How WA deal makes North Melbourne the AFL's Expendables

The Expendables.

How else can you view North Melbourne in light of the pending deal to sell two home games to Western Australia?

There’s concept and reality here. The concept for fixture reform to reduce the travel burden for the WA teams was for each Victorian team to play one additional game in Perth every 5 years.

Your team once every five years hosting a game in Perth. Share the load… ease the burden.

The reality is North Melbourne will play both of those WA games for the next three years.

It will fill the coffers and come with an undeniable competitive disadvantage, and it will do the bidding for the entire competition: Making North Melbourne The Expendables.

There’s a reality and a necessity to selling home games. To the Northern territory, to Cairns, to Tasmania, to Ballarat.

It’s to spread the gospel, but that’s not what the WA concept is.

It is specifically to reduce the burden of travel shouldered out of Perth for the Dockers and the Eagles.

This is quite rightly being hailed as the biggest fixture reform in the West since the Dockers entered the competition, and it falls to North Melbourne to achieve it.

This is the cost of being a boutique club and long-term cellar dweller.

The $2 million I’m sure is vital to the coffers at the Kangaroos… but more than anything this club needs to start to win, and this will make it harder.

This is different to the selling of games elsewhere.

Hawthorn made a fortress in Tasmania… Gold Coast is building an advantage in the NT… the Bulldogs have mastered the conditions of Ballarat.

This is not North Melbourne going ‘we’ve found the unexplored and unexploited frontier in WA’… so let’s not be treated like lemmings.

The WA clubs lobbied relentlessly for an additional home game – they had logic and fairness on their side.

The spread would have had each of 10 teams make a sacrifice one every five years.

The reality is North Melbourne is the kids doing everyone else’s work in the group assignment.

And this works from a tourism perspective if Kangaroo fans en masse take up the direct flight from Melbourne to Busselton for a game in Bunbury… that’s a big ask of any supporter base.

This is a great outcome for Fremantle and West Coast. It’s a neat solution for the AFL. It’s absolution for nine other Victorian clubs…

And it confirms North Melbourne as The Expendables.