Australian football legend Malcolm Blight has launched a passionate defense of Mark Ricciuto and the Adelaide board as pressure mounts following revelations surrounding the 2018 camp.
Veteran journalists including Damian Barrett, Gerard Whateley, Caroline Wilson and Mark Robinson have called for Ricciuto to step aside from his role as football director, given the light that has been shed on the camp.
Barrett said yesterday the Adelaide legend needed to move on to give the club a clean slate.
“(He’s an) all-time great footballer for the club. (But) I question the role and effect and manners of the role as a director of the football club and I would have thought his time at the club as a result of this, after a long time at the club with other questionable decisions, might be up,” Barrett told The Sounding Board podcast.
“Time to go… time for a fresh look, a fresh approach, and certainly a different, maybe more empathetic approach to the director role at that footy club.
“I’m not one to call for people to stand down, and this is an honorary job anyway, so he’s not going to lose any wages out of the role.”
Blight however has slammed those going after Ricciuto, saying the board would not be aware of every aspect of the camp and that the responsibility falls to the club’s football department.
“There’s a lot of uneducated people out there who don’t know how a board works,” Blight told Sportsday S.A.
“At the end of the season, they get beaten in a Grand Final, they brainstorm improvement – if they’d asked me I would have said, ‘forget about it, move on, everyone’s going to lose’.
“They come up with other activities to try and get better and there’s nothing wrong with that. They come up with a camp, they get testaments from other organizations from somebody inside the Adelaide Football Club.
“What actually happens is the executive, the working people who get paid – the board do not get paid – the executive presents a case for abnormal activities and/or costings. That’s presented to the board.
“Questions are asked by the board members and of the infinite details, they don’t go down to the bottom. They don’t ask, ‘who’s going to say this, what’s the agenda, where they’re going to go up a tree, whether they’re going to go over an obstacle course, are they going to play Richmond music’, the board doesn’t ask that question, that’s got to be done at executive level. Not board level.
“So anybody out there including Mark Robinson, Gerard Whateley and anybody else talking about Mark Ricciuto or those board members, it wouldn’t have gone down that far.
“Boards don’t operate that way. The executives run everything and eventually present to the board.
“Why has Ricciuto (been under siege)? Give me the argument why Mark Riccituo and the other Adelaide board members shouldn’t be there. They don’t know every infinite detail. That’s not their role.”
Blight served on the inaugural board of the Gold Coast Suns, joining in 2009 and stepping aside in 2012.
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