Of all the things going on at Adelaide at the moment with their issues on and off the field, former Western Bulldogs captain Bob Murphy sympathises with their older players and the situation they find themselves in.
The Crows currently sit 18th on the ladder and are winless after three games.
Having come so close to winning a premiership in 2017, Murphy feels the likes of Daniel Talia, Rory Sloane, Taylor Walker and more would now be coming to the realisation that their chances of winning a premiership in their careers are gone.
He described it as a kind of “football grief” and explained how he went through at the Western Bulldogs after three straight Preliminary Final losses and the departure of coach Rodney Eade.
“The problems at Adelaide are so many and varied, but I just want to break it down into how does Matthew Nicks now deal with this group of senior players he’s got. This is really difficult ground,” Murphy told SEN’s Bob and Andy.
“There’s already calls of ‘you’ve got to make the big statement’, do you drop someone?
“I’ve lived through this once before at the Bulldogs and it’s a really difficult situation of new coach in and all of a sudden the optimism of the off-season and the ‘maybe we could put this together with a few young kids and we’ll go alright’ and then reality hits with a thud that not only are you out of the finals race, you are languishing down the bottom and it looks like you’re going to be down there for a long time.
“The Crows players, they would have felt that for the last couple of weeks. That thudding dread of reality of what you’re in for.
“One option for Matthew Nicks is to do what a lot of people are saying. Drop Taylor Walker or whoever it is. Who’s the big name? Make a statement at the selection table.
“One thing you’ve got to take into consideration is Daniel Talia, Taylor Walker, Rory Sloane, Tom Lynch, Bryce Gibbs. They’re the older bunch. They’re there. They’re not going anywhere.
“They are in football grief at the moment. They are now realising that they won’t be able to win a premiership and that is devastating.
“So to drop one or to set an example, there’s a cruelty to that. I would wonder if behind closed doors if Matthew Nicks and those players are coming together to look after each other and go ‘we’re not here for a premiership, we’re here to help these young kids build to something else’.”
Murphy opened up on the moment he experienced this exact situation at the Bulldogs.
“It’s eerily similar. Under Rodney Eade we got pretty close (to a flag) like these Crows did under Don Pyke,” he said.
“We made three prelims, got close and then the wheels fell off and then you start to rebuild and a new coach comes in. A cluster of veterans stayed to try and go again.
“We were in a leadership meeting and I can’t remember if were in Brendan McCartney’s first or second year, but it was early days.
“And we’d been thumped and it was the type of thumping that the Crows endured on the weekend. A really bad soul-destroying thumping on a footy field.
“It was a leadership group meeting and Daniel Giansiracusa spoke up and just really simply and beautifully articulated that our job is not about making the finals and the search for premiership success, it’s about looking after these young kids because our chance is gone.
“Until he said it out loud it was like a thudding sort of hit and I was living in the naive world of ‘nah, nah, we can turn this around’ and there was sort of just nods around the room of that actually is the reality.
“I sort of looked at the Crows on the weekend and I think about them and they must have had honest conversations that night and I wonder with those senior players how they would have felt.
“They would have felt that premiership dream, as much as long shot as it might have been, footballers hang onto that until it is extinguished and I think a few of that would be dealing with what I’d describe as like a ‘footy grief’.”