HAWTHORN coach Alastair Clarkson has ruled out putting Ty Vickery on the trade table, saying that trading out any player after just one year at a club is not good for either party.
Former Tiger Vickery joined the Hawks as a free agent ahead of the 2017 season, accepting a two-year offer worth around $ 1 million.
However the ruck-forward’s first season at the Hawks wasn’t a smooth one, playing just six AFL games and missing Box Hill’s preliminary final against Richmond due to suspension.
He was also arrested — then released without charge — over an investigation into extortion and threats allegedly relating to his restaurant.
Despite Vickery’s rocky 2017 campaign, Clarkson, who conducted an exit interview with Vickery on Monday, said the Hawks aren’t looking to trade him.
“We discussed both our disappointment and his disappointment in terms of his year. It hasn’t panned out for either us or him anywhere near as much as what we’d like,” Clarkson told Channel 9’s Footy Classified.
“He is still contracted and whilst a guy is contracted at your footy club and we feel like he has something he can contribute, then he’ll remain.
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“I don’t think it does him any good or us. I don’t like the idea of someone coming into a footy club (and leaving).”
Clarkson said the foundation of Vickery’s exit meeting was not meeting the standards he or the club expected and the boxes he needed to tick during the summer.
“There’s a whole heap of reasons, including what implicated his life for a while in terms of his restaurant and what was going on in that regard, that had him not in the best space to play his best football,” Clarkson said.
“To make a judgment on one bloke in 12 months and then tip him out — if he wasn’t playing for Hawthorn, it would be on the basis he feels like he has nothing to contribute to us to help take us forward. It will be really on the basis of Ty, not the Hawthorn footy club.”
Clarkson added that the club might be interested in out-of-favour Bulldog Jake Stringer — “he would be really handy for our football club” — but said it would be difficult to see how a deal with the Dogs could be done after the Hawks were so active in last year’s trade period.
With potential coaching movement looming throughout this season, Clarkson was asked whether Collingwood and Gold Coast had unofficially approached his management.
“I think the best way to answer that is inquiries are made every career — they have been for the last six years,” Clarkson responded.
“The inquiries never go anywhere because they more or less just ask the question because if it ended up that I was to go somewhere else then they say ‘gee, I am disappointed that I didn’t ask the question’, so they will ask the question. I’d expect that of our players, who have had success over more recent times, and I would expect that of our coaches and Andrew Russell, Graham Wright and Chris Fagan.”
Clarkson said he never seriously entertained any offers.
“People ask me ‘you must be excited to be involved in success and then disappointed that you have dropped down’ — but that is the challenge of league footy,” he said.
“I am just excited about the challenge now of trying to work out how we can win our next premiership, as I were when we were seriously challenging and trying to run around the MCG in the last week in September.”
Clarkson added that he wasn’t sure whether he had aspirations to be involved with another AFL club, but that there was a mini desire to join an overseas club with another spot and see whether he could impart his AFL skills and knowledge there.
“There is an end date for everyone and it will come to me at some point in time. But given my attitude right at the present time, I would rather be pushed than walk,” Clarkson said.
“I think that there is some unfinished business. Part of it is we had a really decorated patch in our footy club’s history. Can we reinvigorate our group and recalibrate and go again?
“Whilst that’s still real for us, then I want to be hanging around.
“Just like I spoke openly to the club earlier in the year, if I or the club don’t feel it is working for us, don’t worry about having a discussion or finding it difficult to have a discussion with me. I have been there for a long period of time, I have enjoyed my time there, we set the club on the right path again.”
Clarkson and his Hawks are on the sidelines this September — the first time they have missed the finals since 2009.
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