Not so sure about the string factor Hugh. Poly strings have been around since the mid-80s, Luxilon strings (big banger & ALU power) along with natural gut were in everyone’s racquets for the entirety of Hewitt’s career.

I reckon it’s more a case of Hewitt being a great player at the right time. He took advantage of playing exceptionally well at the end of Sampras & Agassi’s career and before the Federer started dominating. And good on him for it – of all of the guys that won grand slams during that period (Johanssen, Korda, Kafelnikov, Ferrero, Gaudio, etc.) he was probably one of the most deserving.

Great article mate, really well-written.

The most important point Macca is that they aren’t tanking. Resting players this week isn’t losing on purpose – it’s resting players. They qualified for the finals with a week in hand, they can do what they want to manage their team.

The chances of North having to travel to Adelaide if they win tonight are as remote as the chances of them having to travel to Sydney if they lose. It would be a huge concern if the AFL started to get involved in team selection and management.

In answer to your other questions – I don’t think the Lions getting 1 & 2 this year as opposed to 2 & 3 would make any difference at all. Too many variables. Who was the last number one pick to end up the best player out of the draft?

But again, if tanking’s a huge issue, make it a lottery – might not be perfect but it’ll stop any tanking instantly.

C’mon Macca. First of all Brisbane are more than capable of losing convincingly with any team they put on the paddock.

Secondly, Leppitsch would probably take a win to try and show some of his players that there might be some upside to wanting to stay at the club. The top two picks are both key position guns so wouldn’t be the end of the world – whoever he gets will probably end up playing for Collingwood in 3 years time anyway.

Thirdly, if the AFL wants to remove tanking for draft picks from the game they can just make the top 8 draft picks a lottery. We put too much of an emphasis on it anyway. Go back and look through the drafts for the past decade – it wouldn’t have mattered if you scrambled around the clubs, the number one pick is rarely the standout player now.

And fourth – It’s all too hypothetical. Teams that can’t make the finals are much better off getting some experience into some of their younger, inexperienced players in the final few rounds – could this be viewed as tanking? Of course it isn’t – it’s good team management, but they’re not fielding their best side…

Well said Josh. It would have been far more concerning for me if the AFL had got involved in a club’s team selection and management.

It’s just a mixture of an uneven competition and a bit of bad luck this situation has come about. The AFL did the right thing staying out of it or it would have become more of a circus.

Really @really? If you think a more effective way to encourage girls and females to get involved in sport is by removing all of the boundaries that define different competitions (gender, weight, age, etc.) than by simply encouraging, supporting and promoting women’s sport then please go right ahead…

Cancel all women’s sport effective immediately, toss them all in the one pot and watch female participation grow!

Great points @Dalgety. As I mentioned in the article I can certainly understand why the AFL would want access to the player data and have the ability to integrate it with their statistics provider in real time – they possibly view the potential telecast benefits as worth the risk. However at this stage (by my understanding, which may be wrong), that information is the property of catapult and the clubs, who could be justified in not necessarily wanting to share it.

Is forcing the clubs to hand over access to all of their player data (both game and training loads, etc) through a dubious tender process a little bit of a step over the mark? We’ll see I guess.

That’s of course not even looking at the other argument, which is that they’ve awarded what I presume is a lucrative deal to a company headed up by two of their employees for an inferior product. Allegedly.

Maybe I’ll just slip my tin-foil hat back on and keep plugging away….

Absolutely. Still, doesn’t mean it should go unnoticed even if GPS data isn’t the sexiest topic.

Isn’t it time we stopped making constant comparisons between male and female athletes as a means to justify why women aren’t as good or shouldn’t be paid as much?

I understand that wasn’t the premise of this article at all and I think Andrew’s intentions are well-founded, however can’t we just accept it as the same sport, but different competitions.

We don’t criticise Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s boxing because he would get pummelled by Wladimir Klitschko. Nor do we push for just one event – boxing. We accept the different weight divisions and get on with things.

We don’t criticise Hicham El Guerrouj for being slower than Usain Bolt even though they’re both runners.

Let’s just enjoy and promote the growth of women’s sport – they’re the best within the defined boundaries of their competition so let’s appreciate them for that and enjoy the fact that as female competitions.grow, so does the sport.

