In January we predicted a repeat of 2011’s pre-occupation with Tom Scully’s end of season decision. Unlike Nostradamus, AussieRulesBlog didn’t cloak our prediction in impenetrable verse, we just came out and said it. And we were spectacularly wrong. The queries over Brendon Goddard, a proven top-level player, didn’t go close to matching the breathless hyperbole of the Scully prognostications.

February was video month and the star of the show was the now–recently-departed Adrian Anderson. Anderson’s scheme for video review of goal-line decisions had more holes than a colander and most of them were displayed within the first few weeks of the pre-season competition.

The real stuff began in March, with video still dominating discussions as The Giesch and Anderson sought to find new ways to drive us all crazy. And we were treated to the grandfather of all would-be mountains of controversy when Caroline Wilson and Jason Mifsud accused Paul Roos and James Hird of promoting racist drafting decisions. Of course they’d done nothing of the sort. We’re not aware of a public apology, but we sincerely hope there were private apologies proffered.

It was not just April Fool’s Day, but April Fool’s Month. Jason Mifsud prompted an extraordinary accusation against a senior AFL coach, incorrectly as it turned out, but appeared to avoid punishment, publicly at least.

We took little joy in highlighting the errors of judgement by the NRL and FFA in allowing Nathan Tinkler to take over the respective Newcastle teams. Less than a year on and Tinkler’s house of cards is at least teetering.

And finally, there was the contretemps over Lindsay Thomas’ accidental contact with Gary Rohan that saw the talented Swan out for the season with a broken leg. Adrian Anderson’s Match Review Panel — who will pick up this poisoned chalice in 2013? — outed Thomas, but the Tribunal, thankfully, overturned the decision. For weeks, all we heard about was ‘slide tackles’.

Oh, and there were more video cock-ups!

Our catchphrase for May was zero tolerance. We are tired of highlighting how zero-tolerance approaches just don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Zero tolerance will always mean that some unwarranted penalties will be applied. Zero tolerance flies in the face of a long-standing legal principle: "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" — Blackstone’s Formulation.

AussieRulesBlog began a new job in June, severely curtailing our blogging output. We did however pay tribute to Barry Cable, among the best players we have seen. And Brock McLean’s tweet suggested he wears his IQ on his back.

By the time July rolled around, the Barcodes’ away and clash strips had excited us (again), the AFL judicial system broke even further and Karmichael Hunt announced himself as a genuine AFL footballer.

It was clear in early August that our beloved Bombers would get an early start to pre-season and the Giesch’s mob decided to rewrite the deliberate out of bounds rule. Will Minson showed he is a salesman extraordinaire when he claimed not to have stepped on Kieran Jack and the good burghers of Rock Ridge believed him.

Finals time and September delivered some pearlers. James Kelly thought it was hard to know whether a shirtfront delivered thirty metres off the ball was legal — muppet! Mick Malthouse crossed his fingers and told us he hadn’t spoken to Carlton, but he was appointed coach before Brett Ratten’s car parking space had cooled down.

Oh, and there were more video cock-ups!

October was Draft Month. We thought it would never end. It began with a bang — newly-minted St Kilda life member Brendon Goddard to the Dons — and then exploded into the Kurt Tippett KatasTrophY, but our story of the month was Cale Morton’s drop of eighty-four places in the Draft in five years.

The AFL decided November was the right month to correct a five-year-old mistake and told the Blues to count Chris Judd’s  $200k “ambassadorial” salary in their salary cap. We’re told you could hear the anguished cries from Princes Park twenty kilometers away. And despite Canadian Mike Pyke hanging an unlikely (and well-earned) Premiership medallion around his neck a few days earlier, Israel “the Promised Land” Folau packed up his little red wagon and went home — sort of.

We said goodbye in December. Tony Charlton was, it seems, universally liked and admired and AussieRulesBlog was pleased to join the chorus of accolades. Another goodbye caught us on the hop, but was much more welcome — Adrian Anderson, the architect of the video referral system and the Match review panel system, left the AFL.

So, on the cusp of 2013, we look back. A good start for the Dons, but then an achingly slow decline to eventual mediocrity. A video referral system that, frankly, sucked. A judicial system that was bafflingly inconsistent. On a positive note, we did mention the Giesch fewer times, and that’s a trend we hope continues.

There’s much to look forward to. The Suns should be through their ‘second year blues’, though the Giants will suffer theirs and be poorer than expected. So many players moved clubs through the trade period that there’s sure to be some big wins and bigger losses. Ruck contests will be about football, rather than wrestling!

So, forty-five days to go! Bring it on!

We wish our readers a happy, safe and prosperous new year.

It’s hard to know who’s at fault: the young footballers having a drink during their vacation; the people who may recognise them and decide they’re fair game; or the media for reporting these storms in teacups.

A few days ago, Barcode Marley Williams was in a bit of strife after a nightclub session and three Demons have found themselves ejected from the Test cricket.

It seems like an annual problem, so let’s get some perspective. These are young men who’ve been selected because of their sporting abilities, not their capacity for deep analysis of finely-balanced moral and ethical judgements. They wouldn’t have been selected if they didn’t have a fair dose of spirit in them. And just in case someone missed it, they’re young.

Is Williams the only young man to have found himself engaged in a scuffle outside a nightclub in recent weeks? We’re pretty sure the answer is in the negative. Is he the only one to discover that he’s done some physical damage to someone in the course of the scuffle? Again, pretty sure he’s not.

Was anyone else ejected from the cricket on Boxing Day, the same day as the young Demon footballers? We’d be surprised if there weren’t a number of candidates.

Now comes the hard part. It’s a fair bet neither AFL club will be delighted by these events. They’d probably prefer their players were safely tucked up at home rather than out drinking, but it’s unrealistic to expect every young man on an AFL list to stay home and/or not drink.

Can we sheet the blame home to those people who recognise these (very) minor “celebrities” and decide to have their fun with them? Well, probably a portion. It’s not hard to imagine AFL footballers, especially younger players, getting a bit up themselves and drawing some ire. (Note: AussieRulesBlog has no knowledge of the incidents beyond what is reported in the news.)

What about the media? Modern news cycles are not 24-hour, as used to be the case relatively recently, but, as Malcolm Turnbull has observed, are now virtually instantaneous. There’s a constant thirst for new ‘news’. And news values are such that the involvement of a (very) minor celebrity such as an AFL-listed player is enough to get the story run electronically at the very least.

Courtesy mainly of a content-hungry media, the community has quite unrealistic expectations of young AFL-listed footballers. We should be grateful that incidents like these are so relatively rare. That they are is due in no small way to the professionalism and dedication of the vast majority of players.

Interesting to note that the AFL is searching for a general manager of fan development and customer acquisition.

The AFL mention, from time to time, that fans are important and there are occasional surveys which have the sniff of quieting the murmur of discontent about them. But a general manager of fan development? That's a new tack.

As a fan, AussieRulesBlog doesn't feel like we need development and we're already a dedicated fan, so we don't need acquiring. So, what might this new role look to?

Not altogether surprisingly, we have a couple of ideas on the matter.

Fan education
The fans that surround AussieRulesBlog most weeks at the footy have a pretty tenuous grasp on the rules of the game. The demented howl of "Baaaallllllllll!!!!!!!" the moment a player is tackled is as clear a demonstration as any that we're not selling the crowd short.

To be fair, many media callers and commentators, who should be very well informed on the rules of the game, make some howlers of comments, so a lot of the time the crowd aren't being shown a very high bar to aspire to.

