The week before a new AFL season used to feel like Christmas to me. There was the nervous anticipation of seeing how new recruits would fit into my side, assessing how players would return from injuries and the excitement of receiving my membership card in the mail. I’d be unashamedly sucked in by the pre-season puff pieces about personal best time trials, and avidly watch my club’s practice games to keep an eye on new look game plans and which players were being earmarked for new roles. It was even a bit of a thrill checking out the AFL’s marketing campaign each year – I still occasionally watch the 2009 Dropkick Murphys-backed ad with its array of stars and high-end production values on YouTube.
But a little part of me died on 5 February, 2013 – and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back. That date, of course, was the fateful day when a stony-faced James Hird announced he was “shocked to be sitting here” as he, former Essendon CEO Ian Robson and former Bombers chairman David Evans fronted a press conference to announce that Asada was investigating concerns over the club’s 2012 supplement program.
Even though the AFL’s anti-doping tribunal cleared 34 past and present Bombers from taking a banned drug, Asada are considering an appeal on the decision as “a live option” and inevitably yet another AFL season will be marred by the seemingly never-ending story. Throw in Fremantle tagger Ryan Crowley’s impending date with Asada and the news regarding Collingwood pair Lachie Keeffe and Josh Thomas and there are plenty of damaging headlines still to write this season.
It’s a tiring and tiresome story. Can it not just end so we can all get back to following the world’s greatest game? I long for the good old days, when water-cooler footy talk revolved around the weekend’s best matches, the fallacies of the Match Review Panel and whether Buddy or Gaz was the best choice as the coming round’s fantasy football captain. Australian rules football has been irreparably damaged by this story and the league is all the worse from it.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of the saga is that two entire seasons (and potentially a third) have been completely overshadowed by talk of AOD and Thymosin-Beta 4 – two terms few fans would have even heard of 25 months ago. And they’ve been great seasons: two amazing preliminary finals (both won by the Hawks en route to back-to-back premierships); the sustained brilliance of Gary Ablett; the soap opera-worthy story of Buddy Franklin leaving Hawthorn and facing them in a grand final in his first season in red and white; the unprecedented manic pressure that drove Fremantle all the way to the ‘G on the last Saturday in September; how the Cats continually confound expectations every year; Richmond’s nine wins a row to propel it into last year’s finals; Port Adelaide’s genius appointment of Ken Hinkley who has turned the Power from a 14th place finish in 2012 to a premiership favourite in 2015... the list goes on.
In my 20-odd years as a passionate footy fan, I can truly say the game has rarely been in better shape on the field. That such great games, the emergence of potential powerhouses in Port and the Gold Coast Suns and the blooming of some young stars (like Chad Wingard, Marcus Bontempelli and Adam Treloar) have been swamped by this ongoing mess is such a disappointment to those involved in the game and those who love it.
We all know that crowd numbers were significantly down last year and to his credit, new CEO Gillon McLaughan is doing his best to rectify the matter this season with more family friendly time slots (and hey, cheap meat pies!). But the elephant in AFL House could be that there is a significant number of fans who have been turned off by these off-field distractions. I know I’m sick of it dominating both the front and back pages of the newspaper, of the news crews waiting for Hird every time he leaves his house, and of the incessant, stony-faced press conferences.
I don’t profess to know how or when the story will end. It’s good news for the game that the Bombers will be able to unleash their full-strength line-up on the Swans this weekend, and breathe some life into what would have been a rather one-sided contest between last year’s runners-up and the Essendon Top-Ups. But it will continue to bubble away in the background, occasionally rearing its ugly head, and it’s highly unlikely that Tuesday’s news constitutes a definitive resolution.
A week after that Bombers’ press conference back in 2013, former Asada boss Richard Ings described an investigation by the Australian Crime Commission as “the blackest day in Australian sport”. At the time, he may have been right. But we fans have been struggling to see in the dark for two years now. The footy returns on Thursday night but for some reason, it doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve this time around.
