AFL’s restart proves Australian football is wonderful when it’s weird

Hawthorn’s Shaun Burgoyne handballs during the Hawks’ win over Richmond at the MCG on Thursday night. Picture: Getty Images

They said footy would help make it right. Bring back some normalcy. Restore our routine — selection, game, injuries, suspensions, selection, rinse, repeat …

Well, beam us back into isolation because Australian football’s strangest season is getting weirder by the day.

Richmond and Collingwood set the standard when the alleged flag fancies resumed hostilities with a phony war draw. At 5.6 apiece, the clubs spent the game eyeing the other from the Maginot and Siegfried lines, watching for a flanking movement that never came.

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Next, the Demons surrendered a 42-point lead to beat the Blues by a point. A 42-point lead was surmountable back when teams actually scored — but the Demons kicked only 54 points for the entire game. Weirdness.

Then while we were busy sharing photos of the sunset, we forgot that the sun also rises, as it did when Gold Coast beat the Eagles.

They might be Giants but not yet, as the Kangaroos showed in Sydney last week.

Maybe it’s all been an aberration. Write it off as a difficult second round after such a long break.

That theory lasted precisely four days. God might have created the world in seven, but it took Alastair Clarkson only six to fashion his Hawthorn miracle.

The Hawks’ 93-point turnaround — 61-point losers against Geelong to 32-point winners over Richmond on Thursday — continued the craziness.

And they did it in a weird way, eschewing 2019’s ring-a-rosy method of advancing on the wings to boldly go where sides went a long time ago — up the guts.

Creep around the flanks? Bugger that. In a third quarter play that epitomised their direct approach, the Hawks went to a one-on-one at centre-half-back.

It was a crazy-brave move, but the one was Shaun Burgoyne, who won the ball to trigger a Chad Wingard/Jaeger O’Meara surgical strike through MCG’s heart.

Everything’s upside down in this strange season. Jolly and playful in his iso-interviews, a stern Clarkson faced the press after Thursday night’s game. Perhaps he prefers working from home. His press conference was so beige that those few media types not in dole queues felt the need to hammer up a “Clarkson’s stunning take down of Geelong” news line.

The full quote told the real story: “We lowered our colours to a good side last week and I hope I’m not discrediting Geelong by saying it but they’re not that good — we were just terribly poor.”

Geelong is the only club following the script in season 2020; so just watch them get done by the Blues on Saturday night.

Football’s gone all Pulp Fiction this season. They said the game would make everything right. “Who told you this?” Mia Wallace asked Vincent Vega in Jack Rabbit Slims. “They,” Vega replied. “They talk a lot don’t they?” she says before they do the Twist.

They sure do. But all this weirdness is making fools of the punditry and dunces of the tipsters.

This is a good thing. A game that boasts about the unpredictability of its oblong ball should embrace the uncertainty.

Another good thing that ­appears to have gone unnoticed is that Thursday night’s game was open and flowing. “It was a low tackle count game,” Richmond coach Damien Hardwick said. “There wasn’t a lot of stoppages.”

So this weird season might be succeeding where a fiat of football bureaucrats has failed — it might inadvertently be unclogging the game. Strange is not necessarily bad. Often it’s good for the game. Think Mark Jackson making like a muscle man at most of his several dozen clubs.

The upside-down and unhinged stories are the ones we remember best. Yes, in this topsy-turvy season Superman’s looking through lead, Bizarro Jerry’s traded his bike for a unicycle and the Fonz is fighting Mork from Ork.

Australian football is wonderful when it’s weird. It’s at its best when it’s ad libbed and improvised. Too often in past seasons it has been regimented and dull.

It’s still beset by problems; backwards kicking, too much possession football, goalkicking inaccuracy, low scores and the unnecessary move to shorter quarters, but for whatever reason the results are far harder to pick.

Perhaps the shorter quarters are making games more unpredictable. That would be counterintuitive, but nothing’s certain in uncertain times.

Ten days ago they were saying the premiership was a four-way race. Now who would dare limit it to four, or six, or even eight contenders? Especially in a shortened season that might again be halted for weeks or even months.

Because Victoria, as well as being the home of football, is the not-so-proud owner of the nation’s worst coronavirus numbers.

Forget Clarkson’s cluster, that’s the aggregation that the Victorians should be trying to unpick.