Kyle Hardingham of Essendon evades Dane Swan of Collingwood during the AFL NAB Cup Grand Final match between the Essendon Bombers and the Collingwood Magpies at Etihad Stadium, Melbourne. Slattery Images
The AFL fixture is released Friday, with the usual series of leaks already underway: a standalone GWS-Sydney clash, Mitch Clark facing his former side and a Collingwood-Hawthorn re-match are all likely to take place in Round 1.
One other piece of information we can already lock in is that the NAB Cup will have a slightly different format next year, according to an AFL media release in June.
The tournament’s first round will be as it was last year, with six groups of three playing two shortened matches each on a single afternoon or evening. However, unlike last year, teams will not progress to a knockout competition and will instead have two weeks of regular pre-season games.
There will still be a “final” under the new system – the two teams with the most wins and percentage will play off.
The AFL have flirted with such a system before, and it was apparent then that fans preferred the knockout competition to bringing their calculators to games attempting to work out what their percentage their team might be on.
But, leaving aside the past use of the system, an interesting question is raised by going down this path – why did they need to continue with shortened games?
The three-way shortened games didn’t exactly set the world on fire in their first season. Most fans were happy the “real stuff” – or “practice real stuff” – was only a week away. Fans engaged in planning for the upcoming Dream Team and Supercoach seasons were less likely to phrase things in a glass-half-full context.
As for the coaches and players, I’m not so sure they got anything from the concept that they wouldn’t get playing just one normal pre-season game. Coaches got to mix and match what players they used, but the extended bench lets them do that anyway.
It was all a bit of fun, sure, but there really wasn’t too much anyone could take from the games. Certainly, it got a bit annoying every time a commentator would say something like, “Player X has 23 possessions – he’d be on track for 50 in a real game!”
The shortened games were introduced to keep the knockout system going. And they served that purpose. However, with no more knockout system, why are the AFL keeping them?
If the only thing determining who is in the final is wins and percentage, then it doesn’t really make much of a difference whether you squeeze two games into the first week or not.
Surely, the majority of fans, coaches and players – after four to five months of waiting – just want four quarters of footy, not some three-in-one gimmick.
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