The birth of the draft
Martin Leslie wasn't paraded before a room filled with coaches, officials, reporters and football fans when his name was called out at number one in the VFL's first-ever draft. He wasn't rushed straight into an interview, live on national television. His name had not featured in any mock drafts, and his potential had not been dissected on any online forums.
In fact, Leslie (pictured) didn't even know he had become a Brisbane Bear when the league's brand new club chose him first on November 27, 1986. Instead the jobless 24-year-old, who had just signed on for two extra seasons at Port Adelaide in the SANFL, was on his way to the dole office in Darwin when he picked up a newspaper and found out that he had a new club.
"I saw the back page and thought: 'OK, no need to go get the dole...," Leslie, who played out his contract with the Magpies before moving to the Gold Coast at the end of 1988, told The Age years later. Compare his case to that of David Swallow, who moved from Perth to Carrara at 16, a year before the Gold Coast Suns officially made him their first draft pick. Or to the likes of Matthew Kreuzer, Jack Watts or Bryce Gibbs, of whom brilliance has been expected from day one.
"It was strange, I must say. There was a connection that you felt, but that you didn't feel, if that makes sense," Leslie said. "I'd grown up at Port Adelaide and that was my club. Now I belonged to someone else but I didn't really know who they were.
"I knew what I could do. I wasn't a kid and I wasn't thinking, I've got to be good because everyone thinks I'm this good.' I had a few people at home saying 'No. 1, he's not worth that...' so that was there, but it didn't worry me. I probably needed the pressure, more than anything. I needed it to spark me up."
The draft was born as the Brisbane Bears and West Coast Eagles came to life: with its local league becoming a much more national one, the VFL wanted to make sure the changing competition was as even as it could be. Just six clubs, after all, had shared the 20 premierships leading up to 1986, better able to entice and afford the most talented intestate players and therefore extend their stay at the top. Held in reverse ladder order, the idea of the draft was to give the worst teams first shot at the best upcoming young talent, and a chance to narrow the gap. It came accompanied by both a salary camp and a player trade system, the VFL having been forced to court when South Melbourne player Silvo Foschini, determined not to move to Sydney with the Swans in 1983, was refused a transfer to St Kilda. It was designed much like the player drafts that had worked successfully for America's major football and basketball competitions, the NFL and NBA.
Since its introduction, the draft has been constantly reviewed, revised and tinkered with. The eligibility age has changed several times: since 2008, players have had to turn 18 in the year they are drafted, to ensure that all of them have had the opportunity to finish their year 12 studies first. St Kilda's 2001 recruit Luke Ball and Adelaide's 2007 draftee Patrick Dangerfield were among the last players to finish up at school before joining their club full-time a year after being drafted.
A mid-year draft, introduced in the early 1990s, was gone not long later, while a preseason draft was created in 1989, mostly to give unhappy, un-traded and out-of-contract players a way to find a new home. By the mid-2000s, though, clubs' interest in it had diminished to the point that only a few selections were being made. The rookie draft, introduced in 1997, proved far more popular, with clubs able to draft a small handful of extra players, list them separately to their main list, and promote them to replace badly injured players during a season, or permanently at the end of it. Dean Cox, Brett Kirk, Nick Maxwell, Dale Morris, Matthew Boyd, Aaron Sandilands, Darren Jolly, Ben Rutten, Brad Sewell, Stephen Milne, Aaron Davey and Matt Priddis are among the many rookie list success stories.
Essentially, the draft has given the worst performed clubs the best chance to improve their position, by holding the earliest picks, Over time, though, the draft order has been affected by various concessions. Both Brisbane and Sydney have had, at different times, first call on their local talent, to encourage both states to improve their development programs. Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney both dominated the top of the draft order ahead of their introduction to the league in 2011 and 2012. For a long time, the clubs that finished with fewer than five wins in a season were giving 'priority picks' at the start of the draft. This is how Collingwood, at the end of 2005, secured both Dale Thomas and Scott Pendlebury. The next year, Hawthorn drafted both Jarryd Roughead and Lance Franklin. Later, priority picks were moved to the start of the draft's second round. Ahead of the 2012 season they were scrapped - almost, at least, with the league deciding to hand them out only at its discretion.
The father-son rule was established in 1952, after Melbourne lobbied for access to a young Ron Barassi, wanting him to play for the team his father represented before losing his life in the war. The first player actually recruited under the rule, however, was Harvey Dunn junior, who joined Carlton instead of North Melbourne, to which he has zoned. The rule has endured, while undergoing several adjustments. For some time, teams needed to pledge their third-round selection to a father-son draftee. Now, rival teams can offer earlier picks at a 'bidding' meeting held at the very start of the trade period, with the son's club needing to match the selection offered up with their next choice in the draft, or let the player go. The rule has allowed the likes of Gary Ablett junior, Jobe Watson, Dustin Fletcher, Matthew Scarlett, Tom Hawkins, Matthew Richardson, Jonathan Brown, Heath Shaw and Travis Cloke to wear their fathers' colours.
