Explaining AFL's Saturday night fever

Saturday night’s alright for fighting but it’s not much good for footy. There’s a surcharge on atmosphere that makes most of the other social options available to well-rounded people in a big city more appealing than going to a game.

The reasons for this aren’t important because, generally speaking, serious football fans are not well-rounded people. We talk a well-rounded story and make a well-rounded case, but inside we’re as racked with conflict and ruled by our compulsions as any gambler, drunk or political aspirant. It’s just how it is.

So you exchange obligatory sayonaras with friends in Gertrude Street and go your separate ways, they to the Northcote Social Club in a cab, you – that is to say, me – to the lighted dome in the other direction, on foot, alone, carrying a Tiger scarf from another time and a fairly new pocket radio that will go on the fritz any minute now, if the last two are any guide. You’re a man who has failed in life, basically.

The tagline for the night, as it happens. It’s only Round 6 but this is the last roll of the dice for Richmond, a club with more than 70,000 members. And it’s an absolutely winnable game – Port is going just as bad and missing its best defender and its two blue-chip midfielder forwards.

Of course, Richmond is without its one bona fide champion, Alex Rance. More statistically-minded analysts will already have established the offence/defence deferential with/without Rance. The drop-off in the standard of grooming is no less dramatic.

Back in the day you got a free comb with your monthly trim and shave from the barber in Bridge Road. Were the offer reprised in 2016, it’s a safe bet Rance would be the only member of Richmond’s list likely to show any interest, and not just because it’s taken him until now, with consecutive All-Australian honours and a best and fairest under his belt, to climb into the top ten on the club’s pay scale.

The rest are a strangely appropriate collection of regimental number one cuts, suburban tapers and the odd wildly misfiring experiment like Jake Batchelor’s weekly take on the Cleopatra-look – time for a leading teams-style honesty session there, surely. Standards have collapsed.

That the MCG is three-quarters empty on a balmy April evening is probably due less to the wilting spirits of the Tiger faithful than to the implacable realities of Saturday night in the city. That’s my take, anyway.

Plan and consult all you like.The forces that determine these things aren’t amenable to metric logic, innovative marketing or medium-to-longterm strategies. They’ve determined that Saturday night isn’t a great night for footy, and that’s it.

University-trained intellectuals don’t understand this. Corporate leaders, senior partners and – especially – professional debaters understand it even less.

There are two things Gillon McLachlan needs to bear in mind when the night grand final lobby next rolls into town, usually sometime around the midyear sales. The first is that Saturday night football doesn’t work. The second is that it doesn’t matter why, it just doesn’t work.

This sort of unassailable logic is also lost on the role-players at Tiger HQ, it seems. Brendan Gale and Dan Richardson were playing it chastened and true, respectively, when they did their separate media turns on Monday.

It didn’t occur to Gale, the CEO, that the miserable crowd might have been caused by factors other than the miserable football Richmond have been playing for the best part of eight weeks now (if you include the premonition dressed as a bad night in the last NAB Challenge match).

Gale was at some pains to show that he knew why the fans had stayed away. It was because the playing group hadn’t been executing the game-plan to the required standard. I feel your pain, he said, more or less. No doubt he did – execution hurts.

Richardson is in charge of everything to do with football, list management and, especially, strategy. As Josh Elliott reported on Tuesday, he was adamant on several fronts when he faced a hostile public on Monday, albeit via a fairly tame radio interview that didn’t take any calls from Tiger fans while he was on air.

Richardson was adamant that the on-field performances were totally unacceptable. He was also adamant that the game-plan was good. No, the dysfunctional ball movement and lamentable skill execution couldn’t be tolerated – he was most adamant on that point. But the plan was good. All our plans are good.

He was adamant that the reliance on role-playing cast-offs from other clubs had been a necessary and successful policy which, yes, was hurting the club now. But the overall strategy was sound, still is. Stay with us, because we’re sticking to it.

Confess to a fear of sharks and someone is bound to inform you of the infinitesimal chances of being taken by a white pointer compared to the far greater likelihood of succumbing to cardiac arrhythmia or old age. These people (obviously) don’t understand the nature of fear.

I’m not sure Dan understands the nature of reality, or how it differs from the nature of messaging. The messaging is up to the industry standard, state of the digital art, benchmark-tested, reviewed,revised, hung, dried, certified best practice, no doubt. But the reality is that practically no one believes it.

There’s also a difference between strategy and judgment, believe it or not. Elite planning won’t take you far if your judgment is average. If the plan is to assemble a foreign legion of role-players, you still need to pick the right ones. These days your judgment needs to be more unerring still when you get a look at the young talent in the draft that matters, and start developing the ones that come your way.

Coach Hardwick has been locked in for the longterm, presumably to keep the poachers at bay. Good for him, he’s a steady guy. But there’s little evidence that he’s much good with talent, and a lot of evidence that he still prefers unskilled hardnuts in a side that is light-on for skill, at a time when skill is not-negotiable.

Dustin Martin is still the only outright draft success in the Hardwick era. And without downplaying the good and solicitous care and guidance provided by the club’s leaders to the gifted rodeo bull from Castlemaine, Dusty would have been good anyway.

He’s been out of sorts this year but it started turning for him on Saturday. He’s still only at two-thirds capacity – he turned the ball over under no pressure in the first quarter and the resulting goal seemed to galvanise the visitors. Dominated for the first fifteen minutes, Port turned in front with more than twice as many scoring shots, and powered away thereafter.

What resistance Boak, Broadbent, Pittard, Polec and co encountered after quarter time came mostly from Martin. That’s the problem – he had more impact going at 70 per cent than five or six others combined. So it’s difficult not to question the judgment of the people giving the assurances.

Someone judged that a four year contract was needed to lure Troy Chaplin from a club that was happy to lose him. Ben Griffiths remains a partly-realised talent who was still growing four years after he was taken with a high pick. His progress has been interrupted by injuries, which happens, and his type take time to develop.

He was also a beautiful kick, once. Now he can’t hit the side of a substation from 20 metres if goal posts are involved. When he was drafted it was envisaged that Griffith would be the team’s main tall forward, with Jack Riewoldt in support.

Jack, second string to Griffo? Reece Conca has also been jinxed with injury but he was never anyone’s idea of number six draft pick – anyone else’s, anyway.

Conca was given a three year contract extension the same year Richardson prevailed in a game of chicken with Martin’s manager. But for a time there Martin was gone from the club, uncontracted and fielding offers, while Conca was successfully locked away. They went to the brink again last year with the irreplaceable Rance, the only player to beat Martin in the 2015 best and fairest.

You can interpret those as just vindication for staying true to the strategy. Or you can regard them as outrageous risks that almost lost the club two players it absolutely cannot afford to lose, in order to build a war chest it can’t give away.

Dan may need to get outside, walk up and down Bridge Road a few times, get a fresh sense of the surroundings, maybe even a haircut while he’s down there.

Why? Because he’s still speaking like a man who thinks the faith is his to assume. It isn’t. The wind has shifted and so has the onus of proof. He’s plainly a well-rounded and conscientious guy who is probably assessing next year’s draft options right now. As we all know, good judgment or not, drafting can be a game of luck.

Well, he’ll need some. I’ve got a feeling he inadvertently drafted his own severance papers this week.