Providing rulebooks to fans is not going to cut the mustard. A YouTube AFL channel with videos describing how rules are to be umpired would be a good start. And then advertise it to within an inch of its life. Eventually some of the great unwashed will beging to understand. This strategy would also do a helluva lot for umpire appreciation!

Fan information
We've mentioned this one before, but these days there are many things happening on the field that fans at the stadium are simply left to wonder about. As just about any AFL telecast will illustrate, decisions against a team induce an almost demonic fury amongst some of its supporters. When Mr Justice McBurney swans in and pays a free kick for some pathetic acting performance 100 metres or more away from the ball, the rage is raised to a whole new level.

When every AFL venue now includes a huge video-screen-come-scoreboard, scoreboard announcements would seem to be an easy way to inform everyone at the stadium. Someone could monitor the umpires' audio feed and type a précised version of the decision onto the scoreboard. For example, "50m penalty, high contact #9 on #23". Seeing that, everyone at the stadium knows where the decision has come from, and why. We may still disagree with it, loudly, but we're not caught wondering (and thinking the worst).

Fans' hip pockets
We wonder when was the last time that Vlad or a Commissioner — or a club President — bought a pie, some chips and a beer at the footy. Do they know that you need a new mortgage to feed an average family? Do the caterers have to make their entire profit for their world operations from their AFL operations? They're certainly not paying top dollar for their staff. Catering outlets are often object lessons in disorganised chaos, so there aren't too many time and motion studies being completed.

So where does the money go? A mass-produced, cardboard-like pie that dreams of being close to a piece of meat costs nearly twice as much as its artisan look-alike at a cake shop. Where are the gold cups for our beer? Surely we're entitled to them given the price we pay? And don't start on the price of WATER! Bottled water is already scandalous and the normal price of bottled water would make Dick Turpin blush, but at the footy?

So, there you go, Mr General Manager of Fan Development. There's a few things to be getting on with.

Sad news today of the passing of Tony Charlton. AussieRulesBlog vividly remembers Charlton on the TV in the 1960s. That precise pronunciation and dulcet tone never seemed to change.

More recently, Tony compered Essendon’s season launch function a few years ago — he was a Life Member of the Essendon Football Club. The function also entailed inducting new members into the EFC Hall of Fame and naming Legends of the EFC Hall of Fame.

AussieRulesBlog attended the function and noticed Tony and his wife getting out of their car nearby, but we hadn’t met previously and chose not to interrupt the man’s privacy.

It wasn’t an easy gig. It would have been very easy for someone less experienced to go over the top with the sentimentality or to gush in the manner of Bruce MacAvaney. But not Tony. He carried the thing off with panache — just the right touch of sentiment and gravitas.

Wandering back to the AussieRulesBlogMobile, we found ourselves walking very near the Charltons as they too wended their way home. We decided it was worth offering our congratulations on the wonderful way Tony had handled his duties. He was grace personified and just as human, friendly and engaging as the person we’d seen on screen so many times.

Some weeks later, wandering the corridors of The Alfred Hospital, we spotted Tony exiting the offices of The Alfred Foundation where, we later learned, he volunteered five days a week. We approached him and reminded him of our brief meeting after the season launch and thus was borne an all-too-brief casual acquaintance.

Over the next few years, every couple of months or so, our paths would cross at The Alfred. He never failed to acknowledge us or, when the opportunity presented, to have a few words about the Bombers’ progress. When it was announced on the Bomberland website that he had been diagnosed with cancer, we offered our wishes for his recovery, but he brushed the cancer off as though it were a mosquito bite.

We encourage anyone who wants to know more about this wonderful man to beg, borrow or steal a copy of the interview he gave Mike Sheehan on Foxtel during the 2012 season. What you see in that interview is exactly the same man as the one we approached a few years ago.

There’s a lovely story in Martin Flanagan’s obituary for Tony describing his father, a radio broadcaster in New Zealand, reading the news in a dinner jacket even though no-one could see him. There was that same sort of old-fashioned-ness about Tony, but it wasn’t snobbish in the least. It was simply a craftsman at work.

Thank you, Tony, for those few words we exchanged so infrequently. It was wonderful to know you personally even that tiny bit.

Rest in peace.

In an exclusive report, The Age is announcing that Adrian Anderson has resigned from his role as Football Operations Manager at the AFL and may depart as soon as Christmas.

Amid the tumultuous cheering, let's just reflect on the influence of Anderson during his nine years near the top of the AFL.

• Restructuring the Tribunal and implementing the Match Review Panel:
  Hardly an unqualified success. The formulaic approach to assessing incidents on the field works reasonably well in general, but cannot cope with anything out of the ordinary.
• Video technology to assist in goal-line scoring decisions:
  Little better than a dog’s breakfast.

The Barcodes have been the poster boys for high-altitude training for quite a while now. AussieRulesBlog makes no secret of our scepticism, but just about every team bar the Nar Nar Goon thirds is taking off for mountain climes during the off-season these days.

So, we were more than usually interested to see that a scientific study of the Barcodes’ high-altitude efforts had been published.

Not being sufficiently flush to subscribe to the publishing journal (see previous post), we rely on the abstract (summary of the paper for those not familiar with academic terminology) for this discussion.

Apparently players who train at moderately high altitude for an extended period — 19 days in this study — make slight improvements in their time trials and red blood cell counts. Hardly surprising. Thinner air at higher altitude means more red blood cells are required to transport sufficient oxygen to the body’s muscles. Pretty much anyone spending an extended period at those altitudes will have an elevated red blood cell count.

The kicker in this study is that the high-altitude trainers were only measured against their sea-level ‘controls’ at the conclusion of the high-altitude training and again four weeks later.

Just to refresh your memory, this high altitude training — which generates an improvement of two (2) or three (3) per cent in time trials and red blood cell count — is normally conducted in November. And the benefits in terms of training capacity last for “at least four weeks”. Do the benefits last for eight weeks, or twelve? The home and away rounds are twenty-three (23) weeks, plus pre-season, plus finals.

Lets apply the blowtorch of logic to this result. If 19 days is sufficient for the body to acclimatise and produce more red blood cells, it’s likely that elevated count isn’t going to persist for too long when the body returns to sea level.

Red blood cells live for 100–120 days, so the extra cells generated in the high-altitude environment will die and not be replaced back at sea level — before the home and away rounds commence.

The Age’s story reports that the study acknowledged that the placebo effect could not be eliminated as a contributing factor to the alleged success of high-altitude training — this wasn’t included in the abstract. The placebo effect — change of scenery, excitement at being somewhere ‘special’, being told that high-altitude training would make them into super-men — is a far more likely cause for any longer-term benefits than the high-altitude training itself.

So, the Barcodes players might be (allegedly) human after all, and just gullible enough to believe in the high-altitude hype.

He just won’t wait. Next week, we said. No, now, he said. The time pressures were simply un-[bleeping]-believeable. And he says he’ll tell everyone!

And according to now–part-time Adelaide Crows CEO Steven Trigg, that’s all the justification that’s required to ‘stretch the boundaries’ of the rules. So, following your lead, we’re going to smash our daughter’s piggy bank tonight to pay the mortgage! Don’t tell!

By the way, Steven, we’d run that “little ding” in your reputation past your insurance company if we were you. We think it’s a write-off!

You’ll be dead lucky if the AFL doesn’t decide to extend your suspension as further penance for such a pathetic rationalisation.

It’s not gilding the lily to observe that no-one comes out of the Tippett affair smelling of roses.

