Would bonus points - like the AFL’s new rules - make the coaches more defensive?

Scoring has fallen in the AFL this season to contradict the anticipation of change with nine new rules. So would bonus points solve the dilemma?

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COACHING to “win” - and coaching to “not lose” - makes for an interesting study of the current AFL mentors.

At the end of last season, AFL football boss Steve Hocking - after running two committees to consider the state of the game - presented nine rule changes for Season 2019. The anticipation was for a less congested game, creating more time and space for players to generate more scores.

The result? Less scoring. Far less scoring as coaches proved that any threat of higher scores demanded they work on stronger defensive strategies in the summer.

Leigh Matthews, a four-premiership coach across a lengthy career at Collingwood and Brisbane, notes: “It doesn’t matter what you do with the rules, coaches determine how the game looks. We’ve got to incentivise the coaches to score more.”

Gone is the AFL coach - a part-timer with a “real” job - who played to win knowing if the football gig collapsed on the weekends, he still had a pay cheque during the week.

And now there is the full-time AFL coach - with no fall-back position - doing everything to make sure he does not lose at weekends ... so he avoids having to be in a queue at the job exchange.

Matthews’ concept of changing the coaches’ mentality - with an incentive to score big - is challenging - if only because of the “unintended consequences” every time a lever is pulled in Australian football.

Matthews’ solution is for bonus points.

Football great Leigh Matthews talks about about the state of the game. Picture: Colleen Petch

“Say you score 100 points, you get an extra premiership point, win or lose,” Matthews said. “It has nothing to do with the spectacle and the rules of the game the umpires have to adjudicate; it just impacts the ladder as the year goes on.

“We can alter rules all we like, but if we don’t incentivise coaches to want to score more, we will not score more.”

It is not a new theme. It has been applied in Sheffield Shield cricket to encourage scoring. And it challenges the merit of the percentage column on the AFL premiership ladder.

In the first 10 weeks of the AFL premiership season, only one game has had both teams break the ton - Essendon and Melbourne in the Friday Night Football clash of Round 2.

In the first 90 games of the AFL premiership season, never has more than a third of the scorelines shown a team with the century or more.

In Round 1: 3 of 18 scores were of 100 points or more; Round 2: 5;

Round 3: 4; Round 4: 2; Round 5: 6; Round 6: 3; Round 7: 4; Round 8: 3;

Round 9: 3; and at the weekend: 1 (as a parting gift at North Melbourne to coach Brad Scott).

One of the critical questions with bonus points is whether the system would introduce another level of inequality in a competition already out of balance by a compromised fixture? Scoring 100 points comes with differing degrees of difficulty at AFL grounds that are not standard size nor carrying the same conditions.

Champion Data analysis of AFL venues since 2000 reveals indoor at the Docklands in Melbourne delivers the highest scoring average in the national league - 96.78 points a match- and the new outdoor Perth Stadium has the lowest with 82.96 points, a difference of more than two goals.

Adelaide Oval is at the low-end of the count with an average score of 86.97 points for AFL games played since Port Adelaide and the Crows moved from Football Park at West Lakes.

The incentive of bonus points is wrecked by the varying scoring rates from AFL ground to ground.

But Matthews is right on one count. Until the coaches play to “win” rather than “not lose”, Hocking’s competition committee will be forever challenged on how to make the game play to their vision and not that of the full-time professional coaches.

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