Anzac Day, Fitzroy and dawn of modern footy

It was Anzac Day 1981, Fitzroy versus Essendon at Waverley Park, that footy changed before my eyes. It was Kevin Sheedy’s first season at Essendon and Robert Walls’ first coaching Fitzroy.

The Roys were the previous season’s wooden spooners and they played like it, kicking short and mucking around like they were so far out of their league they didn’t want to play footy any more – like the only thing on their minds was self-preservation.

That Fitzroy won that day was, at the time, nothing to write home about – the Bombers ended up losing their first six under Sheedy.

As I and many others saw it the Bombers got frustrated, never got their act together and eventually just ran out of time. The wooden-spooners’ feeble attempt at playing football had dragged the Bombers down to their level.

I was there with a serious basketballer and he saw something else – he was adamant someone at Fitzroy had been talking tactics with someone outside of footy.

I wasn’t sure about that and no one else seemed to see it that way either.

The Age reported it “an unspectacular, grinding match”, and that coach Walls had said afterward “we’re not a great team, we’re a good team. We just need 20 contributors on the field each week.”

Essendon got onto a 15-match winning streak soon after and squeezed into the five, and were rewarded with Fitzroy at Waverley again in the elimination final. The Lions pulled the same stunt, but their act was more polished this time; it was bad football played very well.

Then I was sure.

Last year’s wooden-spooners heading deep into September might have helped sway me too.

Footy first got interested in playing the percentages in the early 1960s – radical new-age thinking then was Norm Smith bringing the axe down on the dropkick.

The conventional narrative around Australian football has Ron Barassi’s apocryphal “handball, handball, handball” instruction at half-time of the 1970 grand final signifying the end of footy’s Old Testament and the start of the New.

Myself, I was never convinced that result wasn’t just a case of the Pies cracking the bubbly too soon. A couple of unanswered Blues goals and panic looked after the rest.

Rather than a turning point in the tactics and strategy race, 1970 was a flat-line. Tommy Hafey’s Richmond long beforehand been cleaning up, playing on, and handballing to a teammate on the run, who’d kick it long to a pack.

And long after 1970, league teams were still kicking it long to packs.

Footy’s next breakthrough was of a magnitude off the scale compared to the dropkick’s demise. It came not from Barassi, whose teams were either loaded up with talent or lost, but from Walls, with his theory of 20 contributors playing defined roles within a strategic and tactical game-plan.

It had been a mantra around footy forever that a champion team could beat a team of champions, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence, before that impoverished early-80s Fitzroy side managed to make the finals, despite the might-is-right free-market football economy before the salary cap and the draft.

This was nearly twenty years before Billy Beane at Oakland – this was Moneyball: The Prequel.

Winning football before Walls looks today like a drunken gamble, banging it long and hoping it didn’t come whistling back fifteen seconds later.

The lack of nous didn’t mean it wasn’t good to watch – to the contrary. Who needed science when you’ve got mayhem?

Footy has been blessed like that – unlike a lot of games played badly, bad footy can be enthralling, a bit like the celebrity race. Someone always wins too, and it might partially explain why it took the best part of a century and an anxious club like Fitzroy to challenge the accepted wisdom.

Before 1981, switching play before it got past the centre was regarded in terms of the ‘Leyland Brothers’ tag given to Ian and Bruce Nankervis of Geelong for occasionally thinking differently – or thinking at all. How the experts laughed. What were they doing kicking across the face of goal?

But the Roys were so down at heel they couldn’t take a trick. Necessity is the mother of invention, and intellectual property costs nothing if you develop it yourself. So risk and innovation became the go at Fitzroy under Walls. Ideas were pulled in from all over – other football codes, basketball, weddings, parties…

Pack marks were spectacular, like drop kicks, but the percentages said uncontested possessions were the way forward, and so it has proved.

The Roys under Walls went sideways or short and gained yardage largely risk-free, often via the radically different tactic of blokes presenting short along the boundary where no one bothered defending them.

