Robbo: Coronavirus crisis hit footy hard, but that doesn’t mean the AFL needs to make wholesale changes
In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, the AFL has warned changes to the game are coming — but do we really need them? Mark Robinson asks why the competition’s hierarchy has to mess with Our Game.
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Kevin Bartlett is talking to cockatoos on Twitter.
Denis Pagan is talking sense and Dermott Brereton and Tony Shaw are talking with deep-seated passion and concern, saying don’t mess with the fabric of Australian rules.
Their collective fear is changes introduced to the up-ended 2020 season, separate from KB’s decade-long campaign to reduce interchange rotations, will be rubber-stamped for 2021 and beyond.
Their fears are real.
When the coronavirus hit football and closed every level of the game, the AFL’s most influential administrators spoke the five most worrying words: Everything is on the table.
Before the pandemic, the AFL boasted record gates and record viewers and the game, it said, had never been better.
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But now it’s broken?
Just why Australian rules is the only professional sport in the world prepared to throw every aspect of the game under review is startling.
Are golf authorities pondering doubling the cup size?
Is FIFA discussing removing off-side or cutting halves to 35 minutes?
Is the NBA considering four-man teams and doing away with the three-point line?
Apart from cricket authorities thinking about and even trialling four-day Test matches — the foundation of the sport amid the hit and giggle of Twenty20 — the answer is no.
So why is the AFL prepared to mess with our game?
“I just hope the people (at the AFL) making the decisions accept that they don’t own the game,” Pagan said.
“They are only caretakers while they are in the positions they are in now.”
The AFL has said it welcomed ideas — including reducing 18-man teams to 16.
But why is it even being discussed?
In 2014, the AFL Charter was revealed, in part, to protect the pillars and “unique characteristics of the game”, and here we are, six years later, debating the merits of a very fundamental of the game.
It started off with a ripple now it’s a tidal wave of support. The AFL commission can’t sweep interchange reduction under the carpet any longer. This is a movement like we have never seen before in the games history. #feathershavespoken. Kb pic.twitter.com/KJJDP3yC8P
— Kevin Bartlett (@KevinBartlett29) April 27, 2020
The historical charter, all solemn and biblical in its declarations, would be worthless if that idea was adopted.
The aim of 16-a-side would be to reduce congestion, but KB has been banging on for a decade about reducing rotations and not being afraid of fatigue.
He’s lectured everyone and now, in isolation, without having anyone’s ear, he’s poured his frustrations onto a group of cockies in several amusing Twitter videos.
He’ll die lecturing, KB.
No, the debate centres on quarters of 16 minutes and time-on.
They were introduced this year, somewhat understandably when the AFL was planning for teams to play every third day and twice on Sundays, but the schedule now has games in traditional timeslots.
There’s no logical reason to keep 16 minutes after this year and the argument the youth of today can’t or won’t concentrate for three hours of football entertainment is baloney.
Record crowds? Record ratings?
“I like the longer quarters,” Brereton said on Fox Footy Live.
“We have a unique game of Australian rules football, where we have skill, ability, agility, power, strength and endurance.
“You still have to have endurance even if we drop it to 16 minutes, (but) I like the real endurance aspect to it.
“The back end of the season, it’s a marathon, the AFL season is a marathon.
“And then we have this day, normally the last day of September, where 100,000 people turn up and all of the cards are laid face down and you don’t know what’s going to blow them off the table.
“You don’t know which one you’re going to turn up and things happen.
“There’s a beauty in our game.”
Brereton said the game’s history would be affected and he will have many supporters on this front.
“The modern day game will distort against the historical element of what players have done, what teams have done,” he said.
List cuts are not so much on the table, but guaranteed for the 2021 season.
It has created both angst and understanding in the football world and without the second-tier plan for the public to consume, there is both anxiety and anticipation.
If lists are cut to 35 — and Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale has spoken of this — clubs will not recruit at-risk or project players such as Sydney Stack, Marlion Pickett or Ivan Soldo.
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Staff cuts, which we saw last week, will mean resources won’t be there to support these players in development — on and off the field.
The rookie list has been sensational for football.
Every club has found a diamond such as Dean Cox, Stephen Milne, Matt Priddis, Josh Gibson or Dale Morris.
Look at Collingwood’s Nick Maxwell … from a rookie to a premiership captain.
Unquestionably, drastic cuts to lists and recruiting staff will narrow the ability of clubs to recruit.
Does the AFL — no, do football fans — want to lose these wonderful stories?
If I hear anymore talk about 16 a side in the AFL and a goal is scored after hitting the goal post on the way through and it’s play on after the ball bounces off the post back into play then I will do a Terry Wallace and spew up. Kb
— Kevin Bartlett (@KevinBartlett29) March 12, 2020
As for the more fanciful suggestions which threaten the fabric of football, KB cut to the chase.
“If I hear any more talk about 16-a-side in the AFL and a goal is scored after hitting the goalpost on the way through and play on after the ball bounces off the post back into play then I will do a Terry Wallace and spew up,” he tweeted.
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