The first draft was very much a trial run. There were no West Australians in the pool, because they had been set aside for the Eagles, who had so many to list that they then withdrew from the draft. The Bears were able to sign six players ahead of the draft, given they didn't have access to the same level of local talent that the WA club did. They chose six South Australians: Matthew Campbell, Stephen Connelly, Ben Harris, Neil Hein, Colin McDonald and Mark Mickan, with only Campbell (79 games) and Mickan, who moved to Adelaide after four years, playing 89 matches in a seven year career, making any real splash. The existing Victorian clubs were still able to sign players from the local, metropolitan zones they had always recruited most of their players from.
Country zones - in place since 1967 - were shut down at the end of 1986, but clubs were able to sign up as many players as they liked from their assigned rural areas in the last few months of 1986. Therefore, not too many country Victorians featured in the first draft; those that did were essentially leftovers, chosen were picked by a club that couldn't afford an established interstate player. It wasn't really until 1992, when metropolitan zoning ended, that any club could pick any player, from anywhere in the country, with the Victorian clubs' long-standing under-19 teams making way for the independent TAC Cup, the Victorian under-18 league that the majority of draftees have since progressed through. Before the draft, kids grew up knowing they would play for the club around the corner if they happened to be good enough. Now, they sit on front of their television sets or computer screens waiting and hoping to hear their name called by a club they probably have no connection with at all. In a split second, they could be moving to a new state.
Leslie played 11 games in his first year as a 26-year-old Bear, and 107 games in a seven-year stint there. As it turns out, he is one of history's most successful No. 1 picks - ironic, really, given he was chosen when there was no draft camp, allowing recruiters to analyse everything from a teeage prospect's hand span to his 20-metre spint time, left foot standing leap and psychological profile. Less research and science went into the early picks and more hunches were acted upon: on draft day in 1987, held in the VFL's old Jolimont headquarters, Cameron Schwab, then Melbourne's recruiting manager, was sitting on the next table to Sydney and felt staggered by the Swans' first choice. "They picked a guy called Scott Salisbury from Adelaide and I remember leaning over and saying ‘you do realise he’s 30, don’t you?’" Schwab later told The Age. "They said ‘nah, nah, we’ve seen him, he’s not 30,’ but he was. He was a good player, but it’s something you just wouldn’t contemplate now."
The 1986 draft brought some very, very good players into the big time. Alastair Lynch, Fitzroy's pick at No. 50, played 306 games, captained the Brisbane Lions, made an All Australian team and played in three premiership sides. Darrin Pritchard became a 211-game, triple premeirship player after being drafted to Hawthorn at No. 26. Craig Kelly, Matthew Armstrong, Andy Lovell, Simon Minton-Connell, Kieran Sporn, Andrew Underwood, Trent Nichols, Matthew Mansfield and the Febey brothers - Steven and Matthew - were also among the 65 players plucked out that year.
Curiously, though, players didn't have to nominate for the first draft, like they've had to since 1993. Clubs could simply chose whoever they liked, then start convincing them to come: after the '86 draft, Melbourne failed to talk Darren Jarman, its pick at lowly No. 55, into moving over from Adelaide. He, of course, became a grand final star at Hawthorn and Adelaide in time to come. In fact, 42 of the 65 players picked in 1986 never represented the club that chose them in a single game.
Jarman was the highest profile of those players, yet as it turned out some very high selections were wasted. That the South Australian league, disgruntled about losing so many of its good young players to Victoria, had introduced a 'player retention' scheme, paying its best players to knock back offers from over the border, didn't help. Steven Sims, the No. 2 pick, did some summer training with St Kilda but decided to stay at North Adelaide. Chris Lindsay, a skinny 19-year-old ruckman from West Torrens, moved to North Melbourne as the No. 7 pick but injured his knee, went home and stayed there. Andrew Payze, Essendon's pick at No. 9, couldn't be talked into leaving home either, despite coach Kevin Sheedy dropping by his workplace every few weeks to visit. Payze later played for the original Adelaide Crows team. Another South Australian, Richard Anderson, felt intimidated and unsure of himself when Richmond selected him at No. 4, so took a teaching job in the country instead of joining the Tigers.
The first draft was as much about careers that didn't happen - or that ended up happening elsewhere - as those that did turn out. "It was all going too fast. I remember feeling like I had no control, and that was very unnerving," Anderson told The Age in 2006. "A lot of people thought I was mad, that I had this fantastic opportunity and here I was, running away from it. I wish I could say I had played VFL. I really do, and I live with that regret."
Comments
Carl Rayson 12 November 2014
1986 wasn't the first VFL draft. The VFL had already held drafts in 1981 and 1982. In the 1981 draft Neil Craig was selected as the overall no 2 draft pick to Footscray. (after Alan Johnson went to Melbourne with their no 1 pick) It's ironic that Craig could find himself at Whitten Oval as coach 33 years after the club made its first move to acquire him.
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