Don’t worry about footy — it’s only the AFL that’s sick

James Hird marks in front of Shane Woewodin in a duel to remember at the MCG in 2001.

AFL reporters — those still with jobs — are struggling to fill their allotted column inches in this time of plague … which, as you might already have heard, is “unprecedented”.

No football? No worries, the seasoned AFL scribe replies as he/she slides open filing cabinet drawers marked Baseless Scandal, Move North to Tassie and Lists. The latter have festooned like the pathogen that spawned them.

Top five left-footers. Top 10 blokes who played in long sleeves. Top 100 players who parted their hair on the right.

So herewith, for your consideration, are the top five things required to play Australian football.
1. A ball (almost any oval ball will do; contrary to popular opinion, ball and Sherrin are not synonyms).
2. Players. 18 is enough, 20 is ­plenty.
3. An open area. Preferably grassed and oval shaped (although this is also not essential; witness football played in tracts of Central Australian dirt).
4. Posts. Four at each end. Two big ones, two smaller ones.

5. An umpire. One’s enough. Volunteers can look after the goal and boundary duties.

Then there are sundries such as guernseys, boots and lines on the ground (50m arcs are optional and don’t worry about goal “squares” — they are obsolescent under the new rules).

That’s pretty much it. Round up all of the above and you’ve got yourself a game of Australian football. It’s perplexing to hear so many say the game is in peril.

“To say this is the most serious threat to our game in 100 years is an understatement,” AFL boss ­Gillon McLachlan said when he suspended the season.

No, it’s not a threat to the game. It might be a threat to the AFL, but even that’s a stretch. It’s definitely a threat to the AFL in its present bloated state, but it’s not a threat to the game.

The game will be back, and it will endure as long as people want to play it.

Claiming football’s in danger is, of course, born of conflation of the game (Australian rules or Australian football) and the premier brand of the game (the AFL). At its heart, the game will remain the same, even if the AFL might not.

The AFL’s cash crisis has forced the league and its clubs to shed personnel. It appears the battalions of assistant coaches and specialist staff will be downgraded to platoon-size.

That’s tragic for the dismissed staff and their families. As it is for all of those in the dole queues snaking across the nation as we speak.

Football doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. The game will endure. And you never know, when we come out the other side, it might be better.

Along with the plethora of lists, nostalgia is also helping us through these troubled times. Witness the 1989 grand final on an eternal social media loop.

More people are seeing how open the game once was. How full-forwards ruled. How champions duked and duelled and danced for the whole 120 minutes.

The year after Shane Woewodin won the Brownlow, he and James Hird played on each other for almost an entire game at the MCG. One wasn’t tagging the other. They were at each other’s side for the whole afternoon. It was entrancing.

That doesn’t happen any more because players are indoctrinated with a defence-first mantra and taught that space is the enemy. So fewer assistant coaches might lead to less-regimented football.

“I think that sometimes people were probably trying to justify their existence,” former Swans, Bulldogs and Suns coach Rodney Eade said this week.

“We tended to coach players within an inch of their lives.”

Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley put the counter-argument. And he did so in foreboding past tense.

“We got to where we got to because we thought it was the best way to develop and support our players,” Buckley said. “We didn’t get to where we got to by accident.”

Despite that, Buckley doesn’t subscribe to the “game is in peril” school of thought. “There will be footy in some shape or some form in the future.”

As there was during and after the world wars, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression and other assorted calamities.

Calamities such as the slow demographic burn that’s killed many hundreds of country clubs.

The death of community clubs has done the game more harm than potentially missing one AFL season.

Yes, we might also lose AFL clubs, but not if there are enough people willing to stand by their team. Whatever happens, we’ll always have Australian football.

Whether the AFL survives in its present form is a separate issue, because there’s much more to football than the AFL.