When the charter for the AFL Laws of the Game Committee was first floated in 2013 I shared the optimism of Age football writer Rohan Connolly that the idea was “a nice piece of clear thinking” and agreed that “if we’re going to have a committee tinkering with the rules as much as this one has in recent times, shouldn’t there be a clear big picture towards which it is working?”.
Three years on, and two years since the charter’s publication, that clear thinking appears to be paying dividends and proving the grounds for more big picture ideas. The charter can be credited with providing the impetus behind the changes that have decongested the 2016 season as well as offering conceptual consistency to the once scattergun approach to making and communicating laws.
“For many years the game has been talking about congestion. Last year we changed that to say we wanted to spread the game out,” Mark Evans, the AFL’s general manager of football operations, told Guardian Australia. “It might mean the same thing but we’re saying that because it comes back to the point in the charter that says we want the game to be free flowing”.
“When we write a Laws of the Game Committee update paper to the commission on things we’re considering, we would ordinarily explain the change and then its relevance to the charter,” Evans says. “Here’s how we think it will play out, here’s the evidence base. Even when there’s an evidence base there will still be a reference to the charter”. The logic is sound, and the application under Evans’ oversight appears effective.
By working towards an idealised outcome along the guidelines provided by the charter, incremental changes can be understood with a clear goal in mind, and communicated and understood accordingly. The previous focus on acute short-term faults gave the AFL the air of a dog chasing its tail and the law of unintended consequences intervened at every stage of a bitty, short-sighted process which was at the mercy of each coaching innovation.
Considering the increased satisfaction with the way the game has been played this season, you’d think we’d be lauding the charter at every opportunity, but two years since its publication you’d hardly know it still existed.
It’s unlike the AFL to hide its light under a bushel but the charter is almost never referenced in its official communications and it’s buried without signpost in an anonymous corner of the AFL website. The Laws of the Game homepage makes reference to the “guiding principles” of the charter, without mentioning or linking to the charter itself. Evans is keen to point out this is not deliberate and suggests the charter’s messages have been communicated often, even if the text itself has remained in the background.
The charter could – and in my view should – be a living document and the primary reference point in conversations on the nature and evolution of Australian football. These conversations are everywhere, they are noisy and they would benefit from the parameters the charter provides. You know how they go – be they in the outer, on talkback radio, in press conferences, or on sofas around the country; there is a yearning for every footy match to live up to an aesthetic ideal. We obsess over “the look” of the game.
This preoccupation has intensified in recent years by the perceived decline in the run-of-the-mill spectacle. The game’s professionalism – feeding investment in coaching and sports science – has delivered fitter athletes and a greater emphasis on team strategy above individual contests. Older generations bemoan the game changing beyond recognition, along with glum proclamations that football is less satisfying than at its supposed peak, at either end of the 1990s depending on who you ask.
The charter, with its nine “guiding principles” and list of “fundamental elements of Australian football”, is well timed and for the past two years has existed to frame those debates at a law-making level, with demonstrable success. It’s time we paid more attention to it further down the food chain.
The idea to create a charter was Gillon McLachlan’s, back when he was deputy CEO, but Evans was responsible for its composition, shortly after his appointment at AFL HQ. As Evans set about establishing the charter terms of reference it became apparent that it could not have the total game-governing remit that sparked initial public interest, but instead had to be targeted specifically at the AFL level.
“It became difficult,” Evans says, “because the way we were positioning was ‘is this the 10 commandments, etched in stone that can never be changed?’ How would it play out if, for example, one of those was challenged?” Evans uses the example of an oval field, a prerequisite at an elite level, but not always practical in parts of the world looking to adopt the game from scratch. “So this forced the charter to be specifically for the Laws of the Game Committee at the elite level. And it also became important for us to say the commission has the right to change it over time”.
Consequently, it’s easy to see the charter as an administrative checklist more than a robust constitution designed for public consumption. Nevertheless, it is the foundation of the primary mechanism at the AFL’s disposal to influence what Australian football looks like at the highest level.
With the charter now embedded into the working process of the AFL, Evans is embarking on his next major conceptual excavation. “We’ve just had a Laws of the Game Committee meeting where we opened up a one hour discussion where we’re not actually talking about changes from 2016 to 2017… We’ve decided to spend some time looking closely at the laws.” The purpose being to ensure that any future rule changes sit within a landscape that is not taken for granted.
“It takes away the fear that we’re going to rush to bring something in, as opposed to putting up and exploring a concept, not for now, and maybe for never, but why wouldn’t we explore the concept and give the Laws Committee a view on whether a particular concept fits Australian football or not?”
It’s impossible not to conclude that through this the AFL is testing the waters for some potentially significant changes. As an example, Evans suggested if the committee was minded, it “opens up the discussion on whether 18 players per team is the right number… or restrictions on movement to try and spread the game out”. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine an experimental NAB Challenge in the next couple of years.
But with the charter acting as a roadmap, steering the commission towards a preferred destination, these exploratory conversations serve a purpose. As was the hope three years ago, it’s clear thinking, working towards a big picture.
