Not for the first time, we at AussieRulesBlog find ourselves out of step with conventional wisdom.

Commentators, professional and otherwise, seem content to award  BOGs and other recognitions to the players garnering the most statistics, seemingly despite blemishes or stats-building passages where two or three players ‘wax’ for up to a dozen touches without achieving anything other than eating up time.

The recently-departed (and unlamented by us) Joel Bowden seemed to regularly feature in lists of best players although his major contribution was playing the role of sweeper and changing the side his team was attacking to. Nevertheless, having racked up his thirty possessions, Joel would duly be named among the Tigers’ best.

We wonder whether this situation follows from the popularity of assorted fantasy football competitions. For the uninitiated, if there are any such, mathematical algorithms allocate a numerical value to a player’s performance in a game based on numbers of possessions, goals, goal assists, and so on. Even media broadcasts are now replete with references to the top fantasy football points scoring players in a match.

Fantasy football is all well and good — if you like that sort of thing — but football is about more than just numbers. Perversely, this is exemplified by forwards who have only six kicks, but kick six goals.

As a consequence of the fantasy football boom, the football public are being overloaded with statistics and anyone is free to draw whatever conclusion they like from them. We are moved to recall British PM Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism that there are three types of lies: lies; damned lies; and statistics. This was never more the case than when raw statistics have an unsophisticated analysis applied.

Already clubs are getting increasingly more sophisticated statistics supplied to them, and these are slowly leaking into the public consciousness.

An excellent example of a more sophisticated statistical analysis concerns hitouts. Once upon a time, it was sufficient to know that your ruckmen were getting their hands to the ball at ruck contests. Where the ruckman was John Nicholls or Polly Farmer, there was a very good chance that the deflected ball finished with your team’s rover.

As teams search for advantage, hitouts is morphing into Hitouts to advantage. In other words, it’s no longer enough to simply know that the ruckman is leaping high enough to touch the ball. Teams now want to know what he’s doing with it once he touches it.

Increasingly, crude statistics like possessions, kicks and marks will fall by the wayside as teams seek to better analyse how effectively their players use the ball once they have possession.

We can only hope that media pundits begin to use these more sophisticated analyses and that the general public learns the difference between ‘best on ground’ and ‘most possessions’ — but we won’t hang by our thumbs waiting.

It’s not a headline we could have predicted. Having seen all or most of five games from round one, we are concerned that alien bodysnatchers have abducted Jeff Gieschen and are conducting fiendish experiments on him while his doppelganger administers the AFL’s whistleblowers.

Calling occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft: Please keep Jeff, we like the way the doppelganger is going at the moment! (with apologies to The Carpenters).

There were some clanger decisions in each game, but we expect that will happen and they even out over the season.

The biggest “problem” was, the umpires having put the whistles in their pockets, fans are used to tiggy touchwood frees being plucked from nowhere, so we were screaming for frees to no avail. We’re sure most of us can learn to be sensible again.

Of course, we can’t be completely happy, so the holding the man/holding the ball rule interpretation needs some sprucing up, Alien Jeff. It seems at the moment that a bloke can pretty much drop the ball when tackled — whatever happened to incorrect disposal? — and then be held through a 720 with pike in a tuck position — whatever happened to holding the man? — without the sound of a whistle disturbing the game’s flow.

Now, we’re not looking for a return to the days of the Spanish Inquisition interpretations of the past few seasons, but a little mellowing of the current laissez faire approach would be appreciated.

We’re also appreciating a more mellow approach to the “You dragged it in and didn’t get rid of it!” so efficiently delivered by Steve McBurney (haven’t caught up with his game yet).

On the whole, the officiating has been quite . . . sensible. [If I turn ‘round, will I be in a Saints’ Board meeting parallel universe?]

Alerted by our good friends at Contested Footy, we notice that eyewear company OPSM is to sponsor AFL umpires over the next two seasons.

[Checks calendar to make sure it’s not April Fools’ Day.]

It is humorous of course. An old joke, but a goodie.

[Drops pen to check not in strange reverse parallel universe along with St Kilda FC board.]

We don’t quite see the fit here for the umpires. Sure, it’s a dream association for OPSM, but where’s the upside for the umps?

We’re not sure the AFL’s suits have done the umps a favour on this one.

If we commute through Melbourne’s Fairfield tonight, will we see Labrador puppies being trained to run backwards?

OK, guys! Good one! You’ve had your fun. You can let on now, can’t you? You were just ragging us, weren’t you?

Weren’t you?

St Kilda’s admission, during talks with Andrew Lovett’s representatives yesterday, that they’d sacked Lovett due to the accusation, and subsequent charge, of rape against him further exposes the Saints’ management team as a bunch of hopeless amateurs. And AussieRulesBlog is beginning to acquire the aura of a seer, having predicted the rape charge was the prima facie justification back in February.

In short order, the Saints have managed to turn a situation fraught with danger into a litany of misjudgement. How they must look back to 2008 and wish they’d drafted Ben Cousins who has ticked all the boxes at Richmond.

Cousins brought so much more than his silky football skills to Punt Road, providing a role model that that club’s favourite son, Matthew Richardson, could not. Damien Hardwick’s decision to nominate for the Richmond job must have been made substantially easier knowing Cousins was on the roster.

It’s hard to imagine that Ross Lyon and his recruiting staff could have seen Cousins’ Rolls-Royce pedigree in Lovett’s precocious talent, or that they could so comprehensively have misread Cousins’ determination to return.

We cannot think of a single positive for the Saints since Preliminary Final weekend last year. It really has been five truly awful months.

Despite the presence on their board of a professional lawyer, it appears the Saints have finally returned from their trip to a parallel universe and accepted their contractual obligations to Andrew Lovett.

The Saints’ series of hairy-chested assertions about Lovett have melted away faster than Vancouver snow.

The question to now be asked, especially by Saints supporters, is who the hell has been running this bumbling, keystone cops effort?

Surely no-one with their eyes open could have believed that Lovett would be other than high-maintenance? Surely it’s a no-brainer that Luke Ball’s mates were going to be pretty unimpressed about his ‘replacement’, especially given his chequered past?

Having (predictably) blotted his copybook, the Saints came down on Lovett like a ton of bricks and then employed the most bizarre timing in announcing their intention to cut him loose. A bunch of kindergarten kids could do a better job of managing than this!

As we blogged last month, should Lovett be found not guilty, the Saint’s profits for the next five years will surely make their way to Lovett’s bank account. Amateur hour indeed!