Gold Coast Suns list manager Craig Cameron has said Jack Bowes could’ve stayed at the club on a reduced salary, but stressed “hard decisions” had to be made for the betterment of the side’s future.
Bowes was traded to Geelong in a deal involving the Suns’ pick No.7, with the proviso the Cats would take on the 24-year-old’s heavily back-ended contract for the remaining two years of his existing deal with his former club.
It was a deal that has the AFL considering changes to prevent such instances happening in the future, but one Cameron insisted was necessary in order to keep the Suns’ list balanced.
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“We’re a unique football club and as such we need a unique strategy for us to be able to maintain and continue to build our list. Maybe GWS is the only other football club that’s in a similar position to us,” Cameron told the club website.
“It’s going to cost us a little bit more to maintain our top-end young talent and our maturing talent and as such it means for players that aren’t in our top 15, they have to come to us at the right salary or be on the right salary on our list.
“If they’re not, we then have some decisions to make and some of those will be hard decisions because we need to maintain our top end and we need to be able to go to the market and bring other players in.”
Since the trade was completed, Bowes told AFL Media there was “a fair bit of disappointment” with how his time at the Suns ended.
Despite this, Cameron said there was a scenario in which Bowes could’ve stayed at the club on a reduced salary.
“Yes there was (a chance for Bowes to stay). Having said that, Jack also wanted to play as an inside mid and felt frustrated that he didn’t get enough time in the midfield with us,” Cameron explained.
“I think he also recognised that was going to be difficult in the future. To get a player to take a position where they’re willing to reduce their salary to remain, they’ve got to be comfortable they’re going to play to the level and in the position they want to play going forward.
“We’ve seen that with a number of players in the past and we’ll probably see it again quite shortly. In Jack’s case, he was keen to try and find a midfield spot for himself and he felt his best option was somewhere else.”
The Suns’ decision to trade out pick No.7 – which Cameron deemed a “carrot for clubs to come in and help us take cap space” – was a calculated one, he said.
“We’ve had a number of early draft selections in the last four years … we already acquired pick No.5 from Adelaide in the Izak Rankine trade,” he said.
“We just felt we didn’t want to continually get on the cycle of having a lot of early draft selections that then hurt us form a salary cap position because of the increase from their second to third year.
“We’ve gathered a lot of talent, what we now need to do is make sure we’ve got list space so we can actually go and select the mature players that we want to bring in.”
Bowes’ now-former teammate Jeremy Sharp was unsuccessful in seeking a move back to his home state of West Australia.
Sharp has played 23 senior games for the Suns since arriving as a second-round selection in the 2019 draft and remains contracted to the Suns until the end of 2023.
“At the end of the year, Jeremy spoke to us around his homesickness and how he’s missing his family,” Cameron said.
“Our conversation with Jeremy was fairly direct, which was he’s a contracted player and we rate him, however if we felt we could get the right recompense for him in a trade that we would consider that. Jeremy understood that and understood that as a contracted player there was a good chance he would play for us in 2023.
“With a contracted player, the onus is on the team that is chasing the contracted player to get the trade done. We just didn’t feel Fremantle came to us with anything that was worth what we think Jeremy is worth.”