@Bart – I’ll take your word for it mate, since you’re there and I’m not. Over 5000 registered club juniors across a dozen or so clubs is a phenomenal effort if true. If that’s the case the future is certainly brighter than the present.

The exaggeration of sports participation figures through junior programs such as Auskick in aussie rules, Hot Shots in tennis, etc. is a discussion for another article and time. In one way it’s fair, in another way it’s sneaky. I certainly don’t begrudge the sports for doing it – large participation numbers = government funding.

@Bart – Really? You sure that doesn’t include auskick? The oldest trick in the book is to give all auskick participants a club membership to help pump up the figures – helps with government grants so I hear…

I don’t know how it works on the GC as I’ve never lived there however the only info I can find is on the AFL Gold Coast Juniors competition (http://www.foxsportspulse.com/assoc_page.cgi?c=1-4608-0-0-0&a=COMPS) and there’s no way there’s over 5000 in that.

Haven’t been to the Retreat, will have to check it out!

@Bart – That makes good sense. There’s no doubt aussie rules is strong in SE Qld, I think AFL Queensland do a very good job in an extremely competitive environment.

However I don’t think the foundations were strong enough for two teams in the national competition when they started. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure there’s only about a dozen or so footy clubs in the Gold Coast region.

By comparison Tasmania has around 40 clubs (I think?). Granted they’re spread further and it’d be a huge challenge getting them to all learn to like one another however I think that’s a much more solid foundation for sustainability.

I really hope the Queensland clubs come good and get a better following – but I’m not confident. Soccer is consistently growing there and the NRL is about to get an injection of cash. I reckon it’s a real concern.

Have just done a bit of looking into this one… Happy to concede to the locals on it as I’ve never lived there.

Crowd averages for 2015 were:

Rugby League: 9,630
Rugby Union: 12,455
AFL: 11,783

Obviously only 3 AFL games compared to 12 & 8 so it’s a smaller sample size. However they were Melbourne vs West Coast, GWS vs Geelong and GWS vs Melbourne. So not exactly blockbusters.

To average 11,783 in a ground with a capacity of 13,550 (compared to GIO which is 25,000) is a pretty good effort and shows that there’s definitely a good base there in comparison to the Gold Coast and Western Sydney – which was the point of the article.

I’d be very surprised if it wouldn’t overtake league and union very quickly in terms of crowd numbers if they were given higher profile matches or their own team however happy to stand corrected on this one.

Fair enough. I think the A-League will bring it in at some stage and it would be interesting to see how that pans out. The FFA are obviously keen to link their entire structure together and the A-League is the only competition not attached to it.

The problem there is that the drop-off is too steep between the A-League and the NPL, so A-League team owners wouldn’t have a bar of it if they were relegated – the only real solution is to have an intermediary and pump some money into it so the relegated team doesn’t view it as the end of the world.

It’d probably also mean scrapping the salary cap and potentially adding 1 or 2 youth development teams that can’t be promoted to make it work – it’d certainly be interesting…

In that case I absolutely agree. Sorry mate, didn’t understand what your point! Grass roots and community based growth is the only sure way to guarantee long-term stability. I think you’re better off starting with a strong foundation and expanding to the top level – the AFL are the opposite…

Great point – however if the NRL invested heavily in the NSW Cup, do you think that would change the general public’s opinion? We tend to be a populist society – if we’re repeatedly told to like something, there’s a pretty good chance we will.

Spot on. And as you’ve probably gathered I take exception to that…

Of course they aren’t going anywhere, there’s no way anyone would walk away from that sort of investment – however do you really think getting 11,000 along to their games after 4 years considering the money spent is a good result?

You’d be getting 20,000+ in Tassie by now, they already average 14,500 at Bellerive – I agree the ‘potential’ in Western Sydney far exceeds that but to suggest it’s been a success so far might be stretching it…

I probably assumed given the subject of the article most people here would understand what I meant without having to say Australian Rules Football….

The point was, you don’t play AFL – you play Australian Rules Football, no matter what people call it.

Absolutely – but you could say that about any new market the AFL tries to enter. I guess the hope is it’s a generational change, if you market the league and the local team well enough to the kids of the Melbourne-club supporters who will still probably go along to games maybe you can build from there?

Not sure what your point is @Lazza but the answer is terrible. As I stated in the article, the year the Gold Coast entered the competition Brisbane’s crowd averages dropped by nearly 10,000. The crowds were dispersed across 2 clubs that were both performing badly in a market that requires momentum.