In no particular order:

Kurt Tippett: Reportedly expressing ‘“bitter disappointment” with the club that drafted him in 2006’, Tippett needs to look closer to home for someone to sheet the blame home to. Try your management team first up, Kurt. They simply could not have been ignorant of the extent to which the contract arrangements you entered into were outside of the AFL rules. In the end, you come out of this affair looking like a spoilt brat who’s been caught with his hand in the lolly jar.

Adelaide Crows: At what point did someone think keeping an allegedly champion player — remember Tippett has more kicking problems than Lance Franklin AND Matthew Richardson — at the club, more or less against his will, by filling his pockets with dollars was a good idea? What of the other players who give their blood sweat and tears and want to be with the Crows? Surely this is Lesson #1: Breeding Discontent and Division?

AFL: You guys caused this with your sanctioning of the Judd deal. You created a precedent and then pulled the rug out from under everyone’s feet when it suited you.

Tippett’s management: Asleep at the wheel or partners to the hubris?

Adelaide Crows: Guys, there’s no such thing as a deleted email. Once you’ve hit the Send button, it’s in the wild and you can’t control it. Who knows where it’s been sent on to, or how many internal copies there are? Putting it in writing — in any form — is dumb! D! U! M! B! Dumb!

AFL: Are you guys for real? The ONLY difference between the Tippett arrangements and Judd is that you knew about Judd.

Tippett: Having been seduced by dollars to do a deal to go to another club at the end of your contract, allegedly a Queensland club, you essentially tear that deal up when you’re seduced by even more dollars to join the reigning Premier. Greedy.

Sydney Swans: You guys know this guy can’t kick straight, right?

The AFL can be its own worst enemy and its prime weapon of self-inflicted pain is ad hoc decision making.

No-one other than Carlton and Chris Judd were pleased when Judd’s “ambassadorial” role with Blues sponsor Visy Industries was approved by the AFL. The arrangement netted the Carlton star an additional $200k per year outside of the Blues’ salary cap.

As one wag sagely noted in an online comment this week:

Last time [questions were raised about this arrangement], Judd came from nowhere and appeared on TV spruiking recycling for Visy. Until then you never heard about his "ambassador role" and the most he did was probably put his bin out.

The Age

Fast forward five years and the Crows are feeling the heat of AFL ire over their extra-contractual agreements with Kurt Tippett. Now, the AFL decides that the Visy payment to Judd must come within the limits of the salary cap.

These rule changes that seem to come from nowhere in response to media furores don’t do much to inspire confidence in AFL leadership.

Surely the most appropriate way to deal with these salary cap issues is to decide on, and announce, a crystal-clear definition of what can, and can’t, be done. Make it a five year arrangement, at which point it is reviewed. Declare an amnesty for non-compliant arrangements of one or two years. Once the amnesty is complete, contract arrangements must be squeaky clean and no correspondence will be entered into. Players and managers in breach will be delicensed immediately and serve a mandatory two-year ban. Clubs in breach should be forced to carry the contract in their salary cap for its duration despite the player being delicensed.

If someone gets creative and makes an undesirable contract, close the loophole in the next contract period. Make it part of the EBA with the Players’ Association.

The only conclusion that can be drawn currently is that senior AFL executives are out of their depth and dog-paddling to stay abreast of circumstances.

This time of year we wait for the inevitable pronouncements about the unfairness of the AFL’s fixture. Whether it be home games versus away games, number of interstate trips, night versus day games, six day breaks and so on, there’s seemingly no end to the ‘problems’.

But wait, Aussie Rules is played with an elliptical ball that bounces unpredictably — just ask Stephen Milne on (first) Grand Final day 2010. Unfair! We must use a round ball that moves predictably.

There are a limited number of weekends for stadium availability, and so an uneven number of meetings/return meetings between all teams. Unfair! Disband a third of the competition and revert to a twelve team competition playing each other twice each season on suburban grounds.

Players get injured in physical clashes and their teams founder — just ask Andrew Carrazzo last year. Unfair! The season must be put on hold until all clubs can field their strongest possible team.

Some games are played indoors in perfect conditions and some on cold, wet, wintery nights that reduce scoring potential. The influence on teams’ percentages is — you guessed it — unfair! All games must be played at the same venue at the same time so that no team is advantaged by better conditions. . .

And so on.

Of course the four scenarios presented are part and parcel of the national competition that lives and breathes on broadcast advertisers’ access to markets.

On the other hand, it’s unfair, for Melbourne, that Jack Watts doesn’t wear his underpants on the outside and might turn out to be only human.

It’s unfair, for Hawthorn, that Lance Franklin has a crucial flaw in his game that seriously reduces his effectiveness.

It’s unfair to everyone for various reasons that the Blues, the Barcodes and the Bombers all play each other twice each year, but those mammoth attendances and huge ratings put a pretty hefty dent in the AFL’s expenses.

The AFL could fixture Freo to play the Giants twice in prime time and tragics like AussieRulesBlog would watch it both times, but we’d have to tell all of our acquaintances what happened, because they wouldn’t be watching.

Of course the [bleeping] fixture is unfair. Life is unfair! Get over it, and get on with it.

A-league ‘club’ Newcastle Jets and NRL ‘club’ Newcastle Knights must be wondering about their futures. Revelations in The Age that owner and ‘coal baron’ Nathan Tinkler is struggling to pay the maintenance bills on his hefty string of thoroughbreds amidst market turnarounds can only be disquieting.

AussieRulesBlog noted recently when Tinkler took on the two Newcastle-based teams that the AFL had (hopefully) learned its lesson with the Edelsten and Skase fiascos.

The simple fact is that Tinkler’s supposed ‘wealth’ was largely calculated on the back of his stockholdings and anyone with a shred of commonsense knows that the lemmings in the equities markets aren’t loathe to pull the pin if they smell even a tiny loss.

AFL fans should be grateful every time we read a story about Tinkler or former Gold Coast A-League owner Clive Palmer.

AussieRulesBlog has long maintained that there is a mostly inverse relationship between playing ability and coaching success at AFL level. So, the more natural and gifted a player, the less likely to be a successful — Premiership-winning! — coach.

There’s another part of this thinking too. The most successful coaches have been, for the most part, nuggety, desperate defenders rather than showy forwards or slick midfielders.

While the game has changed, the numbers over the past fifty or sixty years do support our theory. And only the as-yet-unfulfilled potential of Nathan Buckley and James Hird could tip the pendulum ever so slightly the other way.

What then to make of Mick Malthouse’s choice of recently-retired ex-Melbourne Captain Brad Green as midfield development coach at the Blues?

Green played 250-odd games, racked up one B&F and one year as Captain before being replaced in that role by a second-year player. In a team screaming out for leaders both on and off field, it’s hardly a glowing reference.

Let’s give Green his due. He played 250-odd more AFL games than AussieRulesBlog. Add to that his Reserves, VFL and junior games too! And we’re sure he’s a completely affable chap.

Perhaps Malthouse’s media commitments at the pointy end of the 2012 season and then the off-season break for all clubs left the potential coaching cupboard particularly bare?

We’re not sure what messages Green will be able to pass on to his young charges. How to be an “unfulfilled talent” who turns into a slightly better than ordinary player in an often crap team?

Whatever the reason, it’s a signal that there’s no quick fix for the Blues, and that has got to be good for football!

AussieRulesBlog is disappointed that The Promised Land has picked up his little red wagon and gone home. We won’t know whether the investment was worth it for perhaps another ten or fifteen years.

We thought Folau could have take some solace from the journey of Canadian rugby international, Mike Pyke.

