Squeezing toothpaste

Well, the old master is at it again. Kevin Sheedy’s track record of innovation has a pretty good success rate. He was among the first Aussie Rules coaches to require that his key position players could perform at either end of the ground as required. He was at least partly responsible for the now-traditional annual Anzac Day game between Essendon and the Barcodes. His embrace of indigenous footballers led to the annual Dreamtime at the ‘G’ game.

But AussieRulesBlog thinks he’s gone too far with his suggestion of “AFL 11s” as a Twenty-20-style truncated version of Aussie Rules.

Forty years ago, there was no such things as one day internationals (ODI) in cricket — until the 1971 Melbourne Test was virtually washed out and players decided to give the Melbourne public some sort of cricket show.  One day cricket was thereafter seen as a means of developing spectator interest in cricket which would, over time, enhance spectator interest in Test cricket.

When one day cricket crowds started to falter, Twenty-20 (T20) cricket was devised to condense a cricket match into three hours or so to maintain spectator interest.

No-one will deny that, Ashes Test series aside, spectator and TV audience interest in Test cricket has continued to decline despite ODIs. Now, as interest in ODIs declines, T20 will similarly fail to halt the slide.

Of course the task Greater Western Sydney (GWS) confronts in developing a fan and spectator base is formidable, but we’re not sure how an eleven-a-side game played on a soccer or rugby pitch is going to promote Aussie Rules.

Let’s look again at the cricket scenario. ODIs have only the barest of synergies with traditional, multi-day cricket. The subtleties and nuance of first-class cricket are lost in a formularised, predictable contest. Similarly, T20 removes any pretence at subtlety and replaces it with manic big hitting.

Now, if you wanted to introduce someone to first-class cricket, would you take them to a T20 game? Of course not. Similarly, first-class cricket serves as a particularly poor introduction to T20. They are, to all intents and purposes, different games. Not unlike AFL played on a soccer pitch really. . .

Notwithstanding the difficulties facing GWS, do we really want to begin travelling a path similar to cricket? We already have such nail-biting and revolutionary devices as so-called Super goals (yawn) in the AFL pre-season competition.

It will be interesting to see how the upcoming first round of mini-lightning –premierships in a few weeks pans out. AussieRulesBlog expects an almost universal lack of fulfilment from these truncated games.

Will T20 further evolve into some sort of hitting competition, perhaps with a mechanical ‘bowler’? Would Sheedy’s AFL11s eventually mutate into some sort of AFL penalty shoot out?

If there were falling attendances and spectators seemed to be demanding some quicker, more compact variant of AFL, there may be some justification, but attendances remain generally healthy.

Our big concern, for cricket as well, is that having created a shorter form of the game and attendant expectations, it might be quite difficult to squeeze that toothpaste back into the tube.