Keeping up with the Smiths

By ASHLEY BROWNE

Injury-riddled former North Melbourne defender Jesse Smith has started training at Hawthorn, as part of the exodus from Arden Street to Waverley Park that this summer alone has seen Josh Gibson and Adam Simpson change their blue-and-white stripes to those of the brown and gold.

Of course, Gibson will be assuming a key role in the Hawk backline, while Simpson, the former North skipper, has started to cut his coaching teeth as an assistant under Alastair Clarkson.

But the Smith situation is intriguing. His split with the Kangaroos was less than amicable and seemed to centre around his belief that North lacked the medical infrastructure to repair his fragile hamstrings and ankles, which so far have restricted him to just 27 games in five years.

If the Hawks can get him right, North fans will be apoplectic, because he has shown glimpses – between injuries – of being a star. Never more so than his near best-on-ground performance against Hawthorn in the 2007 first semi-final, an upset win to the Kangaroos. It is on the basis of that one match that Hawthorn fans are hoping Smith can return to full fitness.

But that’s only part of the story. The other is that his father Ross is Hawthorn’s backline coach. It is a good arrangement for now, with Ross able to keep a close eye on his son’s progress and presumably able to confer regularly with the club’s medical staff as they oversee his Jesse’s return to match fitness.

But should Smith officially join the Hawks at one of the drafts later this year, that relationship becomes more complicated. It is one thing for fathers to coach their sons at Auskick or in underage footy. It is another thing at AFL level.

Ask Denis Pagan what it was like to coach his son Ryan at North Melbourne. Ryan’s draft selection alone caused a massive fallout between Pagan and his chairman of selectors and close friend Mark Dawson and Pagan has admitted since that coaching his son was one of the more stressful experiences of his time at the helm of the Kangaroos.

Perhaps all the Hawks are doing is allowing Jesse Smith to use their resources to give him the best chance of having another crack at league footy. But if they are considering taking it that one step further and drafting Smith for next season, you wonder whether someone at Waverley will be giving Denis Pagan a call – Clarkson played under Pagan at North – to check whether it really would be the best outcome for all parties.

Jesse Smith proves that disloyalty is not just the domain of clubs

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By CHARLES HAPPELL

Just when AFL clubs were again in the firing line for their callous and cavalier treatment of players in trade week – witness St Kilda and its former captain Luke Ball; Adelaide and Robert Shirley; Hawthorn and Campbell Brown, and myriad other examples – up pops North Melbourne’s Jesse Smith to strike a blow for the cattle in this annual meat market.

Smith, 23, has been at the Kangaroos since 2004, when he was drafted amid much fanfare under the father-son rule. (In fact, he’s been the club’s greatest coup under that strange and arbitrary rule which has happened to benefit Geelong and Collingwood spectacularly – the Cats with Ablett, Scarlett and Blake; Collingwood with various Clokes and Shaws – but other clubs hardly at all.)

But Smith’s great promise has never really been fulfilled thanks to series of ankle, hamstring and soft-tissue injuries. He was on the physio table far more often than he was out on the track. But the Roos were always confident he could become the great player he’d always threatened to be, as long as they could get his damn legs right. So, led by chief medico Con Mitropoulos, they worked daily to try and cure the injury-prone youngster of his various ailments. 

Now, having played just two games in the past two seasons, and 27 in the last five, Smith has told the Kangaroos he wants to leave. No if or buts; he wants out of Arden St.

It is fair to say the decision has stuck in the craw of the Kangas. On top of that, Smith’s stated reason for wanting to leave was the club’s less-than-perfect medical facilities and, reading between the lines, his loss of faith in the physios and doctors. So he’s given the Roos a whack around the ears on his way out the door, adding insult to injury.

North Melbourne’s chief of football, Donald McDonald, said the club was gutted by Smith’s decision and criticism less than a month out from the opening of its new $15 million elite training facility.

If we make the conservative estimate that Smith was earning an average salary of $160,000 a season for the last five years, the Kangas have shelled out $800 grand for his 27 appearances – at about $29,600 per game, which makes him – per match – one of the better paid players in the league. 

Smith will now nominate for the draft in a move that will deliver nothing, in terms of compensation, to the Kangaroos. So having invested much in the rehab of their boom recruit, North is now left with nothing to show for it – except a big pile of medical bills and the distinct possibility that Smith will go on to play another 150 games of top-level football with another club.

So never let it be said that it is the clubs responsible for all the grubby work and dirty dealing done at the trade-week meat market; sometimes, it is the players who are down in the sawdust on the butcher’s floor, getting every bit as dirty.

The episode capped a pretty unhappy post-season period for the Roos. The club also lost Josh Gibson, who insisted on being traded; it has sacked several in the medical department and might now be regretting the hastiness of that move; and it has had a power of trouble attracting assistants to the newly appointed head coach Brad Scott. 

As many as seven prospective coaches – among them Scott Watters, Gavin Brown, Matthew Lappin and Mark Neeld – have knocked back the Kangas’ offer of an assistant’s job, giving the Roos a slightly malodorous whiff about them as they approach the 2010 pre-season.