THE TRADING CHRONICLES 2015 Part One: The Bemm River Report by Whispering Jack

THE TRADING CHRONICLES 2015 Part One: The Bemm River Report by Whispering Jack

Pardon me for bringing up the past but the modern AFL version of recruiting players by way of a free agency and trade period leading up to a draft meeting a month later leaves me cold and longing for the good, old days ...

The post modern era of social media and instant news reports on fast rotation means that every snippet of information on player movement whether truth or rumour, whether substantiated or otherwise gets eaten up, digested and spat out within moments.

If you happen to be working on a given morning without access to a computer screen during this week then you will probably miss very out on very little action. What you will miss however, are the endless volumes of meaningless discussion on the merits of any given piece of cattle placed on the meat market by someone in the crowd.

And never mind that the person mentioned is a required player and happy at his club on a solid contract with no intention of leaving.

It was much better in the old days. You got your news from the daily newspaper or on Sunday mornings from Jack Dyer and Lou Richards on their World of Sport segment, the Bemm River Report which, much like what you read on the Internet these days, was 90% gossip and speculation and if you were lucky, about 10% was stuff that the two of them didn't make up earlier in the morning. Every once in a while, they might drop a bombshell and the story would turn out to be factual but by and large, nothing much ever happened. The boys hardly ever caught a fish, let alone a big one.

Back in the 80s the VFL clubs recruited from the metropolitan or country zones and the ones like Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond and sometimes North would bring out the cheque book and buy a player from interstate or another VFL club and of course, you could recruit to your heart's content until 30 June so the rumour mill would turn ever so slowly for a much longer period of time ... but that was the way of the world.

Today, we've been taken over by concepts imported from elsewhere, mainly from the U. S of A. There's the Draft Combine, Free Agency, the Drafts, Rookies and now this business about academy bidding which involves input from a computer programme whirring out numbers to determine a player's future.

It was so much less complicated when you could just sit on a riverbank, talk nonsense and, from a Melbourne perspective, be bored as hell because nothing would ever happen - just like the opening days of this trade week.

The Oracle will be back later to take up the Trading Chronicles cause and report when something really does happen.