As befits the surreal nature of modern life, the AFL’s season-launching TV commercials have set a disorienting template for the 2017 football season ahead. In one, the reigning premier Western Bulldogs – a working class club who used to be content with the brand exposure gained from window displays at Footscray butchers shops – find themselves in the nouveau riche wonderland of being spruiked by their very own Hollywood superfan Chris Hemsworth.
Doggies loyalists must shake their heads at such a turn of events; 25 years ago they had Danny Del-Re selling them a membership, now they’ve got Thor crashing through the living room window as they re-watch their special edition premiership DVDs, thumb glossy commemorative books and sing along one more time to Sons of the West.
Last week the once-untouchable and tragically unfashionable club was even invited to appear on the Seven Network’s Sunrise program and yuk it up with Kochie and the gang. At this rate a Married at First Sight spin-off matching up eligible singles from the club’s men’s and women’s teams can’t be far off. If this plane makes it to the first week of the 2017 finals without losing both wings and an engine, Luke Beveridge should be knighted.
The Dogs start their premiership defence this weekend with a quite hairy Friday night fixture against unknown quantities Collingwood. To cause an upset the Pies will need to move past the “crisis talks” required since they learned of the most delightfully screwball scandal of the off-season; on Tuesday it emerged that injured Pies midfielder Jordan De Goey actually broke his hand in a bar incident not related to football, rather than, as earlier claimed by the player, a roustabout-gone-wrong with his pet dog. A summit in David King’s war room surely beckons.
I digress. The primary threat to the Bulldogs’ premiership defence – a threat felt by every other club, and the subject of heavy-breathing obsession from the Melbourne football media – is the rise and rise of Greater Western Sydney. The Giants were dismantled by the Dogs in last season’s preliminary final, but are probably an improved side since that September misstep. According to bookmakers they now sit in pole position for the flag, just ahead of the Swans. A worthwhile disclaimer: the same bookies liked the look of Fremantle during the 2016 pre-season.
Counter-moves are afoot. Victims of their own almost-success, GWS have had their unfettered access to the Albury/Murray recruiting region curtailed following complaints from other clubs that too many future Toby Greenes lurk in the club’s academy system. The uppity Giants have also had their salary cap relief yanked from them two years early, ensuring this season is the first since the national competition’s inception that all teams are on a level playing field.
In all honesty, the flag race is probably a three-way shootout between GWS, Sydney and the Dogs. The latter boast a list far too strong to suffer a genuine hangover, though if ever a reigning premier was to put in a farcical premiership defence, the Dogs would surely do it in lovable style. The next tier of challengers comprises Geelong, Hawthorn, West Coast and Adelaide – all known quantities at this point but all looking like either semi or preliminary final losers to us.
The rest of the pack should bunch together tightly, so it’s best to start at the very bottom. In the post-season period last year Brisbane did what struggling clubs do, replacing the coach who presided over their nightmare plummet of the last few years with one from a dynastic club. They also demoted their captain to send a message: at the very least, new scapegoats are required.
Expectations for Gold Coast Suns are set at similarly subterranean levels, meaning the Lions’ AFLW side is almost single-handedly providing the good news quota in Queensland football. I know which one of the three I’d pay to watch.
Carlton’s dismal pre-season performances have convinced many that the initial lift gained from first-year coach Brendon Bolton’s upbeat presence in 2016 will flatten out. Still, when you look at Jacob Weitering and Patrick Cripps carving their way through play you stop feeling sorry for the Blues.
Fremantle are a little harder to place; unquestionably well-drilled by Ross Lyon but possessing a fringe finals list at best. Richmond and their resilient coach Damien Hardwick have discovered in the last few seasons that the opposite of disaster isn’t necessarily success, and another middling season looms.
A little higher up in projections than last year sit remodelled Essendon. Notwithstanding an unwelcome guest appearance from Mick Gatto, the Bombers can only improve on the horrors of their self-inflicted mess of the last four years. They might however take time to find their feet as a coherent side. The raw components are certainly there.
