There’s a basic hierarchy of experiences as an AFL fan. The simple reality of it is that winning is always better, but losing is more bearable when you’re not trying to be good.
Written out, it goes like this:
1. Winning when you’re trying to be good
2. Winning when you’re not trying to be good
3. Losing when you’re not trying to be good
4. Losing when you’re trying to be good
Believe me, as a North Melbourne fan who before last night had endured nearly two months of losing while trying to be good, that is definitely the correct order.
Winning when the team is trying to be good, trying to push for a flag, and believing during the euphoria of victory that anything is possible is the best feeling you can get as a footy fan. Nothing compares.
Similarly, copping a loss in a year when the team wants to be a flag contender, or wants to be in finals, is the bitterest of bitter pills to swallow. There’s no excuse, no mindset that will dull the pain of the loss – you have been tested, and you have failed.
Being an AFL fan when the team is not really trying to be good is much more of a muted experience. In times of trouble, times of ‘rebuild’, clubs create a media narrative that now is not their time, but later will be, and encourage their fans to see progress in their performances, whether it’s there or not.
Winning during these times is great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not coupled with the notion that this could really be your year, that you are on the march to finals. It’s not quite as euphoric.
Losing during these times is hardly fun but there are always so many things you can take out of it when you do – yes we got caned by ten goals by gee didn’t some-player-under-25 look good with that one nice handball he did.
Sometimes you’ve got to scrape the barrel a bit, like when the Brisbane Lions this week pumped up their first-year key forward Josh Schache for being in the top 100 for minutes played this season – a decent achievement, if a small one, but hardly the tonic for a 1-15 season.
However most of the time fans are relatively willing to accept a step back into ‘not trying to be good’ territory, simply because it involves a lot less heart-on-the-line.
Fans of clubs who aren’t trying to be good also tend to get more sympathy and kind words from other fans. That may sound nice on the surface but the vast majority of it is because other teams don’t regard you as a threat.
After a club goes through a fair chunk of losing while trying to be good, dulling the pain by just not even trying to be good in the first place seems preferable – see for example many Richmond fans begging their club throughout the year to just give up on finals and start playing the kids, which they have recently done.
That’s a mentality in the league that I will never fully be able to understand because personally, I never want my club to not be winning, or at least trying to.
So what’s got me talking about all this you ask? David King’s assertion earlier in the week that the Brisbane Lions should trade their captain Tom Rockliff, a 26-year-old two-time best-and-fairest winner and All Australian, in search of yet another draft pick.
Acquiring draft picks is the ultimate symbol of not trying to be good right now. Draft picks are all about the potential, all about the excitement come November. Little will do more to give fans a feeling of confidence that they’re on the right track than seeing a bunch of pimply-faced 18-year-olds, who come with two thumbs up from Kevin Sheahan, donning club colours for the first time.
Don’t get me wrong – acquiring youth and constantly looking to build your list for the long term is a very important part of the game, and one that no club can neglect without courting disaster. But it’s naturally exciting, and far too many get carried away with it.
It leads to ideas like this – that clubs who are struggling should trade out their best servants, go back to the draft well yet again, and hope it turns out better this time. That the Lions should trade the person at the club who, judging by the passion he shows on the field, cares more about it than any other in the organisation.
“Get those young kids, punch 30 games into them and see where it takes you,” is the list strategy that King recommends for Brisbane. It’s the kind of simple-minded thinking that built Mark Neeld’s Melbourne. Might as well make Josh Schache and Eric Hipwood co-captains from 2017 onwards.
It’s the kind of suggestion you can only make when you know that you don’t have any vested interest in whether or not it works out. If the Lions were to take King’s advice and then find a new level of rock bottom as a result – which they certainly would – it wouldn’t be King who loses his job because of it.
As someone who often comes up with terribly bad ideas and then writes about them here, I’m well aware of this. As I put it on twitter:
Note about being in the media: It's pretty easy to have a ridiculous opinion on what a club should do when it's not your ass on the line.
— Josh Elliott (@JoshElliott_29) July 21, 2016
King’s suggestion shows a complete disregard for the systemic issues at a club that are the reason why the development of draft picks fails. Brisbane have had constant problems with their talent wanting to leave the club, or demanding bigger contracts than they’re arguably worth. So what’s the answer? More draft picks, apparently. But the cycle will just start all over again unless you fix the root cause of the problem.
That’s why worshipping the draft pick is a false religion. The vast majority of rebuilds will ultimately fail to deliver a flag, simply because the club never fixes the issues that were causing it to struggle in the first place.
And don’t kid yourself that a club needs to have that rebuild period in order to become good later. Just look at the Sydney Swans who have been consistently making finals, consistently challenging for the flag, for more than a decade now – and have debuted six new AFL players this year, with a seventh coming this afternoon.
That is what all clubs should aspire to. Trying to be good may make the lows lower, but it makes the highs so much higher. And when you decide to stop trying to be good now in the service of maybe being good later, you run the risk of maybe never being good at all.
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