Jon Ralph: The Covid hypotheticals leaving AFL season on knife’s edge

The AFL is in the midst of a Covid mess. But the fixture gymnastics the league is trying desperately to complete could have been avoided.

Patrick Dangerfield and Joel Selwood missing a Grand Final would appear unthinkable. Picture: AFL Photos/Getty Images

The pressure test for any AFL decision making is the potential ugly fallout if the same thing were to happen in Grand Final week.

So as the league comes under increasing pressure for its bloody-minded determination to march on with this season’s Covid-stricken fixture — regardless of fairness — the rule makers need to consider two questions.

Why did they decide to play Sunday’s game between Sydney and Greater Western Sydney — when multiple players were withdrawn shortly before the first bounce?

And, would they act the same way if it were Grand Final Day?

What if Geelong’s star trio of Patrick Dangerfield, Jeremy Cameron and Joel Selwood stopped off for a jaffle and a flat white at the Corio Bay Roadhouse on the way to the Grand Final parade?

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Patrick Dangerfield and Joel Selwood missing a Grand Final would appear unthinkable. Picture: AFL Photos/Getty Images

Then were barred from playing off for that elusive premiership because it became a Tier 2 exposure site on match day — with no time for them to return a negative test.

Wouldn’t the AFL postpone the game by 24 hours?

Especially if their rivals were untouched by withdrawals?

The AFL has another hypothetical — which explains its forward march through all the landmines and shrapnel exploding around it.

What if it used the pre-finals bye to halt the competition, or even shut down the competition for a fortnight until the cases across Australia abated until teams could cross borders without so many fixture compromises.

What if it did that, then the escalating Covid cases across Australia became so bad they couldn’t get the season away?

What if everything gets far worse across the country so every state resembles locked down Sydney?

The financial toll of falling to finish the season – no Grand Final, no finals for TV broadcasters – would be potentially catastrophic.

The league’s fear is that the 38 per cent cuts to the football cap and 7.5 per cent pay cuts to AFL players would be a drop in the ocean compared to the fallout.

Josh Dunkley will miss a fortnight of footy. Picture: AFL Photos/Getty Images

If that is a touch dramatic, the difference between 2020 and 2021 is as stark as alpha and delta.

Last year the trend was the AFL’s friend.

The AFL pushed back the season as states got the virus under control — apart from poor old Victoria — with the greatest deadline pressure getting out of cricket’s way by November.

This year it is a race, plain and simple, given it is caught between a delta strain more contagious than a case of St Kilda’s goalkicking yips and widespread vaccination that is likely six months away.

So for now it banks every game possible on its way to 198 home-and-away games and nine finals, now just 54 overall games short of that goal.

Whether two or 10 players are missing from a side, if there are 23 warm bodies available the AFL will bounce that darned Sherrin and play on.

Eddie McGuire lobbied hard for the AFL to ensure every team played each other once before any double-ups, which fell on deaf ears at AFL House.

If that were the case we would already be through the 17 home-and-away games that constituted the 2020 season, but instead the AFL’s resident fixer Travis Auld and his fixture guru Marcus King are performing fixture gymnastics to find nine games each week.

For the Dangerfields and Selwoods of the world the price of a Grand Final berth is now their individual freedoms.

Melbourne captain Max Gawn missed an exposure site at the Sporting Globe in Mordialloc by only a day or two earlier this year.

Melbourne star Max Gawn was lucky to avoid a Covid hotspot. Picture: AFL Photos/Getty Images

He said recently he had modified his behaviour to hermit mode, assuming every trip he made out was to a likely Tier 1 exposure site.

Josh Dunkley was incredibly stiff to pick up a takeaway coffee from a Kew cafe and be hit with 14 days in lockdown.

But this year rather than the side with the shortest injury list winning the flag it might be the side with the highest proportion of homebodies choosing Nespresso for barista-made single-origin blend.

Better to channel George Clooney, shilling for his favourite coffee dispensing device, than watching his greatest hits on the couch in 14-day lockdown.

The AFL’s clear message for the 10 GWS, Sydney, Essendon and North Melbourne players in Queensland quarantine is that it has extreme sympathy but it cannot step in to lobby Queensland health on their behalf.

Not when it is working so hard to establish a “sterile corridor” into Queensland.

If that expression sounds like a remedy to a nasty STD, it is actually the way forward to finish the season and this year’s new buzz term instead of “agile and flexible” — a way to get teams from Melbourne into Queensland and back so it can complete the final month of the home-and-away season.

It will take luck and exceptional planning and rip untold millions from the balance sheet.

Yet unless a team loses 20-plus players and coaches and literally is unable to field a team, it will not involve delayed games and postponed rounds for integrity concerns.

And you expect the same approach come Grand Final week.