“Word is,” he tells Channel Nine viewers, “this guy is the most reliable kick for goal in the side. They say down at Collingwood if you had to have someone kicking for your life, Tarkyn Lockyer would be the man!”

Dennis Cometti: “I’d prefer my mum.”

(Silence.)

Cometti: “Not a great footballer, but at least she’d care . . .”

Bingo!

Therein, for my money, lies one of the great, if insufficiently recognised, sporting truisms.

Particularly in team environments, having players that really, truly, care desperately is more often than not the key to the final victory – well above and beyond whatever talents they might have, and how hard they have been training. You can have your fast fit blokes who want to win, and I’ll take Denis Cometti’s mum and blokes that are so desperate to win they will bleed for the jersey.

Enter – or more to the point, exit – Andrew Fifita and his contract with Canterbury Bulldogs having been torn up this week. A former rugby union player in the Waratahs squad, he had gone to the Cronulla Sharks where he had become such a stunning success that earlier this year it was announced he had signed for Canterbury next year for four years for a mooted $3.5 million. Then, last week, in an interview with a journalist Darren Walton, Fifita said that he had rather changed his mind and “If I could go back now, I wish I chose rugby ..."

On Monday the Bulldogs suddenly announced that they had rather changed their mind too, and didn’t want Fifita after all. And of course they emphasised that it had nothing at all to do with his comments, and of course it had everything to do with that.

For in the game they’re in, for the coin they’re paying, how can you have somebody on board who has already publicly announced his regret at being there? Much better to find an “i” in the contract not yet dotted, a “t” not yet crossed, that allows you to tear it up, and use that money instead to get players who really might bleed for the jersey.

Start with the premise that no team becomes worthy champions unless they have players who in the last minutes of the match – with apologies to great English prop Rudyard Kipling – force their heart and nerve and sinew, to serve their turn, long after they are gone and so hold on . . . when there is nothing in you . . . except the will which says to them . . . HOLD ON!”

And work your way backwards from there.

All sporting moves that don’t steer towards providing that are doomed to failure.

And of course it really does apply to AFL, the ultimate team game, more than most.

Is the move of Buddy Franklin to the Swans perhaps an example of what I am talking about?

A moment here, excuse me.

Buddy Franklin! Fine fellow! Champion! Best player! Ever! You tall poppy slayers can get nicked!

Ignore the fact that Hawthorn have won two matches without him, and the Swans have lost two matches with him. My friend Malcolm Knox and I have heard enough of you “simplistic souls blaming him for the Swans’ defeat[s]”!

But seriously, folks.

In the professional age, if I show you two players, one of whom is on a one-year contract and another of whom is on a ten-year contract which will see him out to the end of his career which one – prima facie, taking into account no other factors – has the most skin in the game? Which one is most likely to bleed for the jersey?

Is it crazy to suggest that, structurally, the bloke who wants to see the gravy train keep rolling is the one most likely to be found in the caboose of the train, shovelling coal like his life depends on it – because, financially, it does – while the one who knows it will keep rolling with or without his effort is more likely to be found in the Saloon Car till the wee hours?

Settle, oh-people-my-people, I said, SETTLE! This is NOT another go at Buddy, for it is nothing to do with him per se.

It is simply noting that the Canterbury Bulldogs this week invoked a principle which I think will be to their long-term advantage. Last year the Swans ignored the same principle, and I reckon we are already beginning to see the drift. Fire at will. I shall, as ever, be in my trailer.

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz