AFL Round 10: Coaching matters, and so does the state of AFL umpiring

We’re headed into the bye rounds, which means the halfway point of the season is approaching. After 89 games of football, it looks like the top eight is taking shape.

This time last week, Round 10 loomed as an interesting slate of nine games if only because the teams placed first to tenth faced off – as did the teams positioned 11th through 18th. It was a litmus test for the whole competition so obvious that even Ross Lyon would have known it.

And so, some semblance of normality resumed. None of the nine results made you scream “what the hell just happened?” in the way we had become accustomed to this season. The top eight is taking shape, and down below we can begin to cross a few names off the list of prospective winners of 2017’s competition.

All four teams – Brisbane, Carlton, Gold Coast and Sydney – that find themselves in the bottom four lost in Round 10.

Sydney lost another close one – that makes it two losses by less than two goals on the season – as a “young” Hawthorn team were coached to perfection by coach Alastair Clarkson.

Faced with the prospect of an in-form Sydney midfield, the Hawks tackled the game with one simple rule: do not use the middle of the ground.

Hawthorn went left and right at every opportunity, playing the round SCG wings to perfection and reducing the risk of Sydney getting their scramble-heavy turnover game going to practically zero. The Hawks touched the ball 33 times inside the centre square – a number I physically counted from heat maps inside the AFL app, which is not something I can normally do.

They had 116 uncontested marks on the evening, their most on the year, and kept the ball out of Sydney’s hands (the Swans held the ball for 44 minutes, their third-lowest total of the year).

(AAP Image/David Moir)

It meant the handful of youngsters the Hawks unveiled were cogs in a simple machine – they were tossed into the cauldron of Friday night football, but just had to play a role. By contrast, Sydney’s youngsters withered, and couldn’t keep up with Hawthorn’s ball control. Halfway through the fourth quarter, the Swans were spent.

For the most part, Sydney’s blue chip stocks delivered strong returns: Lance Franklin kicked five goals and recorded 11 score involvements, eating the remnants of Josh Gibson’s football soul in the process. Dan Hannebery had 35 disposals and six inside 50s, while Josh Kennedy had 33 and 20 contested possessions.

It mattered little in the end given the Hawks snuffed out whatever fire had been stoked among Sydney’s group in the previous handful of weeks.

It should serve as a timely reminder that coaching really matters. And Alastair Clarkson is still one of the best, if not the best, tacticians in the game. We would have been talking about the Hawks, not the Swans, as finished in 2017 were it not for this performance.

Hawthorn’s season is still mostly likely finished, but Friday evening showed so long as he’s in charge, Clarkson-coached teams can win.

Carlton has one of Clarkson’s protégés on their books in Brendon Bolton. He’s another of the game’s sharp tactical minds, and he’s got his team playing a style that keeps the Blues in games for long periods.

Carlton were only in the lead for six minutes yesterday against the Roos, but their comeback from a 45-point deficit to lead a few minutes into the final quarter showed the team continues to progress as it grows under Bolton.

The Blues own the league’s eighth-best defence, conceding around 90 points per game. They keep the ball out of the hands of the opposition well (with a positive time in possession differential of 1.2 minutes), kicking far more frequently than they handball (their kick-to-handball ratio is 1.82, a comical 30 per cent higher than the second-placed Essendon) and taking plenty of uncontested marks (95.1 per game, again second to Essendon).

It is a significant shift from last season for the Blues (a K/H of 1.23, 75.9 uncontested marks per game), but it hasn’t tightened the screws any: Carlton had the 10th-best defence last year, conceding 89.9 points per game.

The Blues are also about the same on time in possession differential this year compared to last. Funnily enough, Carlton are also scoring at about the same clip as last season: 72.8 points per game this year compared to 71.3 per game in 2016.

For now, the points tallies don’t really matter for Carlton. That the Blues are performing about the same as last year with a radically different game style suggests Bolton knows his group well and can get them playing the way he wants. That’s progress.

