The Roar
The Roar

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To not preview, view or review

Roar Guru
23rd February, 2018
3

Imagine there are two people in a Tasmanian bar, trying to pick who will finish last in the upcoming AFL season.

‘Brisbane were a popular wooden spoon pick last year.’

‘And so it proved to be.’

‘They won five games and had the lowest percentage in the competition.’

Alternatively, you can imagine those words being exchanged between a penitent and a priest, the sinner’s confessions being interposed by a priest’s grave intonation. In reality, all these words were written by Cameron Rose over the first two sentences of his Brisbane Lions preview.

AFL and racing previews are his forte. To allow for a representative sample of his work, his last fifty articles were analysed for the purposes of this story. Every story fell into one of the two aforementioned categories, and all of both were about what was to happen, not what had just happened.

Yet if he had been writing for Channel Seven and not The Roar, it may have been more appropriate for him to have submitted a review. That network gave complete coverage to AFLX.

Every match was televised by them. Even now, it is possible to find full nights of the neophyte format on YouTube. There you will find that Fox Sports simply tapped into Seven’s feed for the in-play commentary, not bothering to supply their own commentators, leaving that field to James Brayshaw, Brian Taylor and a bevy of players, ex-players and coaches to tell us how wonderful the new format really is.

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Mr Taylor even went so far as to ruefully express the opinion that when a third successive “zooper” to start one of the games turned into a behind, the possibility had been ‘just too good to be true.’

His frame of reference needs expansion. Professional footballers kicking three straight goals from more than forty metres out does not become ‘too good to be true’ just because the reward is ten points instead of six.

If Paul D was promised that he could prevent a Brisbane loss by just talking to his television as though it were a genie, that would be too good to be true. It would also be the cause of an unfortunate case of laryngitis for Mr D by the end of Round 4.

If Mr D does want to watch Brisbane on television over those rounds, he’ll need to pay for it. None of Brisbane’s early matches are being covered by Seven, the price of many years of incompetence.

Hindmarsh Stadium AFLX generic

(Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)

If Brisbane does exceed expectations in the early rounds, there’ll be no shortage of reporters to cover it. AFL sells. AFLX?

There has been reference to AFLX being the AFL’s version of the Big Bash League. The comparison is flawed on many levels, but one area it may not fail us quite so much for analysis is in the media.

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Cricket writer Jarrod Kimber mentioned earlier this year that it is not unknown for Cricket Australia to pay independent journalists to cover the BBL. In this sense, Cricket Australia and the AFL may share an interesting conundrum should AFLX last.

Both would undoubtedly like their own media organisations, cricket.com.au and afl.com.au, to be the most powerful players in the media, yet competition from organisations like News Corporation and Fairfax provide one yardstick of outside interest.

What might be the best yardstick of just how much AFLX has turned logic on its head is that the statements:

‘Brisbane were the best team in the competition last season.’

and;

‘Brisbane were the worst team in the competition last season.’

Now require further explanation. Yet Brisbane, as bad as a wooden spoon is, at least had a wooden spoon last season. Tasmania has something worse than a wooden spoon at the moment. That matters because it makes the football seem less worthy of previewing, reviewing or, and most crucially, viewing.

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