Talent-stuffed Collingwood often struggle for credibility when their win:loss ratio is contrasted with fan expectations, but they could do with a passing of the injury cloud that wreaked havoc with their last few campaigns. Both the Pies and Dons will fight for lower-tier finals spots with downward trending hype teams of seasons gone by (Port Adelaide, North Melbourne) and upward trending cellar-dwellers of the same period (St Kilda, Melbourne).
This season the media landscape will be shaken up most noticeably by the sad absence of retired broadcasting doyen Dennis Cometti, and every footy fan would been shocked by the recent news of a serious health scare to his former partner in crime, Bruce McAvaney.
If you think you’ve suffered through a pre-season of fake and non-news, spare a thought for the poor AFL reporters who cover the code year-round and have content quotas to hit all summer. Each player in this high-stakes game merely hopes to avoid the ignominy of 2011s benchmark: the “Andrew Walker wears a hat” headline (subject to an extensive thread on a Carlton FC message board).
The Andrew Walker’s hats of this off-season campaign were many and varied, but we liked Footy Classified’s gripe about players failing to address members of the media by their given name – outrage sparked by a bunch of AFL captains greeting SEN radio host Francis Leach as “mate” during the annual pre-season media cattle call. Knowing Leach’s extensive body of work handling talkback calls, it’s a decent bet he’d be happy with any host-guest dynamic more sophisticated than grunts and farts. Thank Gary Ablett Sr there will be some actual football to discuss by Friday morning.
Remarkably, AFL administrators are in an even greater lather than the media as the season kicks off. League chief executive Gillon McLachlan set a not entirely endearing precedent for his 2017 management style this week, bellyaching about the failure of Gabba ground staff to get that venue in shape for Brisbane and Adelaide’s AFLW final, despite a three-week lead time.
“Of course I’m angry,” McLachlan stropped, before descending into a tirade of such breathtaking arrogance that you were left longing for the days of well-mannered wallflowers like Andrew Demetriou. “The lesson out of this is that AFLW is here to stay. People need to make a decision about prioritising that. This is a serious mainstream sport and people need to get their head around that. I mean, really, three weeks? These venues are billion-dollar pieces of infrastructure and they’re there to be used and that is the incumbency on the people managing them, to get them ready to play.”
One might call that a mighty high horse to be riding when you’re in charge of a code which ignored women for the best part of two centuries, so “people” might also call out the CEO’s theatrics for what they are. Two months earlier McLachlan needed to placate the incensed hordes of fans who’d been locked out of the second undersized venue his administration had chosen for the season-opening game of this very serious, very mainstream sport of his.
For that historic occasion McLachlan made tickets free, when most attendees would have paid. The game was also played in the shadows of a dispute in which players had to fight tooth and nail simply to be provided health insurance, boots and the grossly inadequate wage they’re being paid to provide the league with a 10-week extension of its media dominance. But you know, it’s not just players who are itching to lay that cathartic first shirtfront of the season.
If recent days are anything to go by, players might well take McLachlan’s bossypants lead and speak their minds this season, so it’s not all bad. “Super excited for the first Ashes Test,” was the sarcastic response of Lions player Josh Walker to the Gabba situation. Hopefully he’ll also provide a more viable goal-kicking option than Phil Tufnell.
What the AFLW has done this off-season is completely disturb football’s tired Old Grammarians ecosystem. Perhaps it will also remind a few male players that the they’re not the centre of the universe. The longer-lasting consequences of this rise in the women’s game remain to be seen, but possibilities have certainly opened up for the sport at large. The bloated men’s season, with its innumerable meaningless fixtures and split rounds, has been crying out for NFL-style truncation for years.
Perhaps in some not-too-distant future, the AFLW season will spread out across a 12 or 14-game regular season with two weeks of finals, thus enabling the league to shorten and sharpen the men’s season schedule without the loss of the TV rights revenue to which they and clubs have grown accustomed.
Yet just as things change they remain the same. Having revealed they’re open to breaking one of their holy commandments by shifting the men’s grand final to a twilight start time, the AFL stubbornly persist with made-up traditions like the daft season-opener between well-supported mediocrities Carlton and Richmond.
Heaven forbid that top-performing sides with a relevant and compelling modern rivalry – like, say, that shared between the Bulldogs and Giants – be rewarded for fostering something fans actually want to watch. As Gillon McLachlan would say, people need to start making better decisions about priorities.
