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What’s going on with AFLX? A few months ago it was going to be played in the bye week before finals, then it changed to being played in pre-season.
Now it looks like that is off the table as well. So what’s going on then? Has the AFL realised that creating a game essentially from scratch, and then getting professional players to test it comes with a set of problems.
The concept itself is fine – a version of Australian football that can be played on a soccer pitch making the game more accessible to people in different countries which have fewer ovals than Australia.
The problem mainly comes from transferring a game from one shaped surface to another.
Over the last 100 years, Australian football has developed as a game to be played on an oval. In its earliest years, it was played on a rectangular field, but that is ancient history now.
Besides, the rectangle it was played on dwarfed the current soccer and rugby fields that AFLX will utilise.
Since the AFL is yet to release their rules for the new game, we can’t be sure about how some of the problems that come from a smaller rectangular field will be solved. The first problem is kick length.
On a standard AFL ground, a good 50m kick from the goal square will just clear your defence. On a soccer field, it will get you just shy of halfway.
It is not inconceivable that a goal might be scored after just two kicks, or even directly from a ball up in the centre (which we assume there will be to start a match at least).
You’d suggest that this might be solved by instituting netball like zones, forcing the ball to progress through the zones before you score, but this would change the game totally, from the free-flowing oval version to a shorter kicking, zoned, rectangle versions – certainly unlike modern Australian football.
The trial games that have been played so far have reportedly been high scoring, with teams being killed on the turnover, so maybe the AFL is happy to keep a fast, long kicking, easy scoring version of the game.
We won’t really know until the rules are released.
The other problem comes from the rectangle nature of the field itself. We can assume that boundary throw ins won’t be a thing in AFLX (with the AFL still toying with the idea of getting rid of them in the ‘official’ rules), but then what happens when the ball goes behind the goal-line?
This was solved in the original rules by having either the standard kick in by the opposition if it was between the ‘behind’ posts, or by a boundary throw in if not.
If the boundary throw in is kept in the rules it will be a simple solution, but if it’s not, might we see a kind of corner lick from soccer, or a penalty corner from hockey work its way into AFLX?
Once again, this is quite a foreign concept to Australian football so it will be interesting to see how it works if it is adopted.
The goal for the AFL should be to have a game of AFLX at AAMI Park – the novelty factor itself should ensure a crowd.
This would act as a proof of concept for the entire idea of the game and also suggest that the concept has a future in both Australia and the rest of the world.
Allianz Stadium has been mentioned as a possible venue, but trying to place a new product, especially one from the AFL, in Sydney to start with would be a mistake.
AFLX can be a success if the AFL plays it right, but it is a fine line. One wrong rule, or even a wrong venue, may be the difference between a genuinely interesting product and a game that is a laughing stock.
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