By: SAM EDMUND
"I don't think you can ever say never in this world, but if we were to have another team down the track you would have to say that Tasmania is the logical place for that team to be and we have expressed that view to the Tasmanian Government,'' Demetriou said. ``Beyond that, if we were to go to 20 teams and who knows, that may or may not happen, you'd have to think it wouldn't be a team in Melbourne because we've got 10, but a place like Western Australia, which is a booming state, or even northern Queensland are the two places which have some attraction.''
The new Gold Coast team will enter the competition in 2011, before western Sydney follows it in 2012, taking the number of AFL clubs to 18. Tasmania has fiercely lobbied for the right to host an AFL team since tabling an official bid with the league late last year and has even received support from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. But Demetriou, speaking at a La Trobe University alumni function in Melbourne, said the league was determined to expand the game in foreign markets first. ``I just think in the national order of things our priorities have been the Gold Coast and western Sydney,'' he said.
``We've copped a lot of flak for our move into western Sydney. ``People say it's a great risk, but we believe the greatest risk is to do nothing. This won't be like our first venture into Sydney in the 1980s. ``There won't be any pink helicopters or flamboyant doctors. ``Hopefully 20 years from now we'll be able to say that it was definitely the right thing to do.'' Demetriou also weighed into the ongoing debate on free agency, describing Luke Ball's failure to move clubs as ``unfair''. ``In many ways you can understand why players would like this and we're sympathetic to them because we work in an environment where the players have their salaries capped and they get told as a 17-year-old from Geraldton that they're being shipped off to Brisbane,'' he said.
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