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The suggestions currently doing the rounds to clear congestion are mind-boggling. Zones, capping rotations, reducing the amount of players on-field – what’s next?
This is the AFL’s typical reaction to any unforeseen development in the game – deal with it in the heaviest-handed way possible.
The AFL – and the do-gooders who champion suggestions like these – learn nothing from precedent, nor from how countless other rule changes schism into new issues.
This obsession with clearing congestion is just the latest in a long, long line of teacups knocked over to spill storms everywhere.
But before the AFL make any changes, they should try to understand why the game has evolved into what it’s become.
One reason that doesn’t get a lot of highlighting is that the talent pool is spread perilously thin across eighteen teams. Less talent means more strugglers.
More strugglers means less efficiency. Less efficiency equates to bigger breakdowns in moving the ball.
Compounding this is the license granted for imprecise disposal. For example, throwing or dropping the ball isn’t punished as stringently as it should.
Most rule introductions over the last ten years have been aimed at keeping the ball moving, such as kicking the ball out directly from a behind, balling it up quickly and hurrying players on with set kicks.
You would be forgiven for believing there’s a mandate to play fewer frees (and have fewer stoppages), thus keeping the ball in motion.
To cap it all off, today’s players run around fifteen kilometres a game. Nobody was doing that thirty years ago. As well as being fitter, players are generally bigger and stronger.
How many tall, big-bodied midfielders now run around – guys who might’ve once played as key positioners?
Grounds they play on, however, have remained the same size. It’s like a kid outgrowing the backyard they once played sport in, and wanting to go down to the park, and when they outgrow that, then the football oval.
Players are now capable of dominating playing space in ways they’ve never done before, which means rolling zones following the ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Capping interchange rotations and trying to tire players out so they remain positional rather than following the ball brings two things to mind.
Firstly, the AFL is trying to get players to devolve – to go backwards with their fitness and conditioning, and occupy the same small space again.
Secondly, if the intent is to purposely exhaust players, isn’t that introducing an unsafe work environment?
Aesthetically, I don’t enjoy the sight of players being so fatigued their skills deteriorate, or cramping late in games and suffering soft tissue injuries.
And again, if the counter is if they just stay positional it’ll be fine, well, how do they learn that?
(Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
There would need to be a generational attritional shift where players learnt their new limitations. Or let’s put it much more simply: there’ll be a generation of breaking players in an attempt to teach them to stay put.
The other absurd thing about capping interchange rotations is that at some point, rotations would’ve hit a zenith. The AFL overreacted like rotations might go into the five or six hundreds.
Hypothetically, it might be restorative to sprint to the bench for a breather ten times during a game, but once a player does it twenty times – sprinting one hundred yards off, then back on – it probably starts making more sense to stay out there five of those times.
At some point, a balance would’ve been struck.
As for zones, given the AFL likes to keep the game moving, it’s going to be fun watching the big pauses that occur when the umpires have to send players back to where they belong.
Or umpires having to do head counts to make sure everybody is where they belong. Or the nitpicky frees where Player X is pinged because his toe is on a line it shouldn’t be.
Oh yes, let’s hurry this solution in. Zones will fundamentally change the game into something else.
You can reduce the players on-field to 16 per team, or even to 14, but you would be flying in the face of tradition: the game has always had 18 players on the field.
Of course, you don’t have to be beholden to tradition if it’s no longer working, but just think about how having fewer players out there is going to work.
Are players going to remain positional because of it? Or will the additional space give them greater license to roam unimpeded? Will we then truly get a basketball-like facsimile?
The reality is simple: the modern player has evolved.
(Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images)
It happens in every sport because, as people, we also evolve. Check the way the average height of people has increased over the years – a quick Google search will produce countless articles on the topic.
Or here’s a fun bit of trivia: when they filmed the movie Titanic (1997) and rebuilt the grand staircase set, they had to build it bigger than it actually was, because people in 1997 were bigger than people in 1912. Building it bigger was the only way to keep it in proportion.
And that’s where a true solution lies if something had to be done about congestion to regress the game to what it once was: increase playing fields commensurate to how much more today’s player can do compared to yesteryear’s player.
You outgrow a bed, you buy something bigger. You don’t try and find ways to continue to fit yourself in the same bed.
Of course, knocking down the Ponsford Stand at the MCG to add another thirty metres to the ground isn’t the most feasible solution, not to mention it would make watching the game from one end to the other impossible.
So then we’re left with the congestion, and the issues people complain about, such as low scores.
I am actually curious why there is an assumption that bigger scores mean a better game. I’d rather watch a slugfest between two teams battling it out and scoring only 60 points each, rather than these pressure-free, back-and-forth games where both teams clear 120 points.
The beauty of Australian rules is the physicality. High-scoring games are usually replete with a complete lack of defensive pressure.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one logical answer: as the players have evolved, as the game has evolved, let evolution continue to take its own course and sort itself out.
It wasn’t too long ago people were complaining about big servers in tennis killing the game and suggesting introducing racquet restrictions.
What’s happened since then? We’ve had a golden period where we’ve witnessed four of the greatest players ever – Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Serena Williams.
Things don’t always have to be Frankensteined.
Sometimes, the best solution is to just let evolution take its course.
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