Last weekend I witnessed something never before seen on an AFL pitch

One of the great joys of watching sports, even if you’ve been watching for four, five, six decades like us older folks have been, is that it seems like every single day, you see something that you’ve simply never seen before.

While I’m not much of an American baseball fan, I was fascinated to see a young man playing in his first major league game for the Oakland As last week become the hero on both sides of the ball. He first made an unbelievable throw from centre field to cut down a runner at third base in the top of the thirteenth inning in a scoreless game and then hit a game-winning home run in the bottom half of the same inning to win the game for his new team.

It was a remarkable exhibition of talent unfettered by rookie nerves, and a combination neither I nor the announcers had ever seen before.

Sunday afternoon, on a footy pitch in Melbourne, thanks to internet broadcasting from fifteen thousand kilometres away, I saw something that I’ve never seen happen in Aussie rules before. Or, for that matter, in American football either.

In a game where the Greater Western Sydney Giants entered the fourth quarter comfortably up on the Carlton Blues by an eleven-goal margin, they were down to precisely zero available players on the bench. That part I’ve seen before.

It’s what happened in the fourth quarter that was new to me, and as far as my research shows, to anyone else who’s ever watched the AFL or its predecessor.

The Giants are right on time to contend for the flag. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

But first, a little deeper background is required to fully appreciate what happened.

The Giants struggled through the early part of the winter with a host of injuries to key players, and reached the end of R10 with the startling record of four wins, five losses, and a draw to St Kilda (the only break in their then-nine-game winless streak).

It was a surprise because the general consensus had the Giants as one of the three best teams in the league entering the 2018 season, but considering the quantity and quality of the sidelined talent, the explanation was credible.

The 8-1 stretch since then coincides with the beginning of the return of that talent, and specifically with the return in R11 of the best of them, Josh Kelly, the player who in my mind is as good as any other midfielder in the league this season.

Having played about half the season’s games as of today, he has about half the point total of the outright leaders – Mitchell and Gawn – in the Meta-Player of the Year tallies.

So, let’s start by acknowledging that in a R20 game, the GWS Giants are a very good team.

Let’s also start by acknowledging that in 2018, the Carlton Blues are not. They have a superstar in the midfield, young Patrick Cripps; they have a handful of good players around him in men like Kade Simpson, Marc Murphy, Matt Kreuzer and Charlie Curnow (Harry McKay looked outstanding Sunday, too). Beyond that, however, there’s a lack of talent comparable to the top-notch teams in the league – like the one from ‘the west of the town’ of Sydney, which they were heavy underdogs to coming into Sunday afternoon’s game.

Patrick Cripps of the Blues (Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Next, let’s review the situation of the game itself. The Giants scored a goal before a full minute had elapsed in the game, and the crowd never rediscovered their voice after that. They had five scoring shots on the board before Carlton scored their first point eleven minutes in.

They had six goals scored before the Blues connected with their second. The halftime score was 78-27. At three quarters, it was 16.10.106 to 6.4.40, a 60-six point margin that was obviously insurmountable.

But that’s true of many games. After all, Melbourne led the Suns by more in the game that started two hours later at the nearby MCG. What made this situation peculiar were two other factors.

One is the aforementioned draw with the Saints. Because nobody else in the running for finals has a draw on their record, the Giants are essentially “out of phase” when it comes to comparing records – they’re either a half-game ahead or a half-game behind any other team (or more) they’re being compared to, and so they are the one team whose scoring percentage is essentially irrelevant this season. So winning by 66 is no better than winning by six to them.

Secondly, there were four injuries that completely depleted their bench rotations: At the ten-minute mark of the second quarter, Brett Delidio left the game with an ankle injury.

Toby Greene last played nine minutes into the third quarter, and Dawson Simpson suffered an ankle injury that looked so much worse than it apparently was in the end. Finally, Sam Taylor limped off late in the third period with hamstring problems.

So, over the last couple of minutes in the third period, it became clear that while the Giants had this game in hand, they were in danger of running the eighteen remaining players on the field into exhaustion over the last thirty minutes of game time with no breaks.

The solution, decided head coach Leon Cameron (who was already on the sideline, one of the only footy bosses who does so anyway), was to do everything he could to rest those remaining players regardless of what happened to the size of their lead (as long as it stayed above zero, of course).

So after starting the fourth quarter with two quick goals, and asking his players to play a very sedentary style of football over the next few minutes, he made a decision that is as far as I can tell unique in the three-decade history of the AFL.

He started giving Carlton the power play.

He intentionally pulled players, one by one, to leave his team short-handed, 17 on 18. First, he pulled individual Giants and had physios give them quick rubdowns to ward off cramps – and the cool thing about this from a technical perspective is that if you’re not replacing players, you can do this at any time, not just when the official allows it!

When they continued to be successful playing a man down, scoring three consecutive goals, Cameron threw caution to the wind and played much of the remaining twelve minutes of the game two men down, playing against a team of professional AFL players 16 on 18.

And winning that last twelve minutes 15-0.

Almost out of courtesy, he had all eighteen on the field when the final horn sounded, but the damage had been done. In a quarter that they did not need to win, they chose to surrender and play short-handed specifically to preserve their players – who intentionally chose to run far less than they usually would regardless of game situation – again just out of self-preservation. They defeated a fully-manned, theoretically motivated to play well, AFL team with sixteen national titles to its name, by a quarter score of 7.3.45 to 1.0.6.

Leon Cameron, Senior Coach of the Giants (Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Before the quarter began, (my personal favourite) radio announcer Peter Donnegan asked his broadcast partners what the Blues had to do to feel good about their fourth quarter, and the general. He brought the topic back up after the debacle, and correctly pointed out that what had actually happened was almost certainly the most embarrassing quarter played by this or any other team this season.

