THE campaign against Greater Western Sydney’s academy and zone has scored an apparent victory with the Giants expected to lose rights to a highly-rated key position forward.

As rival clubs continue to make noise about the Giants’ recruiting allowances, the AFL is understood to have decided that Todd Marshall, a 198cm key forward from Murray Bushrangers likened to Tom Boyd, will be excluded from GWS’s bidding process and therefore be available to all clubs in the national draft.

The loss of Marshall, who was zoned to the Giants because he is from Deniliquin, is comparable to Brisbane losing access to Nick Riewoldt in 2000 when the AFL ruled that the future champion did not fall inside a 20km zone. The promising Marshall is not considered a prospect anything like the Saints’ No. 1 pick but is considered a potential first round pick with significant upside.

The league’s position on Marshall is that he has not had sufficient involvement with the GWS academy given he’s spent the past two winters in England playing cricket and only recently appeared on GWS’s radar.

Round 18

The AFL is meeting with the Giants on Friday in a gathering that is expected to deal with the contentious issue of their academy and zone and determine which players are eligible to be taken by the Giants through the bidding process.

While the Giants are expected to retain the Riverina district — which gives them access to likely top 10 pick Harrison McReadie and other highly-rated prospects — in the long run they are expected to relinquish NSW players from just over the border from towns such as Albury, Wentworth, Deniliquin and Broken Hill.

Recruiters want the situation clarified before the national Under 18 championships which start on Monday and will showcase many of the Giants prospects, hence the Friday meeting with the AFL.

The Giants are fiercely resisting the push from Victorian clubs, led by Collingwood’s Eddie McGuire, to loosen their hold on academy players from the current zone and are expected to retain those players — barring Marshall — who are already designated as academy players, even if they are from just north of the Murray river.

They are therefore likely to keep Will Setterfield, who is from Albury and boarding at Caulfield Grammar this year, another Albury prospect Zach Sproule and Kobe Mutch, who hails from Wentworth. But the prevailing view is that the Murray part of the zone will be phased out in the near future, on the grounds that this area is essentially AFL territory, while the Riverina is a region in which there is some competition with the rugby codes.

The comparison between Marshall and Nick Riewoldt rests on the fact that the AFL has again intervened and removed a key position prospect — albeit one without Riewoldt’s track record — from the zone of a northern market club, amid intense lobbying and complaints from rival clubs.

GWS chief executive David Matthews this week suggested that his former football boss Graeme Allan could ‘’educate’’ Eddie McGuire about the GWS academy situation given that Allan has rejoined Collingwood.

The AFL indicated earlier this week that it would review which territories would be included in the GWS academy, in a move that has foreshadowed the decision to remove Marshall from the Giants’ zone.