Defending their wings was no better though, because then the Roys went up the corridor and got it up to Bernie Quinlan quicker. Let them have the boundaries then!

True, it wasn’t great viewing unless you were a Roys’ supporter or sympathiser.

But if one wasn’t the former you were probably the latter, so it only looked like cheating a couple of matches a year, when your second-favourite team made your favourite team look brain-dead. They won ugly but good luck to them, you’d say.

Paul Roos, who landed at the Roys at the end of 1981, wasn’t cut the same slack later on at Sydney. His Bloods, not a great team but a sensational team when half did their jobs, won even uglier than Fitzroy.

A thread of Sydney’s 2005 flag surely belongs to Fitzroy. Roos’ Roys teammate, Ross Lyon, could chip in a handful of runners-up medals.

Without ever dominating the competition, during the early ’80s Fitzroy would have won the constructors’ trophy every time.

In 1983, for the first time in the club’s history, the Roys seniors, reserves and under-19s all made the finals using Fitzroy football, symptomatic of a club getting it as right as any could on the smell of an oily rag.

As is their way, other clubs saw the Roys and raised them. Geelong got serious about its set-ups and strategies in 1985, and took on former Collingwood player David Wheadon to take a rational approach to its game-plan.

Before too long footy’s ball movement and defensive formations began to unmistakably resemble aspects of basketball, football, netball and hockey, with some chess, backgammon and poker thrown in.

Wheadon literally wrote the book, Tactics in Modern Football, that gave bush coaches and the public some idea of what was going on out there. By the early ’90s when it was published, even when the art of football war was rudimentary compared to today, the complexity of some of the plays was off the charts. No basketball coach ever stayed up late countering their 9-on-6 fast break or a 10-on-13 overload with a rotating high-post.

Sacrificing yardage to drag opponents out of position or burn up the clock, wrecking the other team’s game plan, or just driving a truck of doubt through their coaching staff’s confidence and hoping they would blink, were all unknown science around footy before Walls’ game-changing prototype in ’81.

Before the Roys wheeled out their possession and tempo game, putting the anchors on the opposition’s run consisted largely of whacking their rover across the top of the head and hoping the inevitable all-in brawl shifted someone’s momentum.

As a player, Walls was a student of the game. If he ever accidentally got a rover on his fontanel, it was never ever in junk time – it was always at exactly the right moment.

What made him a highly effective player up to 1980 was the same instinctive understanding of the situation that, as shown by Walls the coach from 1981, was the epitome of modern footy. It was being smart enough to understand one’s opponent’s situation in order to know exactly they didn’t want, and fiercely competitive enough to give it to them as often as humanly possible.

These days, whatever the last thing it is you want to see the opposition team doing, just pencil it in because they will be doing it – and they’re unlikely to be decking your full forward in front of goal like they did in the olden days.

The AFL could do worse than one day award an annual Walls Peace Prize for outstanding contributions to football’s non-violent strategies and tactics. The bloke who invented dynamite left one. We know it makes sense.

Until then though, all that remains of Fitzroy these days is a legacy so far-reaching that it makes it in my book the most influential football club of the modern era, irrespective of their not being physically being around to pick up the trophy.

The paper-scissors-stone game of strategy and tactics Walls’ Roys kicked off is the main game today – zone defences, numbers at the back, tempo footy and the full-court forward press included. Whatever it takes to still be in there with a chance at the end.

Footy’s come a long way in a short time from a long way back, but it’s right up there now with the international sports. It was only a matter of time before shape entered discussions, and it has.

My basketball mate said 30 years ago today it was a matter of time. “Time, space and possession.” He thought we’d see tighter games and more draws.

I wasn’t sure about that in 1981 – tighter games maybe, but more draws seemed a long bow, like tipping more hole-in-ones. I’m coming around though.

Unless you live in Sam Newman’s cave and think 99-all with three minutes left sounds like basketball, or a nil-all draw can’t be utterly enthralling, AFL footy has become an aficionado’s dream – team sport at its best, fairest and most intriguing.