Jon Ralph: AFL may have to pack in 22 games into a 17-week season if coronavirus wipes out entire rounds
The 2020 AFL season could finish in mid-October and feature 17 games should the worst-case coronavirus scenario eventuate. Jon Ralph assesses how the AFL will schedule a meaningful home-and-away campaign.
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If the AFL starts the 2020 season next Thursday it is only a question of how quickly it will inevitably shut it down.
The league is guided by Victoria’s health experts, but after the cancellation of the Grand Prix it is hard to countenance how Carlton-Richmond goes ahead with any fans at the MCG.
And after the Federal Government’s advice that mass gathering over 500 people should be cancelled, the league will be forced to follow suit and stop fans attending its games.
Can you imagine those 90,000 fans packed into their seats looking nervously at those around them for any sign of a sniffle or cough?
The league is aware that all it will take to shut down this season anyway is for players to become infected, which seems certain at the peak period of this virus.
So at some stage this season it will have whole rounds wiped out by coronavirus.
What would a postponed season look like for the AFL if the league bows to the inevitable and follows on from the NBA, tennis and so many other professional sports?
What the league has in its favour is flexibility that it hasn’t always had.
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It didn’t always have multiple byes factored into its home-and-away and pre-finals slots.
It hasn’t always had the flexibility of Victoria’s Sheffield Shield side playing at Junction Oval instead of reclaiming the MCG only days after the AFL season.
The Twenty 20 World Cup begins in Victoria on October 18 this year but the first MCG game is at the MCG on October 25.
That New Zealand-West Indies clash is 29 days after the Grand Final, so even if it took a week to change the ground over to its cricket configurations there might be a fortnight of wiggle room that wasn’t there a decade ago.
Surely the MCC could broker an arrangement between cricket and football.
If the league postponed the season by five weeks and eliminated its byes it could still conceivably finish up by mid-October.
It could also decide to play a 17-week home-and-away season instead and for a single year find the fixture parity so many have screamed about for so long.
Given the peak period of coronavirus was anticipated as mid-April in Australia, maybe 17 rounds is all the league will be able to squeeze in.
What would the ramifications be for broadcasters and financial consequences of that for the league?
Hard to know, but if bumper ratings followed it would at least off-set some of those financial impediments.
Could the league cram 22 games into 17 or 18 weeks?
It would require a period where teams played multiple games in a week.
What it might mean is a squad mentality where all 40 players are required to rotate through teams.
Sydney star Isaac Heeney told the Herald Sun on Thursday it would be particularly challenging.
“I don’t know. It would be a challenge, two a week. Sometimes you struggle to back it up week-to-week because you are so sore and you might have a little problem there.
“It would be tough to do two a week, I don’t think you could do it, no,” Heeney said.
This will be a season like no other with sacrifices we have never seen in AFL history.
But as the AFL does its war-room planning every one of those scenarios will have to be a live one.
A 17-game season that finishes in mid-October is so much better than no season at all.
Originally published as Jon Ralph: AFL may have to pack in 22 games into a 17-week season if coronavirus wipes out entire rounds
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