Watson fires up as Saints offer Tauru extension

“That you can have a kid in his second year of football, who has played 19 games, who has another year on his contract, and we are saying that it’s ok that he’s actually walking through other facilities, tyre kicking them, to see whether or not that’s where he wants to spend the next five years.

“You and I are both in the same opinion. If you are down the bottom of the ladder and you take a kid in the first round, they then get a three-year contract,” Lyon said.

“I think that should be non-negotiable, off limits, that player stays at that club for three years. Then it is incumbent upon on you to be as good a club as you can be, develop the kid as well as you can, develop the relationship with the family, so by the end of that three years, halfway through the third year, they go, ‘Yeah, I love this club, I wanna stay here, let's sign for another five’.

“Or by the end of that three years, the player is then entitled to go, ‘Look, I haven't felt comfortable, I don't think you've coached me well or developed me well, I think your facilities are subpar, your medical team's not working’, whatever, at the end of that three years he's entitled to go.

“Because they don't get a say in where they go. It is a big investment for the club, so for Alix Tauru to be touring another club's facilities in his second year as a first-round pick, I think that's got to be outlawed.”

“He’s, I'll say flagrantly, touring another team's facility. The Gold Coast are facilitating this tour of their facility and probably other clubs now have the idea that maybe this kid is gettable.

“I know this is not the NFL, but if this happened in the NFL, the player would get an enormous fine, so too would the club who's trying to entice him. It would be a massive fine, but for whatever reason we don't care about this sort of stuff.

“But the point here is, the fan does. St Kilda fans will care about this because what you have as a fan is the hope of the future and the optimism that you invest in your team thinking that you are going to see some kid develop and become a star of your team one day.

“So if the AFL were to come out at the end of this trade period or before the draft and say, ‘Right, these are the rules, this is what's happening - you take a first-round pick, he cannot leave your club for three years. End of story’,” he added.

“We will enforce this to the point that if there is an approach made to one of these players in contract, whether it be for three years or two years, by another club, whether it's direct, indirect or not, $500,000 fine and loss of first-round pick.

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