AFL in good idea shocker
As news filtered through yesterday that the AFL was tabling a radical new fixturing proposal to the clubs – a 17-5 system that ensured context and interest in the last month of the season, with each team playing each other once and the draw being split into three groups for the final five weeks – one couldn’t help falling into the strange and almost unsettling feeling that the administrators might just have hit on a decent idea. Not a perfect one, but a very promising one. This also seems an acknowledgement by the league that they’re aware of the crushing levels of boredom and apathy that can set in by the mid-way point of the season, especially for those of us who support useless teams.
If you used a line graph to chart the excitement levels within an AFL season at the moment it would look like one of those twirly hipster moustaches; absurd peaks at each end and in between, just plain old innocuous facial hair. That facial hair is the elongated periods of utter dross we generally see between rounds 10 and 20, when a decent proportion of fans have started making September holiday plans and others merely want the real stuff to arrive quicker.
Exceptions? One would suppose there would be less incentive for a side like 2014 Richmond to lift itself up by the bootstraps and make a finals charge in the last two months if the chance of securing the number one draft pick loomed. There’s plenty of others, such as the likelihood that we may become wearied by the Top 6 match-ups by the end of September, by which time a good number of them will have been endlessly repeated. It’s not a bad starting point for the discussion though.
Role-playing for a minute, here’s the 17-5 system breakdown as it would have occurred last season, which dragged us kicking and streaming through a punishing schedule of final rounds that should have been given themes like “Gee I hope we don’t get any injuries this weekend round”, “Let’s get that landscaping finished before the finals start round” and “When will this horseshit finish Round”:
First tier: Sydney, Fremantle, Hawthorn, Geelong, Port Adelaide, North Melbourne (aka, the ‘bloody hell this is another cracking game’ bracket)
Second tier: Essendon, Adelaide, Collingwood, Gold Coast, West Coast, Richmond (aka the ‘we might be out of the race now but we’ll be buggered if we’re going to help Collingwood through’ bracket)
Third tier: Carlton, Western Bulldogs, Brisbane, GWS, Melbourne, St Kilda (aka ‘The Lord of the Flies’ bracket)
Doesn’t that excite you a little bit? Even throttling down the gears a little and engaging in some strategic tapering, the first tier contains enough quality to guarantee decent match-ups every week. The second is a six-car pile-up with the spectre of dashed hopes, bitter recriminations and schadenfreude. The third isolates the clubs hunting for draft picks away from the main draw and removes genuinely cheap late-season wins for top sides easing off before the finals.
You’re not denying many fairytale runs, in actual fact. Even Richmond’s improbably 9-game winning streak last year came after they sat in 12th place after Round 17, so under the new system they still would have retained the chance of playing finals. Teams below 13th at that point simply don’t stand a chance, so all the better to quarantine them off from the main draw like unvaccinated children.
If the league really wants to shake things up, here’s an even more radical proposal - even if it will never happen as long as there are TV rights deals with so many zeroes that accountants need to drag their Excel spreadsheet columns four inches to the right - just play a 17-game regular season and ditch the extra five games. Everyone plays each other once. Not every game means something but a lot more of them do. Players cane themselves every week because they’re no longer spread as thin and neither are the wallets of fans.
Anyway, that a proposal as revolutionary as the 17-5 model is even being considered is good news for footy fans because the word ‘equalisation’ might finally start to mean something.
Quarter-time in season 2015
On the topic of competitiveness and with a quarter of the 2015 regular season now behind us, it feels instructive to take a look at how each team is currently tracking against their performances at this stage last season. It’s not a flawless metric but does at least provide some food for thought.
Considered genuine Premiership chances this year, Hawthorn and Port Adelaide are both two games worse off and failing to match expectations, as are fringe aspirant Geelong, while North Melbourne are only one game behind their progress in 2014 and remain flaky. Gold Coast had four spirited wins in their first six weeks last year but this one’s been a wipe-out so far. They’ve gone backwards quicker than anyone.
As far as the remaining finals hopefuls go, Adelaide, Essendon and Sydney are all slightly better off, while the stocks of both Fremantle and the Bulldogs have risen considerably and against prevailing expectations. It’s hardly surprising that Richmond and Brisbane find themselves treading water but at 4-2 now as they were last year, the Pies actually feel like they’ve made huge strides.