When Pyke first started his AFL odyssey, few would have predicted he would make such an impact. He had the same issues as Folau in reading the game and mastering the skills. Clearly he also has  greater reserves of resilience than Folau, because he showed in September that he can hold his head high as a genuine member of the Swans’ Premiership team.

The reaction from the NRL pundits will be fascinating.

The unfolding so-called 'tanking' issue that threatens Melbourne Football Club has many facets, but none more intriguing that the club's failure to gain the desired elevation through acquiring low draft picks.

The apparent focus on the conclusion to the 2009 season turns the spotlight on the resultant draft picks. Tom Scully, famously, is no longer with the Demons, instead reaping huge rewards from the Giants and Jack Trengove had the Captaincy thrust onto his shoulders whilst still learning the game.

Similarly, Jack Watts has yet to discover where his red cloak is, put his red underpants on the outside  and lead the Dees to the promised land. 

And perhaps it's the Trengove captaincy that is most damning of the club's strategy. In their pursuit of youth, almost at any cost, they found themselves without any leaders worthy of the name in the playing group.

Did the Demons unwittingly show the Suns and the Giants how necessary on-field leaders would be with such young playing groups? The Demons' activities in the just-finished trading period show what a significant dearth of leaders they have had.

The scandal/kerfuffle/mess that is Kurt Tippett’s recently-expired contract with the Crows will be the big story out of this first free agency period trading. The ramifications for the competition generally, and for Tippett and the Crows specifically, look to be far-reaching. And yet, AussieRulesBlog thinks there’s another story hidden in the last day of trading.

Five years ago, the Demons used pick 4 in the AFL National Draft to take a skinny kid named Cale Morton. This week, those same Demons, admittedly with a different coaching group in place, have seen Morton off to West Coast in exchange for pick 88.

This is either a spectacular devaluation or one of the most graphic illustrations seen of how fraught the AFL Draft is. Perhaps it’s both?

Morton isn’t the first draftee not to live up to the billing, but fans rightly expect something of quality from a top ten pick, let alone a top four. It’s not Morton’s fault that his name was read out at pick four either!

Just for some perspective, the top ten picks for that year — 2007 — were:

1. Matthew Kreuzer

2. Trent Cotchin

3. Chris Masten

4. Cale Morton

5. Jarrad Grant

6. David Myers

7. Rhys Palmer

8. Lachlan Henderson

9. Ben McEvoy

10. Patrick Dangerfield

And for some further perspective, from the same Draft —

12. Cyril Rioli

13. Brad Ebert

17. Harry Taylor

19. Callan Ward

22. Scott Selwood

29. Brendan Whitecross

35. Sam Reid

37. Scott Thompson

43. Easton Wood

46. Dennis Armfield

59. Craig Bird (NSW Scholarship)

75. Taylor Walker (NSW Scholarship)

With the exception of (in our assessment of current value) Dangerfield, Cotchin, McEvoy and Kreuzer, the other six in the top ten are all easily supplanted by those lower picks.

Of course, clubs draft for position as much as for quality, so these assessments are necessarily quite subjective.

Neverthless, it’s enough to make us glad we’re not working in recruiting.

The revelation of an agreement outside of contract between Adelaide and Kurt Tippett is a big test for the AFL — and not for the reasons you might suspect.

It appears the agreement, as Adelaide understood it, was to trade Tippett to a club in Queensland — Tippett’s home state — at the conclusion of his contract.

The rock on the rails that derailed this plan was Tippett’s decision to nominate Sydney as his preferred club. The prospect of a well-regarded player moving to the Premiership club would, on its own, have been sufficient to pique the interest of the trade and draft police at the AFL.

Had Tippett chosen Gold Coast, does anyone think we’d be reading about this in any other than positive terms? Or Brisbane?

Did Adelaide assume too much? Did Tippett dud the Crows (and make himself a cult hero for fans of 17 other clubs)?

AussieRulesBlog can’t see anything intrinsically detrimental in an arrangement for a player to move on at the expiry of a contract. In fact, it seems a quite sensible arrangement. The only fly in this ointment was the red and white ribbons on the Premiership Cup last month.

Should the AFL have absolute right of veto over every trade? This policy would seem to be part of the AFL’s attempt to equalise the competition — another tool in the suite that already features salary caps, priority picks, compensation drafts and reverse order drafting. And, at least to some extent, that’s alright — if it works.

The Saints boast a clutch (now minus one) of low-numbered draft picks. They’ve been at the pointy end of the competition for a good while. They’ve made it to the Big Dance and but for a whimsical bounce might have secured that long-dreamt of Premiership.

The Tigers have also fielded a significant squad of prestige draft picks, but without the long-term success. For the Tiges, long-term is a month.

The Demons had more single-figure draft picks than a line of binary code (that’s ones and zeros, people), but without threatening to look like a proper football team.

Clearly, for some clubs, those primary draft picks have been more millstone than jet engine.

We don’t have any huge problem with the AFL scrutinising and rubber-stamping contracts and trade deals, but we’re finding it difficult to understand what there was about the Tippett arrangement that’s different to Koby Stevens nominating the Bulldogs as his preferred club when the trading period began. The truth is, the only difference is that Tippett made his desires known three years earlier than Stevens — and according to Adelaide he has welched on the deal.

Given Sydney’s record with recycling players, there’s every chance that an end of the Docklands Stadium will be renamed the Tippett end some time in the future and that is a scary thought for everyone, not least the Camrys.

What next? A chief executive draft?

The test for the AFL? Not making asses of themselves.

Hooray! It’s not often that AussieRulesBlog is in almost complete sync with the AFL, but we are today.

First and foremost we’ll see an end to the ugly blight of ruck wrestling. Making the rule trialled during the 2012 pre-season a permanent feature, ruckmen will no longer be able to make contact with each other before the ball has left the umpire’s hands.

AussieRulesBlog has a real problem with anyone who thinks the above scene is either attractive or within the other rules of the game. If Mike Pyke and David Hale aren’t holding each other in this image, then AussieRulesBlog should be watching the Melbourne ‘Victory’.

We’re not concerned that inability to wrestle for five minutes before the ball is back into play will somehow advantage ruckmen like Nic Naitanui. For all of a couple of weeks it might, and then the competition’s strategists will figure out a way to limit Naitanui’s effectiveness.

Even supposed ‘dinosaurs’ like Shane Mumford and Darren Jolley will manage. How often have either conceded an easy contest at a centre bounce in the past couple of years? No contact beforehand there, and both Mumford and Jolley have somehow contrived to deliver the ball to their midfielders pretty effectively.

We’re also in the mood to applaud the game’s custodians on their other rule changes, although we’re sad to see the relegation of the umpire’s bounce to a largely ceremonial role. It’s the beginning of the end for the bounce. In five years, it’ll be a curiosity.

Laying on tackled players and pulling the ball in beneath an opponent have been highly unattractive features of the game for too long. We’re not totally convinced about forceful contact beneath the knees, but we acknowledge the danger it poses.

Of course, there’s often quite a distance between our expectations of how a new rule will influence the game and how The Giesch’s mob implement that rule. that will be the test and we’ll reserve absolute applause until we see the rules in action.

Interchange cap
Unfortunately, there’s been a lack of will to implement an interchange cap. Long-time readers will recall that AussieRulesBlog wrote passionately of the benefits of a cap over a substitute. And, largely, our fears have been realised. There’s not that big a difference between rotation numbers in 2012 and what they were before the substitute. Entirely predictable — and we predicted it!

