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What a weird few weeks in footy: the Adelaide Crows suffer a heavy defeat against St Kilda and coach Neil Craig walks away. Port Power suffer a heavy defeat against Collingwood and Matty Primus stays in charge. Figure that out.
The Melbourne Demons suffer a heavy defeat against Geelong and Dean Bailey gets the chop, and then vaguely admits to playing in a certain manner to ensure a good set of draft picks for the following year. Cripes.
No mention of player responsibility, though.
The Gold Coast Suns suffer a heavy defeat against Geelong and Guy McKenna stays in charge. Please explain?
What’s the difference – a single loss or a coach’s overall record?
Then to cap it all off, the Adelaide Advertiser points out that the ABC is considering pulling the plug on SANFL coverage in 2012. What hope is left for the administration of the sport then?
Now, before anyone shouts me down for suggesting that:
(a) Aussie Rules footy isn’t the greatest thing in the known universe
(b) Collingwood is clearly the most incredible entity in the cosmos,
(c) that there aren’t possibly better ways to run a sporting organisation, or
(d) that the sky is falling in a the entire space-time continuum will be vaporised if we don’t stick our fingers in our ears… let’s consider this zany action-packed period with a bit of a genuine critical eye.
Not slavishly negative, just a lingering, proper good look into what could be done to redress the issues at hand.
The sky ain’t falling in, just moving sideways (as Scottish progressive outfit Porcupine Tree would say).
Michael Lynch in the Sydney Morning Herald on August 7 put it simply.
“Footy prides itself on being the most equal competition, the one in which a salary cap and draft is specifically designed to ensure the teams are evenly-matched to produce close encounters.”
We then read from Collingwood boss Mick Malthouse that the scoreboard blow-outs in recent weeks are a worrying trend – and that the suited ones at AFL headquarters should be “concerned”, he told The Age‘s Ash Porter on August 7.
“I think consideration has to be given as to how the draw is operated – who plays who,” he added.
Bingo. That to me is still the biggest sticking point for the national competition – not so-called “tanking”.
I’ve never seen any AFL player drive onto a ground in a restored Panzer IV or M4 Sherman and blast a super-goal from outside the 900-metre line somewhere in the vicinity of the car park.
It’s the fixtures that are the focus here.
We like to pride ourselves in Australia on the supposed fact that the AFL elite series is absolutely even, fair and totally spell-bindingly giddy entertainment, week-in, week-out.
Have we become slowly deluded? It is plainly not even, nor fair, nor always as exciting as footy fanatics would have us believe.
Yet nobody ever seems to ask why or what steps should be taken to do something about it.
Why, for example, is it the controlling body’s fault if teams lose a lot?
Is it the job of the AFL (as said governing body) to ensure teams are competitive? Heck no! That’s the job of the clubs, those running them, the coaches and players.
Like any contest, you have to beat the best to be the best – assemble a better roster of players, don’t ask for a handout from the governing body.
Collingwood president Eddie McGuide – and I don’t always agree with him – told the Herald Sun‘s Sam Edmund on August 9 that the AFL shouldn’t simply prop up ailing teams.
“If you’ve got clubs who think the only way they can prosper is to meekly put their hands out and maybe get a few crumbs off the table of the AFL, they’re never going to fight their way to the top,” McGuire said.
Yet woebetide anyone daring to ever even hint that a fair and equal fixture list would be at least one problem out of the way and return a bit of integrity to the competition.
Does it not matter simply because there’s nothing else to really compare it to? Surely the principle holds true regardless?
I am not saying that the AFL must turn itself (as in, the game as played out on the field) into any other sport. All I am asking is why it is seen as strangely perfectly acceptable every single year to have a lop-sided fixture list?
And this includes me not saying the AFL must transform entirely into the EPL, although the question is a valid one.
Is the fact that there may be only a few teams capable of winning a title a reason to avoid a fair fixture?
Sure, if there was promotion and relegation in Australian Rules footy, you’d have more interest at the lower end of the ladder. True. But again, just because the AFL is the apparent be-all and end-all, shouldn’t it still matter?
Fairness is when there are six cans of Coke in a box and I give two to each of my two friends nearby.
Fairness is not team A meeting team B, then C, D, E, A, F, G, H, B and probably completely missing out on seeing I, J and K again for another year and a half.
Fairness is not a team like Collingwood (as good as they may be) getting over half their season’s matches at home, nay, probably the same stadium.
Fairness is not about using terms like “my team had an easy draw this year”. There should be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” draw if it’s truly fair. Either it is fair or it is not.
The solution is simple – either everyone plays everyone once and there’s room for extra play-offs, State Of Origin (remember that?) and IRF Tests, etc. Or scrap the pre-season and everyone plays everyone twice. Why, oh why is it so hard to grasp?
As Patrick Smith put it so eloquently in The Australian on August 6 – the AFL continues to pick and choose the issues it thinks are worth dealing with.
Players betting on own team? Check. Horrendously lop-sided fixture list? Nah, we’ll keep letting that one pass, for years and years.
“The league’s integrity is a stick-on transfer,” Smith wrote.
“And it only plonks it on issues where it best suits the league…Australian rules is a wonderful sport but as a business it truly stinks.”
He added three days later that “as long as the AFL’s stated aims are to increase attendance and ratings, the big clubs must be favoured…”
Collingwood – Smith’s example, not necessarily mine here – gets to play on Friday nights, a blockbuster opponent every second weekend, is favoured in the fixture and as a result can attract the dollars to make it grow even more powerful.
Hardly the picture of fairness those running the competition would like us to dearly hold to, is it? No, it’s called success – and as a club, good on the Pies if they play well with the resources they have.
But again, success shouldn’t be able to be built on the back of an unfair fixture.
“The AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou continues to brush aside any criticism of his administration,” said Smith.
“The lop-sidedness of the competition should be of no concern to anyone…there is naught to worry your little minds about. Hush now.”
Brilliantly put. Maybe at the close of season 2011, there will be some at AFL headquarters who will take note and help everyone to wake up to the inequity of it all.
And for the nth time, none of this is meant to be me having a go at the sport itself. I believe there’s little wrong at all with the game – as in the players running around passing a pill and trying to get it through the big sticks at either end. Perfectly fine there.
It’s the other guff outside every Saturday (or Friday night or Sunday twilight) that irritates the public – and that includes me. Like this.
Contrary to what you may have been told, people – high-scoring matches don’t turn fans off. Plainly inequitable fixture lists do. Find a way to get it right, please!
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