The Blues continue to get games into their new wave of players, even if match committee seems to swing from old to new on a fortnightly basis. This year, including another busy off-season, looms as the bottom of Carlton’s rebuild; Bolton is most certainly the coach to lead them back to the top.

Queensland football will once more be in focus this week, with four wins between the Gold Coast Suns and Brisbane Lions precisely where they sat after ten rounds of football last season (admittedly, the Suns have a game in hand).

Both teams have a better percentage than last season but find themselves a rung or two lower on the ladder due to the performances of those around them.

The Suns and Lions are at different stages of the journey to sustained success; Gold Coast in the third year of Rodney Eade’s current three-year reign, the stench of an inevitable coaching change growing by the week. Brisbane are ten games into Clarkson Coaching Academy graduate (although was he technically the business manager of the school?) Chris Fagan’s hopefully long tenure.

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

For the Lions, there remains plenty of work to do. Under Justin Leppitsch, Brisbane was a turnstile, conceding high scores every week with its players exhibiting the bare minimum defensive intensity and accountability required to be allowed in the league. It has improved a shade this year: Brisbane are conceding 20 goals a game, rather than the 24 they were in 2016.

On a positive note, Brisbane aren’t being blown out of the water as much as last time around, conceding just two blowout losses through ten games (they had nine in 22 in 2016).

Through ten rounds of the season, Brisbane, Carlton, Gold Coast and Sydney are our four cross-off teams. We’re in the midst of an even season, but three games in the loss column or more back, this quartet would need to display a level of consistent excellence that we simply cannot rationally expect them to attain on their years to date.

While we know four teams can start planning for 2018, 14 still doesn’t go into eight. There’s a lot of rough congealed around 2017’s diamond.

Assessment gets a little tricky over the next three weeks, when chunks of the competition will have an uneven number of games in the books and teams coming off byes play teams coming off a regular week’s rest. It feels like an opportune time to check in on the underlying pulse of the season in our mid-year numbers game – watch out for it on Wednesday.

For now, we can’t end a Monday football column in 2017 without getting frothy about the state of umpiring. Once again, the men in green made their presence known in critical moments of important, top eight-shaping games by applying rules in what seems like an ad-hoc fashion.

Yes, it technically took Charlie Dixon more than 30 seconds to go from the point of marking Hamish Hartlett’s entry kick to the start of his run up for a set shot at goal. The umpire was technically right to call play on.

Yes, Jayden Short technically rushed a behind without a player within four metres of him applying direct pressure. The umpire was technically right to call it a free kick.

Both individual calls were correct to the letter of the law. But if that’s how we wish to umpire games of football, can the AFL issue a decree to begin to penalise players for incorrect disposal when they do not execute a technically correct kick or handball?

Can the AFL issue a decree to enforce the ten-metre protected area around players who take a mark, a technically correct interpretation of the rule designed to give players greater freedom around the ground? Can the AFL issue a decree to penalise players who fall into or jump onto their opponent’s back when executing technically incorrect tackles?

No, they can’t, because the AFL doesn’t issue decrees to its umpires on technical adjustments to the way games are officiated. Remember the tougher deliberate out of bounds rule that morphed into the insufficient intent rule that morphed into the more lenient deliberate out of bounds rule in the space of two months? That just happened naturally.

Australian rules football is a technically challenging game to play, and perhaps more so to umpire. The match officials do the best job they can, but they have one hand tied behind their back by the increasingly complex set of circumstances thrust upon them by the higher ups of the AFL.

They don’t help themselves either, by their reticence to consider making a part-time job more professional.

Each and every week of the 2017 season there has been a clutch of head scratching umpiring decisions. How long before someone with some clout – in the media, from club land, or within the AFL itself – raises the spectre of the state of officiating in the biggest sport in the country?

As the individual incidents mount, the case builds that the patchwork quality of umpiring in the AFL is a systemic issue that requires a response from AFL House.

As one astute AFL watcher noted…

The irony of this rant is not lost on me. But that’s just where we are now. Something has to give.

For now, we must keep our eyes tuned squarely to the action on the field, for the halfway mark of the year is ten games away.

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