly. But it\u2019s never that easy. His challenge now \u2013 and it may be beyond even him \u2013 is to get them to connect, to convince them to stay, and to find enough of them willing to do the dirty work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Damien Hardwick had another one of his gripes last week, teeing off at the officiating and the clamorous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-742698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}