Priority draft pick
[2] However, through a series of trades in that year's AFL draft, the Sydney Swans, who had finished as minor premiers in the season that had just passed and reached the Grand Final, ended up with it instead.
In its original version: It became clear, however, that a team with reasonable prospects could finish with five wins and receive a roster boosting priority draft pick as a result of an isolated poor season due to key players suffering injuries, internal dissent and/or other off-field trouble.
[3] There was annual speculation that poorly performing teams manipulated their results after they were eliminated from finals contention in order to ensure they remained below the eligibility criterion and received a priority pick under the 1993-2011 format; this was referred to as "tanking.
These include: While all of these behaviouurs can be interpreted as an attempt to avoid winning matches, all but the first point can also be justified as a sensible player management and development strategy for a team with no chance of playing finals, which complicates the debate about tanking.
When speaking about West Coast's 2010 priority draft pick, coach John Worsfold openly defended his right to play young players in unfamiliar positions to assist their development;[15] but, when speaking about Carlton's 2007 priority draft pick, assistant coach Tony Liberatore said he personally thought it was wrong to play younger players in place of senior players whose niggling injuries would not be bad enough to force their omission if the team were playing finals,[14] and Brock McLean revealed that he requested to be traded away from the Melbourne Football Club because he disagreed with similar strategies in the lead-up to Melbourne's 2009 priority draft pick.
[12] The penalty for any player or club official found to have been involved in tanking is a possible lifetime suspension and/or a fine of up to $100,000 for each offence.
The AFL has the endorsement of the Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation that the integrity of the game is sufficiently protected under the priority system.
When asked in 2011, the AFL Players Association's official position was that it would like to see the priority pick abolished due to the perception of tanking and its impact on the public's confidence in the game, rather than any suggestion of actual corruption.
[12] Tony Liberatore made similar statements in 2008, when he claimed that he felt like "winning wasn't the be all and end all" when Carlton received a priority pick in 2007, but he also said that he'd never seen anything to suggest that players were deliberately losing matches.
The match was high scoring, played with low intensity, poor skills and very little defensive pressure, and two players (Carlton's Heath Scotland and Melbourne's Travis Johnstone) gathered more than 40 disposals.
The Herald Sun later accused Melbourne coach Dean Bailey of making positional changes in the final quarter which were so nonsensical that they could only have been designed to ensure Richmond would make a comeback: this included moving key defenders James Frawley and Matthew Warnock into the forward-line, resting key midfielders, and using Brad Miller as a ruckman.