The topic of ‘short-handed’ almost never comes up in footy. Unlike rugby, hockey, soccer/football, or a host of other sports, there is no ‘red card’ offense in Aussie rules.

Even Andrew Gaff was allowed to stay on the field when he gruesomely decked the younger Brayshaw Sunday in the Western Derby. Ironically, Leigh Matthews and others are using the Gaff gaffe to resume calls to give referees the ability to eject players, although Gil and the AFL head office continue to be adamant that it’s an unnecessary change for “one or two incidents a year”.

Andrew Brayshaw (Photo by Will Russell/AFL Media/Getty Images)

While the AFL brass were watching possible rule changes in a VFL game between Coberg and Werribee down at Piranha Park Saturday, there was a more intriguing game at Etihad Stadium Sunday, unintentionally demonstrating the ramifications of red card ejections.

So far, though, this is the only game in the record I can find where one team used fewer than the recommended number of players in a regular-season AFL game. (I welcome corrections to that statement: please comment if you have evidence of such a game.)

But it has happened, most recently in a pre-season game on 10 March 2016 between Richmond and Port, curiously also at Etihad Stadium in the final game before the regular season.

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It came about for the same reason: four Tigers players were injured during the game (Shane Edwards, Shaun Grigg, Reese Conca, and Jacob Townsend), leaving no bench for coach Damien Hardwick to work with.

Hardwick actually requested the AFL cut the fourth quarter short to allow him to preserve his players for Round 1. Denied that, he chose to pull players like Dustin Martin and Alex Rance off the field without replacement, reducing his playing squad to as few as fifteen players at times.

Like the Giants this weekend, Richmond’s priorities were not the results of the quarter at hand but the long-term health of the team, even more so because this game was still a four-point game for the Giants, whereas the Tigers had nothing of worth to give up in the NAB pre-season.

Damien Hardwick (AAP Image/Joe Castro)

The difference? Richmond lost that last quarter 4.8 to 0.1, 32 to one. Greater Western Sydney won despite their shortage, 45 to 6. Carlton should be embarrassed.

Hockey plays not only 5 on 4 but occasionally 5 on 3 with multiple infractions, and a quick search of YouTube will share a multitude of double-shorthanded goals for the three-person team going against the grain.

The same is true with each of the other sports; for example, Germany’s only World Cup victory this year came on a 10-on-11 situation where they scored a late goal to defeat Sweden 2-1. But in each of these sports, there’s enough history of short-handed play to allow the development of counter-attack strategies, especially hockey.

In footy, the numbers shift so often with players moving forward, dropping back, even sitting out momentarily to deal with injury that there’s almost no set six-on-six game plan (even if the AFL’s 6-6-6 starting set-up goes through – the positions only last until the

There was a famous case more similar to the Giants’ success last November in American college basketball.

On 25 November 2017, the University of Alabama played a men’s basketball game against the nationally-ranked University of Minnesota in a tournament in New York City. There was a brawl in the second half in which the entire Alabama bench came onto the floor to join the fight – an automatic ejection for every player who joined the conflict, leaving the “Crimson Tide” with the five young men who were on the court at the time of the fight.

Like Richmond or the Giants, they had no players to substitute for their exhausted starters. In basketball, though, a star player often plays the entire game.

Wilt Chamberlin famously averaged more than 48 minutes per game in the 1961-62 NBA season, despite the fact that NBA games are only 48 minutes long! The answer to the paradox is playing overtime games when he never fouled out.

But it gets worse. With twelve minutes to go, Dazon Ingram fouled out, leaving just four players to go against five. One minute later, John Petty landed awkwardly on his ankle and had to leave the game, leaving Alabama with just three eligible players with 10:33 left in the game, down by thirteen points to the highly ranked Golden Gophers.

You’d expect a result like Richmond’s, playing a powerful team as they had been. You wouldn’t expect anything like the Giants’ result, because they were behind in the first place and weren’t playing a team like Carlton, 2-16 at the time and down 66 points.

Yet over the course of the remaining ten minutes, the three young men with “Alabama” on their jerseys somehow outscored the five Minnesota players 30-22 and were within three with 60 seconds remaining.

Alas, the fairy tale fell just short, as Minnesota held on to their 89-84 lead and avoided the kind of embarrassment that Carlton could only dream about – at least they were supposed to lose in the first place; look at the box score and you won’t notice anything off.

Had Minnesota lost from ahead to Collin Sexton, John Petty, and Riley Norris, three young men alone on the court, knowing there was no cavalry coming? How do you live that down?

How does Carlton? There’s really only one answer for being outscored 45 to 6 by a team who was willing to surrender the quarter to you – they had already given up.

Watching the Alabama/Minnesota game on replay, you can’t say Minnesota gave up – they were being beaten by a hot-shooting Sexton (a freshman, by the way, who scored 40 on them that night). Watching the GWS/Carlton game?

There should never have been so many open Giant players when there are two more defenders than attackers! The announcers were going crazy trying to understand why the Blues were playing so inertly, and I wish I could say they had an excuse other than they’d already quit.

Because that’s the ultimate damnation of a coach, when your team quits in the middle of a game like that. The week after tasting victory, Carlton surrendered in front of its home fans – when the opposition can take some of its own players off the field and still run around you like you were traffic cones, you should turn in your uniforms.

Years ago, I saw a hilarious fan video making fun of a then-inept Port Adelaide team, set as a highlights video of a game against ‘The Bye’, in which thanks to a rushed behind they lost 1-0 to an empty field.

Having watched Carlton lost 45-6 to a partial ‘bye’, I don’t find that video quite so funny this morning.