Some Pobjie tips to give the pre-season some bite

OK. I give up. I need some help. I’ve just been watching a thing called the “NAB Challenge”, and I still have no idea what it’s about.

I believe that NAB is some kind of financial institution, but I have yet to locate the challenge.

That’s the difficulty with football pre-seasons, isn’t it? They polarise opinion. On the one hand, some people find them boring and meaningless; but on the other hand many people consider them tedious and irritating.

But look, obviously the reason the Fox Footy Channel has been be-swarmed by this “challenge” is so we can get a little teaser for the season ahead.

So here is my list of Things I Have Learned From The NAB Challenge:

1. “NAB” stands for National Australia Bank.

2. The Australian Football League contains 18 clubs.

3. In 2014 socks will continue to be a popular accessory for many players.

4. Football involves a ball and some posts and some other things.

5. Many teams will win some games this year but some of them will win fewer games than other ones.

So what I’m saying is, there’s a lot the NAB Challenge can teach us. At least there might be. Theoretically.

I guess the thing about pre-seasons is that they’re not seasons.

That’s why they’re called pre-seasons.

If you called the pre-season the season then the season would be the post-season and that’d be weird, which is why we call the pre-season the pre-season, to distinguish it from the season; the season being that part of the year during which people give a crap about football.

Currently we’re in that part of the year during which people don’t give a crap about football.

Or to be more precise, they do give a crap about football, but only football which is played during a different time of year. Because people know that the football being played now doesn’t matter.

They know that the Bulldogs beating the Saints augurs exactly nothing. They know that West Coast thrashing Fremantle won’t imply anything for the year ahead.

And they know that nobody participating in these games cares either – these games are for players to warm up their legs and coaches to warm up their larynxes.

They’re not for competition, and certainly not for “challenge”. The only challenge involved in the NAB Challenge is in the commentary box, where those hapless callers have to somehow generate inflections suggestive of enthusiasm.

Still I guess it’s an improvement on the NAB Cup, which actually awarded a trophy to whoever was the worst at keeping their best team off the field.

It is a vexed question for administrators: how to achieve unnecessary saturation coverage of the sport during the off-season, while only alienating fans just enough for them to become jaded and cynical but not stop spending money?

The fear the AFL has, of course, is that if football fans go one day without having football stuffed down their throats, they will instantly give up on the game and start going to volleyball.

A valid fear, but sadly, the way to engage fans is not to provide them with a terrible product that nobody cares about.

You don’t win hearts and minds with supergoals, especially because supergoals are stupid and they make AFL scoreboards look even messier and more confusing than they already are.

No, the way to make pre-seasons exciting is through innovation.

For example:

– instead of the NAB Challenge, why not the NAB Shootout? Every club puts up its best goalkicker, and they compete to see who can kick the most set shots from a variety of angles. Then some men with guns come and shoot at them and they have to run away.

– instead of a Supergoal for goals kicked from outside fifty, why not an Ultragoal for goals kicked from outside the stadium? Or a Microgoal: only three points for goals that the umpire reckons even he could’ve kicked.

– why not reward teams for playing youth? For every player under the age of thirteen who takes the field during the pre-season, the opposition has to tie one of its starting eighteen’s ankles together.

– why not make the games really MEAN something? Not with a stupid trophy or paltry cash prize, but by putting one of the coach’s children into foster care for every game lost.

– why not have every player wear their own clothes onto the field, instead of the team uniform?

– what if umpires were allowed to take large gifts from illegal bookmakers?

– why not allow feral animals onto the field during the last five minutes of every quarter?

– why not play in the nude?

– why not get drunk?

As you see there are many ways in which the pre-season can be made interesting and fun, and only most of them involve not putting it on TV and freeing up airtime for cricket.

Any and all of the suggestions above are absolutely guaranteed to get bums on seats. Where those seats are I can’t say, but bums will be on them, and that’s the main thing.

I will take a cheque Mr Demetriou.