Surprising no-one, Barcodes chief cook and bottle washer, Eddie Everywhere, decided to wheel out the super hyperbole and suggested AFL players will be blood doping within weeks.

We’re not sure what Eddie has been sniffing, but we want some! The facts are that the game has become quicker because of unfettered interchange. Yes, players have become fitter, but their running capacity has been significantly enhanced by having more short rests. Some of Dane Swan’s visits to the pine last only thirty seconds.

It’s only logical that reducing interchanges — which the three-and-one bench was supposed to do and patently failed to achieve — will reduce players’ running capacity. They could dope, and thanks for that helpful suggestion, Eddie, or they could simply pace themselves more so they have some petrol tickets left for the last ten minutes.

Eddie and those who think like him are locked into maintaining the game exactly as it is played at the conclusion of 2012. There’s no law or logic that says that must be the case!

If players can’t rest as often, they’ll have to ration out their effort across their game time. It’s not hard to figure out. And we would likely see a reduction in soft tissue and collision injury to boot.

AussieRulesBlog waits with bated breath for the 2014 rule changes.

Here at AussieRulesBlog Central, we haven’t had the opportunity to watch David Rodan ply his trade, week in and week out. We reckon it would have been a privilege to have done so.

We could never understand why the Tigers moved him on after 66 games, and now, 111 games further on, Port Adelaide have taken the same decision. Both clubs haven’t had lists full of blokes giving 150%, getting the ball, running and driving it forward. And yet Rodan is moved on.

Obviously the clubs know the man better than we do as casual observers. Rodan has had three ACL operations and is nearing 30 years old. These must be factors. And it’s true that Rodan hasn’t been a star, but. . .

Any time we’ve seen him, he’s been having a red hot go, and that’s all most footy fans want to see.

Here at AussieRulesBlog Central, we’ve been ruminating on the [insert sponsor] AFL Trade Period. Well, with footy over for the year, other than reliving some of 2012’s glory by replay, there’s not much else to do if the round ball sends you off to sleep faster than a handful of Valium.

Free agency and the extended draft period seems to have unlocked a lot of wanderlust amongst the AFL’s six hundred-odd players. After two weeks, we’ve seen players dashing around the competition like snooker balls after a particularly strong break. It’s all quite unusual, and not a little disconcerting.

But we’ve been thinking. Not long ago, we were ourselves in a situation where our daily grind at the millstone to assuage the bank manager was under some pressure. Even had that not been the case, were we sufficiently disenchanted with our place at the coalface, we are perfectly at liberty to go off searching for other, more attractive options. Find another employer, satisfy them of our willingness to bleed for the company’s bottom line and we’re off.

Not so, your AFL footballer. Admittedly, apart from the rookies, they can buy and sell AussieRulesBlog quite easily. Yet during the season, every week, we expect them to put their bodies in harm’s way, and we’re ever ready to criticise if we determine they haven’t gone in hard enough. (We are talking of the general ‘we’ here, not the Royal ‘we’.)

But let them hint that they’re not as happy at ‘club X’ as we deem they should be and we quickly label them as traitors and turncoats. As do some of their ex-teammates this week!

How many of us would put up with the restrictions on our trade of our labours that AFL players must submit to? Not many, we’ll wager.

Next time your boss or your coworkers are getting up your nasal passage, just contemplate what it could be like if your boss could match the offer you got from another employer and keep you at the familiar grindstone against your will.

Hmmm. This trade period doesn’t look so bad now.

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt Pepper taught the band to play. . .

Listening to and reading about the dramatic changes to AFL lists through this [insert sponsor] AFL Trading Period brings to mind the tumultuous times of the 10-Year Rule of 1972–3.

In the 60s and 70s, player movements were tightly controlled. A player needed registration by the governing bodies to be eligible to play, and they required a form known as a “Clearance” before endorsing the registration of players moving between clubs, between competitions and even between States.

Kevin Sheedy famously crossed from Prahran in the Victorian Football Association to Richmond in the Victorian Football League — without a clearance. It meant that Sheedy was banned from playing in the VFA again. At the time, that was a BIG deal and BIG news.

In mid 1972, the VFL decided that players with ten years’ continuous service with a VFL club would be entitled to join the club of their choice — without a clearance.

Perennial cellar-dwellers, North Melbourne, had already secured the services of Ron Barassi as coach for 1973. When the 10-Year Rule was announced, North President Allen Aylett and Secretary Ron Joseph went on a legendary recruiting drive.

They secured mid-fielder/half-back Barry Davis from Essendon, 100-goal full forward Doug Wade from Geelong and rugged utility John Rantall from South Melbourne. Along with the great Barry Cable from WA and Malcolm Blight from SA, home-grown youngsters Keith Greig, Wayne Schimmelbusch and David Dench also arrived at North.

Other established players who transferred under the 10-Year Rule were Carl Ditterich (from St Kilda to Melbourne), Adrian Gallagher (from Carlton to Footscray) and George Bisset (from Footscray to Collingwood).

By May 1973, the clubs had lobbied the VFL to drop the 10-Year Rule.

It was enough of a window for North to go on to win their first Premiership in 1975 and their second, after the drawn Grand Final against the Barcodes, in 1977.

It’s really the only other time in VFL/AFL history where so many well-known players have changed clubs almost at once.

It seems unlikely, though, that current cellar dwellers will benefit the way North did in the 70s. Those were heady times.

Interestingly, almost all of the 10-Year Rule players eventually returned to their original clubs as coaches, match committee members and the like. It was a time of not much money in the game for the players and North offered what was then considered truckloads. It bought the players’ services, but not their hearts.

AussieRulesBlog wonders what we’ll say of the first year of free agency forty years from now.

It’s always tempting to assume the most obvious reason is the right answer, but some further consideration can often reveal other, more likely, possibilities. The Goddard free agency move is a current issue on which to test the theorem.

Conventional wisdom, and the most obvious conclusion, would suggest that Goddard is chasing more money in his move to Essendon. And it may be that it is that simple, but AussieRulesBlog — already on the record as a Goddard-sceptic — has been thinking about how other factors may have influenced the decision.

There’s no question that Goddard was well paid at St Kilda. The three-year deal offered by the Saints would have been substantial. The Bombers, keen to secure Goddard, offered more money and a four-year contract. Barring injury, it’s hard to imagine that St Kilda wouldn’t have done a further deal with Goddard, so the extra year on the contract would seem to be an unlikely deal-clincher.

The reported values of the three and four-year deals differed by around $100–150k per year: around $600k with St Kilda and low to mid $700k with the Bombers. Again, on face value, it looks like around a 25% increase, but after fees and tax, the numbers look less attractive.

For someone whose preference, apparently, was to stay with the Saints, it hasn't taken that much to break him loose. That, and the Saints’ fairly muted reaction — not to mention their unwillingness to meet the Bombers’ offer — suggests that the relationship with the Saints wasn’t all that it could have been.

Scott Watters and his leadership group may be not overly upset to lose a possibly disruptive influence, or one that maybe didn't put the team first in their eyes. For his part, Goddard may feel quite stale, may not be infatuated with Watters' methods — or may simply need some new golf partners!

Before free agency, a player moderately unhappy in his circumstances had little option but to suck it up and make the best of his situation. A player of Goddard's stature would have been an unlikely trade. It's hard to see the Bombers giving up Michael Hurley or Jobe Watson to secure Goddard, and you can be sure the Saints would have driven a bargain of that kind had the Bombers or Goddard broached the exchange.

Whatever the reason, the next Bombers–Saints game will have a little spice.

