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Why the AFL trumps all world sports

25th April, 2017
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There's no game like AFL. (AAP Image/Travis Anderson)
Roar Guru
25th April, 2017
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2878 Reads

My son wanted to watch some soccer on Saturday (we’re American, can you tell?), so we turned on the English Premier League. West Ham United versus Everton. To say the game was boring is to insult paint drying. Nil-nil, and even that overstates the scoring chances the two teams created.

I’ve long considered myself a sports gourmet. The Olympics are my favourite event of the quadrennial calendar, because so many sports we see rarely are featured over a 17-day period.

But there are reasons those sports aren’t seen the rest of the time: much of the excitement comes from knowing that these athletes have worked for four years to get to this one chance at a gold medal. The other 1460 days on the calendar wouldn’t be nearly as exciting to the rest of us.

Soccer, or true football, is the best example I know of a sport which is amazing to play but incomprehensibly dull to watch. My sons all played enough for me to testify to this fact: watching my child play is wonderful, but watching other people play is not.

There are quite a few team sports which fall into this category. Both baseball and cricket involve far too much standing around. I’ll watch and enjoy the four-minute highlight package of either game much more than the full game.

Oddly, the same can be said for American football. If you only show the actual plays, you can condense a three-hour game into a half-hour timeslot and still show plenty of commercials. (There’s a reason the rise of padded football in America coincided with the advent of instant replay on television!)

Sports like hockey, softball and soccer suffer from another damaging trait, which is the overinflated importance of a single score. Since one mistake can produce a score, but that one score may be all that occurs in the game, wins and losses rest on not the general tenor of play but on one, maybe two moments of brain lapse.

In baseball, it manifests as the ‘one big inning syndrome’, where in the American Major Leagues, the majority of games have this peculiar trait where one team scores more in a single inning than the other team scores the entire game. Basically, one pitcher’s bad inning ruins the game for his team.

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Basketball doesn’t have that problem, but it suffers from another issue: incessant time-outs. The NBA used to have an expression about not needing to watch until the last five minutes of the game. Now, those last five minutes take 40 to play out, and the final 60 seconds take half of that.

The other issue with basketball is that in order to play professionally, you have to have won the genetic lottery and be at least two metres tall to compete. Rugby and American football require men of inordinate mass up front, others of great speed out back. At least the footballers are usually of a normal build, something that the majority of us can aspire to.

All of which leads me to our sport: Aussie rules footy. There are enough scores that one mistake settles only a very closely fought match. There’s action going virtually all game long – my novice Yank friends are always amazed that the trainers come out onto the field and action usually works around them when a player is hurt.

There aren’t any timeouts to slow the momentum of a team, the opponent’s going to have to find a way to do that themselves. And while there are positions where height is a significant advantage, the majority of footy athletes are simply well-balanced physical specimens who run well for speed and endurance, jump high, catch, punch, and kick with skill, and must use their brains around the pitch to excel.

Leads are rarely insurmountable before the fourth quarter, even when they require doubling your team’s output for the day to do so.

And most importantly from, the team that plays better on that day almost always wins, but that doesn’t mean that the team that was favoured always wins. All it takes is for one team to believe their press clippings, and the other to put forth more effort, and an upset can take on epic proportions.

Had Brisbane been able to hang on Saturday against the Bulldogs, the first half of that game would be Exhibit A. As it is, it may still be Exhibit B. Hawthorn’s thumping of West Coast might be a lot of things – a last gasp by a proud team, flat-track bullies floundering at the ‘G – but it might also be one team just playing harder than the other on a particular day.

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And that’s what’s so great about footy. You never know what you’re going to see when you go to a game, no matter how lopsided it looks on paper. But you know that, most likely, the team that plays better on that particular day will win.

Weekly Wanderings:
Another great thing about AFL is the value placed on traditions. Milestone games mean something (congratulations, Bob Murphy!), the entry banners are important (as long as they can spell ‘Ziebell’ correctly!), and hitting 800 goals means a lot (congratulations, Lance Franklin!). But not as much as reaching 500 and winning the game (congratulations, Jarryd Roughhead!).

You mob the fellow who scores his first AFL goal. You back up your teammate who gets knocked to the turf by an opponent. A goal counts for six no matter how it’s scored, but when it’s a thing of beauty it’s admired forever (Eddie Betts’ name is stapled to this spot). So is a magical mark or a tremendous tackle.

The numbers don’t have to be the same from year to year, but the skills that were important for Gary Ablett Sr are just as important for Gary Ablett Jr.

Of course there are flaws in the sport. We’re human, we can’t help it. But don’t lose sight of the forest of beauty of the game for the nitpicking in the trees.

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