In a recent interview, VFL legend Malcolm Blight said AFL was becoming like basketball, with coaches being too scared to take the game on, and too willing to put players behind the ball.
He couldn’t be more wrong.
Basketball is fast, free-flowing, virtually non-contact, high-scoring and quite a predictable spectacle.
Australian rules can be, at times, but generally is not.
It sounds to me that Blight wants the game to become like basketball – or, rather, this mythical perfection that apparently existed in the 1980s (it didn’t).
And he is not alone in wondering why teams are kicking fewer goals, and what can be done about it.
Teams are kicking fewer goals because coaches don’t want their opposition to kick lots of goals, and we should do nothing about it, because there’s nothing wrong with that.
There is no rule that says scoring goals should be easy in AFL. If kicking goals becomes too easy, the game becomes boring.
We don’t want to be able to guess what’s going to happen next. We don’t want easy goals. We want a tough, well-fought contest between two sides trying their best to win.
We want high pressure, we want tackles, we want good marks, and we want goals from difficult angles, brought on by the difficulty in finding a target inside 50.
High-scoring football does not equal good football, no is low-scoring football bad.
Often good defending teams make skills look bad. If you want perfect skills, go see your team do some light training. If you want perfection, AFL is not the sport for you.
It is supposed to be a messy, scrappy affair – because when it is, those scintillating plays are much more exciting. When you get those plays all the time, you start looking for something else.
There also appears to be a correlation between the lower scores and the fewer blowouts. When teams score big, they tend to win big. But the lower scoring games have offered a much more even contest, which can only be good for the game.
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