Essendon will be hoping for a result of similar benefit to the famed trade that saw Paul Salmon depart Windy Hill for Hawthorn, Darren Jarman exit the Hawks’ nest for Adelaide and Sean Wellman, the Bombers’ current defensive coach, leave the City of Churches and set up camp at centre-halfback for the Dons.

Of the other deals done in the first few days of the [sponsor name] free-agency trade period — seriously, what next? The Sorbent Toilet Break? How soon before an almost completed trade becomes "a close shave"? — the move of Quinten Lynch to the Barcodes is the one we're scratching our head over. Lynch has two genuine claims to football fame: he has a kick like a mule that isn’t as accurate or as reliable as he'd like it to be; and he makes some horrific blunders. Clearly he offers a more experienced backup to Jolly than Dawes, but he has hardly made the key forward post his own at the Eagles. A Dawes on-song offers far more upside, in our view, than Lynch. Still, anything that weakens the Barcodes is good for football!

The first big signing of the free agency era raises plenty of issues, not the least of them being the life membership recently conferred on Brendon Goddard by St Kilda. AussieRulesBlog wonders whether the Saints might rethink that award this week if they had the chance.

We’re not fans of the ‘automatic’ life membership. Richmond and Essendon, at least, award life membership for a mere 150 games. We wouldn’t denigrate the achievement of playing 150 games. After all, AussieRulesBlog has played the grand total of zero. A 150-game player may be the most deserving recipient imaginable — but wait until he retires.

We’re not fans of awarding life memberships to active players, no matter what their status. Things change — at least in a football sense and sometimes otherwise — that might easily tip the balance away from a life membership. Goddard’s ‘defection’ is just the latest example.

Will Goddard be received as enthusiastically in the future as he might have expected as a one-club player? The answer, dear reader, is as plain as the nose on your face. And the very starkness of that difference must make the decision to leave extremely difficult, or very easy for the mercenary or selfish.

Unfortunately, free agency further erodes any sense of loyalty to a club. After playing the requisite number of games, players are free to explore their value should they wish, and to cash in as much as they can while their physical skills allow. Headlines show the Saints putting a brave face on Goddard’s departure, but they must be hurting and feeling somewhat betrayed.

Watching the NRL Grand Final — thank goodness for the Storm making that game mildly interesting — we were amazed to hear that three or four players in that game had changed clubs in the middle of the year. AussieRulesBlog hopes never to see that happening in AFL.

Well, after seven months, here we are on the eve of the culmination of the season. AussieRulesBlog doesn’t have the sense of anticipation we’ve had in the past, but perhaps that’s more about our recently-changed day-to-day circumstances and our not having a ticket to the big dance this year.

Intuitively, it has felt like a season of significant upsets, and yet, the Cats aside, those expected to figure at the pointy end have done so. A few sides have performed above expectation, but more have failed to live up to the pre-season or early-season hype.

With a wintry blast buffeting Victoria this weekend, we’re not terribly disappointed not to be heading to the G tomorrow, but we will really miss watching the setup and execution of the traditional Grand Final ‘entertainment’. Perhaps Vlad and his henchmen have stolen that ghastly truck/boat thing that Wills and Kate sprinted around the Solomon Islands in? Surely the worst vehicle dress-up since the infamous Angry Anderson ‘Batmobile’!

Whatever it is, the entertainment is sure to be half-baked, cheesy and amateurish and, in a way, that’s why it fascinates us. A bit like one of the awful movies that garner cult audiences.

Roll on 4.30pm and a close result!

We hope it's not becoming a habit, but we're again breaking our self-imposed rule not to focus on the Bombers.

Jake Niall's story in today's Age highlighting the implications for other players of free agency gives just a little idea of the deliberations that confront AFL list managers almost daily.

Essendon's interest in Brendon Goddard leaves veteran David Hille, speedster Alwyn Davey, hard nut Sam Lonergan and perennially-injured Scott Gumbleton swinging in the breeze.

For what it's worth, AussieRulesBlog thinks Goddard's best is well behind him, although a new environment may curb the petulance that has blighted his career thus far.

On the other side of the coin, Hille wouldn't have more than a year left and might expect to see a fair bit of VFL action in 2013. Davey's only weapon is his speed, which is devastating occasionally, but he's a long way short of Cyril Rioli's impact. Lonergan is as hard at the ball under the pack as anyone on the Dons' list, but his disposal and finishing are pale in comparison with, say, Watson. And Gumbleton? Who knows? Occasional flashes suggest a prodigious talent, but injury has cruelled his development and we have to wonder whether he can now get close to fulfilling his potential.

Does a potentially re-energised Goddard compensate for these four? The heart says no, resoundingly.

This though, is the brave new world that the players wanted. It's terrific for those in demand: not so good for those on the fringes. We wonder what Hille, Davey, Lonergan and Gumbleton thought of the free agency proposals when they were discussed. Did they imagine they'd be potential collateral damage in a big free-agency play?

It's not only the Bombers playing the waiting game. The Travis Cloke saga remains unresolved and a good many other players wait to see whether their club will have room for their paypackets depending on where Cloke finishes up.

AussieRulesBlog hates Trade Week and the ritual cancelling of careers that the AFL imposes on clubs every year, and we feel deeply for the players so summarily thrown onto the scrap heap. For once though, the players can't complain. It was their association that was complicit in the free agency system, for good or ill.

Tim Lane makes some very valid points about video decision assistance in general and the AFL’s system specifically.

The Toovey decision, where the camera positioning was serendipitously perfect to deliver a conclusive amendment to what the goal umpire had perceived, seems to prove the case that using video technology makes the game better by helping to get the decisions as right as they can be.

And the goal called by goal umpire Chelsea Roffey where the ball may have been touched as it crossed the line proves yet again, if such proof were needed, just how imperfect the AFL’s system is and how there may never be anything that approaches perfect.

There’s a common factor between these two decisions, surprising as that may seem. In both cases, the TV camera was placed at an angle to the goal line. In the Toovey case, that camera happened to be at pretty much exactly the right angle to show clearly that the ball came off Toovey’s upper leg. In the Roffey decision, a camera at an angle to the goal line wasn’t able to show where the ball was, two metres above the ground, in relation to a line marked on the ground, as it was touched by a Sydney player’s hand.

It’s the angles that are the problem! In the Toovey case, the angle worked, but for almost every other case, it simply doesn’t allow a definitive judgement.

When the camera is positioned right on the line, as in the left-hand illustration, there’s a reasonable chance of determining where the ball is in relation to the goal line (unless obscured by the goal post). In the right-hand illustration, that relationship between the ball and the line is changed by the angle. there can no longer by any certainty about where the ball is in relation to the line.

What’s the upshot of all this as we careen toward the end of the first video review season? Well, it’s obvious. The system as it is currently, works in a small percentage of cases but is useless for the majority. If the broadcaster or the AFL were to spring for sixteen or more, high-speed, high-definition, constantly-monitored goal line cameras, there’s a fair chance they’d eliminate about 90% of potential errors. That’s it.

Bring out the canvas curtain and administer the lead aspro before 2013. We were all much happier when Adrian and The Giesch thought there were only about six goal umpiring errors per season. Now we know there are more, but we can’t do a damned thing to remove them. Thanks for nothing, guys.

It was the back half of the 2011 season and pundits were pondering whether Special-K would be able to legitimately claim a place in the Gold Coast Suns’ team as a footballer, rather than as a marketing exercise.

Fast-forward a year. Those same questions are being asked of The Promised Land after a less-than stellar first season at the elite level, but no-one is any longer credibly suggesting that Special-K isn’t a bona fide AFL footballer after his second season.

