In the 1960s, the novelist George Johnston once observed that “for six or seven months of the year a mad contagion runs through the press, TV, radio and everyday life,” that there was no summer “only a period of hibernation between football seasons”. That contagion has spread, and the period of hibernation is now referred to as “before breakfast on Christmas Day”.
Johnston was also a man who knew that anything subject to the urges of the market and the whims of taste was easily trivialised. He knew what his deal breakers were, and you suspect when it came to AFLX – a product that is the latest exhibit of what a sophomoric lust for Americanisation will do if left to bloated administrations – he’d have balked and balked hard.
AFLX, a seven-a-side mash up of Australian rules, association football, basketball and Cirque du Soleil, has replaced a week of the preseason competition games for each team and, for the most part, will largely serve the same means of exposing a few rookies to a competitive hit out. In that respect, AFLX is unlikely to be hugely disruptive.
But on Thursday night’s example, AFLX is more banal than bacchanal. For all the hype, neon and silver balls, the competition itself was as every bit as emotionless as Brad Johnston and Nick Dal Santo were when they kicked off Foxtel’s coverage in the language of a limp press release.
Brian Taylor, who usually commentates as though every player is in the blast radius of his bluster, and James Brayshaw, no stranger to hyperbole, were both unusually reserved until a brief moment in the second-half of the opening game between Port Adelaide and Geelong.
“It’s raining Zoooooooopers!” screamed Taylor, referring to the 10-point goals named for a brand frozen iceblocks. While he may have roused those at home who were tending to nod off, he failed to bend the phrase enough for even the gullible to forget that the hucksters have been let through the gate.
On Thursday night, 10,000-odd spectators at Hindmarsh Stadium watched Adelaide defeat Geelong 55 to 47 in the inaugural AFLX grand final, although it is a victory that will barely register as a trivia night question. There was little to take out of the games from an individual player perspective, outside of Mark Blicav’s horrendous haircut. But AFLX is a spectacle in which entertainment is the most important thing, not the winning or losing. Although as entertainment, it was well inside the margin of error for a loss.
But it is early days, and while the AFL will inevitably tweak the format, there may not be many barrackers coming through the gate. Interviewed during the game between Fremantle and Port Adelaide (game five of seven for the night), AFL CEO Gil McLachlan put words to what we were all watching, or rather not watching – one-on-one contests and high marking. The latter an, err… x-factor of the national game that appeals to an international audience. As fast-paced and high-scoring as they game may otherwise be, it is difficult to see how it will appeal to an Asian audience already besotted with the world game and basketball, and not insignificantly, the cultures attached to these sports. Skydivers, acrobats, fireworks and DJ duo Mashd N Kutcher do not a culture make. In the words of Woody Guthrie: if you ain’t got the do-re-mi, it’s better to stay in Texas.
They do however make for a carnival, and that may be where AFLX’s future lies. Rather than a theme park training exercise for AFL clubs that competes against the AFLW for resources and attention (it has already encroached on the coveted Friday night slot for round 3 of the AFLW), the game may be better suited to a knock-out format.
Having established that the AFL barely takes a breath for Christmas, a series of regional and suburban competitions could be held through November and December and open to anyone who can pull a team together – recent retirees, kids unlucky to miss out in the draft and bush Colemans – that would eventually be whittled down to the country’s 16 best. These teams who would play in a one-day only televised national carnival (in Sydney to sate the AFL’s evangelical lust) for a winner take all one-million dollars – a purse more difficult to trivialise than a tasteless, repurposed Perspex trophy from an adult entertainment awards night.
