The world is upside down these days. It has to be. Something is in the water, for there is something not right with AFL this year. It’s the bench. There’s a problem with the bench.
The bench used to be a feared place to be. It’s something we all knew when we were playing footy as kids.
The bench was the last place you wanted to be. Even if you knew it was just so you could get a drink, have a breather or let someone else play and be back out in five minutes.
Most importantly, we all knew the bench served its second purpose: a form of punishment.
You cause a costly turnover by kicking the ball across the face of goal straight into the arms of an attacker, then straight to the bench you went. If you were ballsy, you would wait for the coach to actually call you to the bench. Not that that is advisable.
It was the same in the AFL. It used to be that if a player made a mistake, he would be dragged to the bench. The coach would give him a massive spray, he’d bide his time on the bench for five or 10 minutes, and then he’d get back out there for redemption.
These days, it’s completely the opposite, and I don’t like it. More and more frequently these days, you watch a player score a goal and he is celebrating that goal en route to the bench.
Tom Hawkins, Lance Franklin, Ben McGlynn, Taylor Walker, anyone these days. Why is the bench the place you go when you score? Surely its counterintuitive to take off a player who just scored?
I saw Patrick Dangerfield a month or so ago kick a great goal, and then actually sprint to the bench. Why? He just scored a goal. I would want him to stay out and score more for God’s sake.
It would be like watching James Rodriguez score an early brace for Colombia and then see him get benched five minutes later. Or Greg Inglis tear up the opposition, score a length-of-the-field try and run straight to the interchange while high fiving his teammates. Lunacy right?
I swear the bench has a swag of beautiful and scantily clad women (or men for those players who prefer that) offering sensual massages that are invisible to all but professional footballers. That can be the only reason why I would sprint off the pitch.
Could you imagine a coach having to ask Tony Lockett to hit the pine after scoring a goal? I daresay he would have given the runner a trademark headlock, choked him good and proper while whispering in his ear ‘you go tell the coach to piss off… after you get your breath back’.
Gary Ablett Snr would have just ignored the runner. Why on earth is someone running off the park after scoring a goal? Does the team not want him to score more? It’s crazy.
The flip side is that the bench is no longer being used as a form of punishment. I watched Sydney versus Hawthorn on the weekend which was a great game.
While I don’t want to apportion all the blame on any one player, Nic Smith probably cost Sydney any chance of coming back. The Swans had scored a goal, and were possibly mounting a chase, until Smith, in his defensive 50, kicked straight into the arms of a Hawks player. Ouch. Comeback snuffed.
But did Smith go to the bench? Did the coach give him a serve and demand he ‘get that goal back’? No! He was allowed to stay out.
To steal the words from league pundit Phil Gould “no, no, no, no, no!” What happened to the days where a player would know that he had to come off, in fact if he didn’t voluntarily take himself off, he ran the risk of not playing the next week.
Something ain’t right with this bench anymore. The world is upside down I tells ya!
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