AussieRulesBlog isn’t suggesting that The Land has to follow K’s trajectory, but it’s not at all far-fetched, in our opinion, to suppose that a proven elite sportsperson gains confidence through a first full season that finds expression through a second pre-season.

A year ago, the pundits were trying to figure out where the Suns could hide K in their backline. Somewhere where his lack of footy smarts wouldn’t be exposed on the scoreboard. This year he has announced himself as a genuine midfielder.

We’re really pleased that The Land has committed himself to seeing out his contract with the Giants. A great deal can happen in two years and another pre-season may just see him find his niche and begin to earn his place in the team beside his teammates. You can bet your life that it irks his professional pride that he’s getting games he thinks he doesn’t deserve. We’re betting on him making it.

What’s more, K’s signing a new deal with the Suns and his comments in interviews suggests he’s enjoying the freedom and creativity of AFL much more than the rather humdrum world of NRL. When The Land impacts a couple of games and gets some confidence, he could be doing just the same.

Our short catalogue of weekend disappointments yesterday inexplicably failed to mention the video decision-assist farce on Saturday night.

This debacle highlighted problem after problem with this ill-considered, hastily-cobbled together system. Well, it is allegedly a system.

First problem: despite good co-operation and perfect positioning of the two umpires with primary responsibility for making the decision, the ‘video umpire’ chose to check their decision anyway. If this isn’t a poor-enough decision in the first place, the individual concerned must have known that the views he would be served were inherently inferior to those of the umpires on the spot.

Second problem: the decision of the best-positioned umpires was overturned despite the video ‘evidence’ being significantly short of conclusive. A system supposedly designed to improve accuracy actually overturned the correct decision on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Third problem: the decision to review was made just as the ball was about to be bounced to restart play after the goal had been awarded to the Barcodes. Had a behind been signalled, and been the wrong decision as was subsequently revealed, this review would never have happened.

Had there been cameras designed to cover the goal line between the behind post and goal post, there may have been a definitive view, but we didn’t have them. Channel Seven chose to showcase their technology, but apparently reckoned without ‘the fat bit’, as Dennis Cometti is fond of calling it, which obscured the goal line and the point of the football. The line between the goal posts was deemed worthy of coverage in the same plane, but no others.

Instead, this crock of a decision was made based on a camera shooting at an angle to the line with no point of reference and next to no context.

The genius who dreamed this ‘system’ and process up should be summarily dismissed. It’s gilt-edged crap. (Are you listening, Adrian?)

There is so much to come out of this weekend’s footy. Ugly rule-free ruck contests, a former AFL Rules Committee member whose acquaintance with the laws of the game is, to put it kindly, tenuous, umpiring interpretations that are at odds with the rest of the season, and two comebacks that leave AussieRulesBlog’s tipping credentials in tatters.

Darren Jolly is, allegedly, a great ruckman. We say ‘allegedly’ because in last night’s semi-final he was pitted against West Coast’s Dean Cox and Nic Naitanui. Jolly’s strategy seemed to be, in most cases, to blatantly hold his opponent in ruck wrestles. The umpires’ response, for the most part, seemed to be “both holding!”.

We’ve raised this issue before, and we loudly applauded the experimental pre-season rule that saw ruckmen banned from making contact before the ball had left an umpire’s hand. These ruck wrestles are ugly, ugly, ugly. By all means allow ruckmen to position their bodies to their own advantage, but flat out holding is an ugly blight.

Channel Seven’s Luke Darcy is a former member of the AFL’s Rules Committee — not that you’d know it from his comments on the telecast. Darcy may be a perfectly affable chap, but what he knows about the rules you could write on the back of a postage stamp in letters a metre high.

Once again, the umpires have brought out their ‘Special Edition’ rulebook which is locked away for the rest of the year. Under these special rules, incidents which would normally attract attention are simply ignored. In the Qualifying Final clash between Hawthorn and the Barcodes, Franklin was clearly held without the ball three or four times in the first quarter as Tarrant temporarily morphed into a bruising thug. In last night’s game, there were countless examples — for both sides, lest anyone accuse us of bias against the Barcodes — of players blatantly held without the ball. According to Luke Darcy, among others, it’s good that the umpires ‘throw away the rule book’ in finals football. However much we might agree or disagree about the ‘finals’ interpretation of rules, our expectation is that the rules are the same from the first bounce of pre-season to the final siren of the Grand Final. Anything else is ludicrous.

Finally, AussieRulesBlog was pretty confident that the Dockers and Eagles would prevail. It seems we reckoned without the travel factor since both teams faded dramatically after lightning quick starts. It’s a fair bet the opposite would have happened if both games were in Perth, but one wonders why two of the teams who travel most often and the longest distances continue to be so clearly affected by the travel.

Brett Ratten must now realise that the Blues’ unexpected loss to the Gold Coast Suns was not the signal for his demise at Princes Park. The very speed with which his replacement has been accomplished suggests that the deal with Malthouse was in place, at least in principle if not in fact, for a considerable period.

For other recently ‘replaced’ coaches, the situation has seemed less . . . organised. Dean Bailey comes to mind. Perhaps Matthew Primus.

There was certainly the same whiff of conspiracy around Matthew Knights’ demise at Essendon.

Does it matter? Some of us continue to believe that a contract is to be honoured. Not paid out, but honoured.

In the end, the question for those involved comes down to ends and means. Do the ends justify the means? And can you sleep with your conscience?

Another point we noted from the final quarter of the Swans-Adelaide Qualifying Final replay was the indecent rush to the exits by an extraordinary proportion of the Crows ‘faithful’ once it became clear the Crows would not win.

It happens to be the Crows this time, but the same can be pointed out of all supporter groups.

AussieRulesBlog is firmly of the opinion that true supporters stay on right to the final siren. It’s easy when your favourite team is handing out a shellacing. It’s easy when the finish is neck and neck and the excitement is pulsating. And it’s hard to sit through your team copping a hiding, but true supporters see it as their duty to do so.

We hate hearing the opposition’s song blaring from the PA, especially when our boys have copped a whipping, but the players can’t pack up their gear and leave at the ten-minute mark because they’re being thrashed. They have to stay. And AussieRulesBlog thinks it’s every supporter’s duty to back their team siren to siren. Be packed and ready to leave the moment you hear that final siren, by all means. But not before. That’s our role in the team and the club.

Teamwork is everything. Be a faithful supporter, not a faith-less one.

AussieRulesBlog has been getting an early start on the off-season by watching replays of all the matches from week one of the finals. We’re just watching the final quarter of the Swans-Adelaide game and noticed Crow Patrick Dangerfield reeling from a blow to the head after an attempted smother by Swan Jude Bolton.

In commentary, Premiership Captain Tom Harley says Bolton has nothing to worry about because the high contact to Dangerfield wasn’t malicious. The MRP agrees, noting on the AFL’s MRP results web page:

“It was the view of the panel that Bolton’s action to brace for contact was not a striking motion [and therefore] no further action was taken.”

We have one serious question for the MRP. Is the head sacrosanct or not?

Pretty much everyone who follows AFL footy agreed that Jack Ziebell’s contact with Aaron Joseph wasn’t malicious and had occurred incidentally to both players attempting to take possession of the ball. Nevertheless, the MRP saw fit to charge and suspend Ziebell for that incidental contact. The justification for this nonsense decision was, among other things, the AFL canard that the player’s head must be protected.

And yet Jude Bolton’s contact that left Dangerfield dazed is apparently OK because it didn’t look like a strike.

