by Dutchy » Wed Nov 22, 2006 12:43 pm
SOme might be interested in this....3 boys under 4 years old!!! 2 is hard enough!
Trade winds bypass jilted Roo
Emma Quayle
October 29, 2006
TROY Makepeace first suspected he would not receive his wish either to be traded or welcomed back to Arden Street when he spoke to Kangaroos football manager Tim Harrington on the Thursday night of trade week.
"Tim said not much was happening and that he didn't want to leave me in the lurch, without a club," Makepeace said this week. "I said, 'What do you mean? Are you going to delist me?' He said he hated to use those words, but that's where it was heading if nothing happened on the Friday.
"It obviously fell through, and I had a phone call to come in and have a chat with the coach on the Friday night. That was when he told me."
Dean Laidley explained in that meeting that there were younger players who needed games, and Makepeace suspects he was in trouble for other reasons, too.
These days, you don't want to be an out-of-contract player in his mid-20s, who is not in his team's best handful of players. Particularly at a club that has just finished 14th, doesn't look like winning a premiership in the next few seasons, and is under pressure to pour games into its next generation.
Only two established players — Kasey Green and Brett Montgomery — were recycled last year, compared with nine five years ago. If you're too old to be picked up as a rookie, you're almost always simply too old.
"I can see that," Makepeace said. "I don't want to say I was an easy target, but you can see why it was me. I don't think I'd lost form and I'm not too old, I don't think.
"There were probably six or seven guys like me who were in and out of the team and who didn't have the best year. But I didn't have a contract, and that's the frustrating thing. It wasn't great timing for me."
Makepeace can understand why Laidley made his decision, even though he still doesn't agree, and thinks his 100-plus games experience is something that might have given his younger teammates some breathing space.
He isn't happy that he wasn't warned earlier that his job was on the line, because he would have made bigger efforts to sell himself to other clubs, and he doesn't feel he ever got a long-promised chance to prove himself in places other than the back line.
That said, he knew something had to change. This year was by far the most frustrating of Makepeace's seven seasons; he was dropped for the first time in his career, dropped several more times, and felt that once he lost Laidley's interest, he lost it for good.
"Dean had a few issues with how I played and I thought I'd worked on those, but apparently not," he said. "There was one incident in a game against Melbourne where I let my concentration drop and Aaron Davey was influential in a few plays where they came from behind and won.
"I copped some wrath for that, which was fair enough, and there was another incident against Brisbane where I made a split-second decision to go for the ball. I didn't win the footy, it spilled out to my man, who kicked a goal, and I copped it for that one as well.
"It just felt that Dean was concentrating so much on certain incidents like that — it detracted from everything else I was contributing to the game and to the team, and it made it harder to concentrate during games.
"Every time there was a stoppage situation I was trying so hard not to let my man win the ball that I didn't have the influence I thought I could have. Things didn't come naturally to me and I was looking over my shoulder for the runner all the time.
"I can understand when Dean says you can't play 90 per cent of games, and I'm not trying to push the blame on to other players or anything like that. It just felt like certain things were magnified with him and that everything else you did got overlooked."
Makepeace has started to think about life minus football. He's applied to sit the firefighters' recruitment test, and will perhaps pick up the electrical apprenticeship he stopped when he was drafted. He has three boys under four years of age, too, including three-week-old Ryder, and has spoken with his wife Marcelle about the things she'd like to do.
But before that, he would like to play more football.
"I've hardly ever been injured and I don't think my commitment or my enthusiasm can be questioned," Makepeace said. "If another club picks me up, they can be 100 per cent sure I'll be giving it everything. I'm sure I can still play good footy."