Improvers: Adelaide (4-2 in 2015 vs 3-3 in 2014), Essendon (3-3 vs 2-4), Fremantle (6-0 vs 3-3), GWS (4-2 vs 2-4), Melbourne (2-4 vs 1-5), Sydney (4-2 vs 3-3), West Coast (4-2 vs 3-3), Western Bulldogs (4-2 vs 2-4)
In a holding pattern: Brisbane (1-5 vs 1-5), Collingwood (4-2 vs 4-2), Richmond (2-4 vs 2-4)
Dropping off: Carlton (1-5 vs 2-4), Geelong (3-3 vs 5-1), Gold Coast (1-5 vs 4-2), Hawthorn (3-3 vs 5-1), North Melbourne (3-3 vs 4-2), Port (3-3 vs 5-1), St Kilda (2-4 vs 3-3)
Consistently inconsistent
We still haven’t had a Friday night game worth crowing about yet, but there’s at least some hope that tonight’s clash between Essendon and North Melbourne will reach the heights of their absorbing duel in last season’s elimination final. Going against North Melbourne, who won comfortably against Richmond last week, is that they’re yet to string two wins together this season. The Bombers couldn’t handle Fremantle’s stifling pressure in Perth last week and they’re battling their own problems on multiple fronts. Brad Scott probably wishes his club could make bigger headlines than ones about their coach clashing with security guards.
Yo-yoing just as badly as North in these early stages is reigning Premiers Hawthorn, whose stumble against GWS last week really could have been foretold with injuries and suspension limiting their selectors and an opponent primed to strike. They’ve gone win-loss-win-loss-win-loss so this season and that pattern is likely to continue this week against Melbourne, who weren’t exactly smashed off the park against Sydney but should by now be holding themselves to higher standards than honourable losses. The duel between Dee Tom McDonald and Hawks forward Jarryd Roughead will be pivotal but there’s also a lot of interest in the omission of poor Jack Watts, who mightn’t have been quite as offended at being axed if the list of inclusions had contained names more luminous than Rohan Bail, Viv Michie, that other guy and the one whose name I forget. James Frawley returns for the Hawks.
The end of the line for Cornes and Reilly
After 298 games of faultless service, the abrupt retirement of Port Adelaide’s Premiership-winning stalwart Kane Cornes’ shouldn’t exactly qualify as a shock, but it certainly caught everyone by surprise yesterday. It’s typical of Cornes really; shuffling off and giving someone else a place in the team even as he continues to meaningfully contribute to the cause every week. After Port’s trip to the Gabba on Sunday he’ll be farewelled in style next week, bringing up his 300th game at home against Richmond and then embarking on a new career as a firefighter. Of course.
As he battled through tears to inform teammates of the decision yesterday, there was a resonant modesty to the words that Cornes did manage to get out. He spoke of “just being able to hang in there”, but anyone who saw him consistently shut down the competition’s best midfielders and punish them in the other direction knows that he did so much more. Port coach Ken Hinkley, the man Cornes credited with rejuvenating his career in the seasons just past, insisted that he become the first man to reach 300 games for the club. How he’ll be missed by Power fans.
Across at Crows HQ, 203-game midfielder Brent Reilly has also called it quits on the advice of doctors following a lengthy recuperation period after he fractured his skull in a training mishap in February. The 14-year veteran will stay on for the rest of the year in a coaching and mentoring capacity and the first task of those teammates will be knocking off St Kilda at home on Saturday, a task they won’t take lightly after the Saints’ staggering comeback against the Bulldogs last week. Maybe they’re rebuilding a touch quicker than we thought.
The best and worst of the rest
There’s plenty of fun to be had off Broadway in Round 7. I still think Carlton should issue fans with separate membership cards for each game, so that they can actually follow through on threats to hand them back to players as they leave the field, but should they lose to GWS at the Docklands on Saturday there’ll be a very harsh truth at play; their opponents are currently miles ahead in almost every sense a football side can be. Mick Malthouse has dropped six Blues for this game because it’s impractical to drop all twenty-two, but Carrazzo, Menzel and Yarran are all handy ins. Heading the list of omissions is maligned forward Liam Jones, who’ll be hoping there’s three or four decoy forwards among his VFL teammates this week so that he can set to work doing whatever it is that he does.
Though they’re unlikely to inflict harm as grievous as last year’s 110-point SCG hammering, the Swans should still account for Geelong at ANZ Stadium because as impressive as the Cats were against Collingwood last week, they just don’t quite boast the midfield potency Sydney does. West Coast are finally starting to click into gear after weathering the scorn of the football world over the off-season and couldn’t possibly hope for a better home assignment this week than the ragged and dispirited Suns. The most common refrain as West Coast players drive to the ground will probably be, “are we there yet?”
Compounding the Bulldogs’ slip-up last week against St Kilda – which would have put them in pinch-yourself territory at 5-1 to start the season – they’ll face ruthless, marauding Fremantle on Sunday, a meeting fans and perhaps even a few players will surely dread. The best you can say of Richmond’s chances against Collingwood that same afternoon across at the MCG is that expectations are set ridiculously low. The iPhone 1 had only just been released the last time Richmond beat Collingwood. I wouldn’t hold your breath this time.
