Think of what happens in a quarter of AFL football. Take any match and consider the hundreds of actions involved: the transference of play end to end, the scoring, the ball ups and throw-ins, the interchanges, the umpiring calls.
So much goes on during a game of footy, yet it seems the first instinctive habit of the average onlooker is to pick out what is wrong. The game is too fast or the game is too slow. Players aren’t kicking set-shots properly. There’s too much congestion, there’s too many interchanges. The rules are nonsensical, the umpires are incompetent.
Is the constant search for perfection damaging our overall ability to enjoy the game? That’s not to say these gripes aren’t well meaning or have some truth to them, but at what point does critique fall into harmful nitpicking?
For instance, take the recent draw between West Coast and the Gold Coast. There may be differing opinions on the concept of splitting the points – that’s completely understandable. However, the morning after on the Sunday Footy Show, the melodrama and impulsiveness to find fault was incredible.
Reasons ranged back and forth between, “all those fans went home disappointed” to “we’re competing with a draw-dependant soccer, we have to stamp it out”. The suggestions had nothing to do with logistics or meaningful implementation. It was a knee-jerk lament that the game as we know it is dying, all because sometimes once a year two teams finish on the same score.
You could frame about 50 different issues in this light – a code with such a crippling identity crisis that it wouldn’t be a surprise if some only continued to watch it out of a bizarre obligation to complain.
And this deprecating sense of self isn’t a new phenomenon by any means either. Our insecurity regarding the ‘health’ of the game is actually a time honoured tradition.
James Coventry’s brilliant book Time and Space is filled with many so-called crisis points and bemoaning of the status quo. The Argus’ chief football writer Donald McDonald in 1889 chastised the ambiguity of the rules regarding starting positions after kick-off.
“It will be a bad day for the Victorian Football Association should they ever be required to go into a court of law with their present rules,” McDonald bristled.
In 1930, the Mail in Adelaide ran a headline “What’s Wrong With Football”, pointing out that attendances in the previous four years had dropped from an average of 35,000 to 22,000. The newspaper ran a poll, with 58.9% of the 9,000 respondents taking issue with “tinkering of the laws”.
Nine years later in the very same newspaper, O. O’Grady took umbrage with the ever changing rules, pointing to the holding the ball (sound familiar) as a key example.
And it can be a hard slog, especially at this time of year with many having little to play for. But it’s the moments that spring out from the static that can make you fall head over heels all over again. Watching the Bulldogs pile on their eighth goal in a row, Breust retaking the lead for the Hawks seconds after the Eagles had just snatched it back in the driving rain.
Even viewing Fremantle in person on Sunday evening was a delight, organised and skilful in equal measure.
In the title story of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, two couples sit around drowning their sorrows in gin. The weighty discussion mostly centres on the challenges of affection and longing.
“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”
For supporters in as early as their mid-thirties, they’re somewhat two-and-a-half decades into their football supporting journey. Desire and enjoyment is a hard thing to maintain, as the passage of time threatens the foundations passion is built on. Like all relationships, it takes work to accept both change and to live with certain flaws.
The entire code has been built on imperfection and inconsistency. Falling out of love or becoming frustrated with it is not a unique or modern problem. As fleeting as true satisfaction is, it’s on us to try harder to find it.
