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Opinion
AFL offseason reports about who is dominating in training and what clubs are thinking for the season ahead are as reliable as George Santos’s resume. As fans, we just trick ourselves into thinking this is the year that the fourth-season disappointment will finally put it together because for the first time he’s had a “really good preseason” and has had four “really strong blocks of training”.
Like Santos’s ‘career’ or my annual purchase of Shaun Atley stock from 2009 to 2014, it’s about delusion and false hope.
In that spirit, I decided it was important to play a quick game of ‘would you rather?’ to pit commonly used offseason phrases against one another and judge which I would rather hear about a player on my team.
Let’s get into it.
Would you rather hear that a new acquisition is burning up the track or has rediscovered his love of the game?
This one is easy. Clearly you want a new acquisition to be burning up the track.
Let’s start with the positives. Firstly, if your team was bad last year, you want a new player to teach the incumbents a thing or two about how to play this game. If your team was good last year and you’ve added another good player, simple maths says that you can’t be bad this year, because you were good once and you’ve gotten better.
Checkmate, future.
But, as is my wont, let’s also think about the negatives. Where did his love of the game go? If he’s lost it once, couldn’t he lose it again? What is he, an actor going on a 12-year sabbatical because they need to refine the process (rehab)? You can’t have that in this game. Joel Selwood never lost his love of the game.
Give me the burner.
(Credit: The Malones/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Would you rather a player has put on five kilos of muscle or have a club release a photo of a player looking jacked doing battle ropes?
This one is also easy. What do footballers and Instagram models have in common? They know it’s all about angles, baby. Battle ropes are designed to make your biceps look like they might tear out your skin, and it works for people like Touk Miller.
But I want that good stuff. That beautiful ‘I’ve added five kilos of muscle almost impossibly quickly’ stuff.
Now, for legal reasons I won’t say how difficult it would be to just chuck on an extra five kegs of pure lean muscle over two months. I’m not Jason Akermanis.
What I will say is I love it when a once skinny midfielder walks onto the field in Round 1 looking like he has barrels of cab sav shooting out of his chest.
Would you rather a player who has completed the beep test or broken the club record over two kilometres?
This one is more complicated. Breaking the club record over two kilometres is a feat of human achievement, like climbing a small Mt Everest quite quickly – so not really like climbing Mt Everest at all.
What I’m getting at is that it’s just difficult, but it’s not really representative of any football-specific fitness other than the various ‘pushing through the pain barrier’ platitudes that define coach-speak in our game.
The beep test, on the other hand, is representative of footy. It’s repetitive high-intensity effort.
And beyond that, as human evolution continues, the two-kilometre records will continue to be broken regularly.
Finishing the beep test never seems to happen, or at least never seems to get publicised. It was hard in Year 10 PE and it’s hard now. That’s all there is to it.
Before you ask: yes, it hurts that I have picked the thing that the Collingwood player did over the thing the Richmond player did.
(Photo by Michael Dodge/AFL Media/Getty Images)
Would you rather a player playing more midfield minutes or moving to half back to play a quarterback role?
This one just comes down to my own memories. Lance Franklin is my favourite non-Richmond player ever, and he has been for a long time. I remember the annual offseason tradition while he was at Hawthorn of Alastair Clarkson, or some reporter Clarkson was close to, reporting about Buddy and Cyril Rioli playing more midfield minutes.
They were always so exciting, so tantalising. What could these players do if they were around the ball all the time?
As it turned out, we never got to know, because Buddy very seldom played on the ball. But it was always fun to think about.
On the other hand, I will never forget the 2013 offseason when Richmond were looking to shake things up and try Dustin Martin across half back. This revelation annoyed me to tears. Why would our best forward-half player play across half back? Last I checked, the game is about kicking goals, not kicking the ball accurately to someone who can’t kick goals. It would hamstring whatever the player is best at.
Give me the midfield minutes lie every time.
Would you rather an intraclub match was A1 and ultra-competitive with super sharp skills or that the backs can’t stop the highly paid key forward?
I basically stole this from one of David King’s tweets about Melbourne’s training sessions. Sharp intra-club was it? Terrific.
But then what about the intra-club reports you hear where your defenders just don’t have a prayer against the expensive gun key forward? This one was hard but ultimately, as it often does with yours truly, it came down to the negative.
What does this kind of report mean for the defenders? Are they as lost as Prince Harry would be working an actual job instead of regurgitating the same stories about how he hates his privileged, incredibly wealthy family? As lost as Prince Harry would be if he couldn’t become generationally wealthy (again) by writing about his various war exploits and how he lost his virginity, purely because of people’s interest in that family he so despises?
Anyway, based on that, I want the inanities about how sharp the hands are in the intra-club or how it’s rare to see a club this fit and raring to go so early in the offseason.
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