There’s plenty of other reasons as to why Brisbane are travelling so badly, however the addition of the Suns has them on their knees.

Yep, it’s a good little debate and at the end of the day will come down to opinions – and we all know what they’re like…

Just on your last point, I reckon a second tier competition will only struggle for relevance if it isn’t backed properly. If the AFL invested in it, made sure it was telecast (maybe with mid-week matches to help fill the void in my life between Sunday night and Friday evening) I think it could get going. But I might be wrong…

Even though it’s comparing apples with oranges the FA in England do this really well with their Championship League and League One. The Premier League, even though it’s the biggest by far, is still part of a structure. I admire how they can achieve that in a competition that can only be won by a couple of teams that spend as much on their players as the entire AFL salary cap combined…

I think we’ll be agreeing to disagree on this one.

In a competition where ladder position and home ground advantage can be so crucial in finals to not have an equal draw can undoubtedly effect the result.

Whether it has up until now is hypothetical so probably isn’t worth debating.

The 17 vs 34 round argument you make also feeds into why I think 18 teams is too many…

I’m looking forward to seeing the effects of that one… Not going to impact Melbourne but the AFL’s Qld market in particular will feel the pinch if it takes off. The Lions and Suns will want to stop being terrible by 2018 or will be in a bit of strife.

Traditionally it was according to the old ‘Barassi Line’, the accuracy of which is probably contentious… but was based on participation rates.

I’ve got no doubt it’s more of a split now between rugby league, union and AFL – maybe because league and union are represented in the national leagues?

@Epiquin. Thanks mate, I wrote it for my blog which is a very different audience hence the painful introduction. They usually have pretty pictures and swear words as well to help ease people who don’t necessarily follow footy into it.

Re. the draw – It’s unequal. You can’t run a sporting league where the teams don’t play each other an equal amount of times and justify it as logical. Can you?

Re. crowd attendances in Melbourne – Of course the AFL is in a great place with attendances. The point I was making there is that the AFL has lost it’s club-based feel. It’s all big business and big stadiums now and I think that will hurt clubs in the long term. There are four clubs in Melbourne that cannot fill even half-fill those stadiums for the majority of their matches. Perfect example is the Bulldogs – why not spend some money and develop Whitten Oval – play in front of the same crowds in a 90% full stadium every week. The club will benefit, the fans will benefit and the game will benefit.

Re. the 80 new players – That’s just my opinion. I think it has diluted the talent pool and the style has become more defensive as a result. Completely happy for anyone to disagree, just my take on it.

Re. the AFL expansion – Again, just my opinion. GWS and Gold Coast have been a massive drain on the AFL’s money so far. They have spent and spent and spent and now celebrate the fact that crowd averages in Western Sydney are up from 8,000 to 11,000 or that Gold Coast memberships are up (by 150 people). Tasmania could have had a solid team by now bringing in around 20,000 a game without the AFL needing to spend the same amount – of course they don’t have anywhere near the population and therefore, potential of Western Sydney but there’s no reason they couldn’t have a Geelong sized following. That time could have been used to work hard on developing the game in Western Sydney at the grassroots level so there was more of a culture there when the time was right.

Re. the states – AFL is clearly the biggest in the NT. ACT is probably a split, the old ‘Barassi Line’ shows it’s traditionally an AFL state however NRL and union have undoubtedly caught up – I dunno, maybe because they’ve got teams representing them in the national league?

Re. rugby league – I think it’s pretty ambitious to paint the Western Reds and Adelaide Rams as success stories, however point taken. Was referring more to the Chargers as opposed to the Titans but again, point taken.

Re. the size of the league – I think 18 teams is too many for the top tier in any Australian sport, that doesn’t mean another national league of a lesser standard isn’t feasible if given the proper financial support and it’s a more practical way of growing the sport (not the business that is the AFL) in new regions. The 14 – 10/12 example was purely hypothetical for the sake of an example – I’ve got no doubt there are plenty of much better structures than what I can come up with after a few seconds thought. The raising of the draft age and creation of a national U21 league was raised by someone the other day and is a good example. However, I do firmly believe the further you remove your premier competition from the leagues or divisions below it, the more problems the sport will encounter.