We are dazed too. Dazed and confused. Once again, the MRP’s logic emanates from a parallel universe.

For AussieRulesBlog, last night’s Qualifying Final between Hawthorn and the Barcodes brought one question into sharp focus.

Although we were only seeing the game on television — which robs the spectator of almost all context — it seemed pretty clear that the Barcodes’ primary objective was to upset Lance Franklin, and they weren’t too fussed about how they achieved that objective.

Seeing two or three Barcodes virtually physically assaulting Franklin before the opening bounce and then more physical attention at every opportunity for the rest of the first half, it was clear that these actions were premeditated.

We regard ourselves as having a fairly modern and up-to-date outlook, notwithstanding the date on our birth certificate, but in football terms we’re firmly ancient. The end most definitely does not justify the means.

The question? We’re interested to hear from readers. How far is too far? How far over the line do you want your team to go in pursuit of a victory? Does sportsmanship — respect for one’s opponent — figure at all any more?

For the record, despite not having any affection for the Hawks, we mightily enjoyed watching the Barcodes reap the results of their, to us, unsportsmanlike approach.

It’s a hardy perennial. No amount of ‘herbicide’ can kill it. When the calendar clicks around to September, you can be sure it’ll pop its old and wizened head up, just it like it did last year and the fifty or so years before that. It’s the yearly whinge of some President or other that their members are being diddled out of finals seats by the AFL’s seat allocation policies.

This year, getting an early start before the Grand Final is even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, it’s Barcode President Eddie “Everywhere” McGuire.

Give Eddie his due though. This year he’s come up with a rather novel stance. The AFL are trying to steal Barcode members apparently.

AussieRulesBlog will out ourselves as a paid up AFL Member. Silver in our case, and firmly an Essendon Club Support package. It’s a carryover from the Waverly days and came into its own for us when the Bombers relocated their home games from Windy Hill to the MCG. Now that the Dons play indoor footy at home, we’re seeing less value, but we keep it going anyway.

If you support one of the big clubs that call the G home and you’re not an AFL member, you’re a mug. More especially so if you occasionally like to pop along and watch teams other than your own go around.

According to McGuire, the AFL are trying to aggregate all club members into AFL membership. How? Well, the AFL allow AFL members to buy a limited number of Guest Passes — 1000 at $75 a pop, adult tickets elsewhere in the stadium range from $46 to $85 — for this Friday night’s game.

As is usual, many supporters find themselves unable to access tickets to the game. The AFL sells tickets to its members plus some guest passes, so therefore the AFL is the big, bad bogeyman.

This is getting boring in the extreme. A big club makes it to a final and some supporters who’d like to be able to go can’t get a ticket. Shock, Horror!Short of building a stadium with infinite capacity, there’s not a solution. The next obvious target is the MCC Members.

We’ll tell you what, Eddie. You could donate the tickets that you and your board and your sponsors are using and allow the poor downtrodden fans you pretend to be so concerned about to buy them . . .

For goodness sake! The hyperbole being uttered in the wake of the Steve Johnson suspension is almost beyond belief.

Geelong Premiership player, James Kelly, apparently opened his mouth and the following drivel issued forth:

"These days it is getting harder and harder to be an AFL footballer and especially out on the ground, with so much happening and so many decisions you have got to make in such a short space of time," Kelly said.

"It's getting really, really hard to know what you can and can't do."

No it’s not. Not hard at all. You can’t shirtfront an opponent thirty metres off the ball. It’s against the Laws of Australian Football. Has been for as long as you’ve been playing the game at any level, James.

Perhaps young James and his AFL playing colleagues could devote some time to reading the laws of the game over the off-season? Then he’d be less likely to get his tongue dirty by putting his boot firmly in his mouth.

Even the contentious and controversial holding the ball rule looks pretty straightforward when you read it. Getting hold of the copy of the laws that The Giesch and his chums use is pretty difficult as it’s always in revision, but the basics remain relatively straightforward and playing to them gives the Giesch’s boys less room for extemporising.

Still, we do feel for James. It must be simply awful collecting a few hundred ‘k’ a year and being expected to know the laws of the game as well.

If media reports turn out to be correct and Carlton and Mick Malthouse agree terms and sign a contract within days of the conclusion of the home and away rounds, Malthouse’s insistence that he hadn’t spoken with Carlton up until Ratten’s sacking looks disingenuous at best.

As with the Hird and Thompson ascendency at Essendon two years ago, the timing and the seeming inevitability of the end result make so much smoke that there can only be a raging fire at its centre.

It matters not whether it was Malthouse’s management or he who dealt with Carlton. For all practical intents and purposes, they’re one and the same and if that distinction is the basis for Malthouse’s denials, then he’s worthy to argue angels and pin heads with the finest Christian scholars of the 5th Century.

The half-truths, if that’s what they turn out to be, didn’t kill the story — if that’s what was intended. A flat “No comment.” wouldn’t have killed the story either, but it also wouldn’t play us all for mugs.

Martin Blake writes in today’s Age under the extraordinary headline

Johnson decision an example of the nanny state:

It is such a contradiction to think that a little shoulder into the sternum of an approaching player, intended as a block for that player's opponent (in this case, the passing Joel Selwood), can draw a suspension from a final when there is so much more overtly dangerous conduct going on around it.

You’ve got this one wrong, Martin, on at least two counts. A “little shoulder into the sternum” it isn’t and it’s in full and clear breach of the Laws of Australian Football and has been since God’s dog was a pup.

Law 15.4.2 Shepherd states:

A Shepherd is using the body or arm to push, bump or block:
    (a)    a Player who does not have possession of the football 
and who is no further than 5 metres away from the 
football at the time when the push, bump or block occurs;

Beyond anything else, it’s clear from the lines in the image that the ball is at least twenty-five metres away. Rule 15.4.5 specifies a free kick for infringing the shepherding rule, but when force is taken into account, there’s no question that Johnson is applying more than a shepherd or a block. He’s doing his best to take out the guy tagging his Captain.

Thirty years ago a “shirtfront” to an opponent was accepted as a legitimate tactic, but most of us have moved on. And a shirtfront most definitely is not a bump — it’s a weapon used to put an opponent out of the game.

Now, the perfect example of the “nanny state” decision was the ruling against Joel Selwood a few weeks ago when he pushed his brother after surviving a heavy tackle.

Johnson is a wizard with the ball and it would generally be better that he played than sat outside the arena, but equally there’s no room in the modern game for snipers.

AussieRulesBlog would have no issue with a shepherd or a stationary block within five metres of the ball, but this was a shirtfront twenty-five metres off the ball. At the very least, it’s unsportsmanlike conduct and, in our view, that makes the charge and the suspension appropriate.

One year during his stellar playing career, Bomber coach James Hird appeared after pre-season looking like Charles Atlas. The lad had put in some serious gym time and had arms like The Hulk.

That year Hird was a shadow of the game-changing superstar we were used to.

Fast forward to 2012 and the arrival of Dean “The Weapon” Robinson at Essendon. The Bombers had an electric start to the season and had clearly put on some size. With injury and the intensity of four months of intense football, the Bombers’ bodies have given up and not allowed the players to do what they did for the first ten weeks.

The year after Hird’s Schwarzenegger impersonation, he fined back down to something more like his previous playing weight. Guess what? The game-changing superstar reappeared.

AussieRulesBlog is pretty optimistic about the Bombers’ chances in the next few years.

We happened to catch a bit of footy radio a couple of nights ago. The Gold Coast Suns were being discussed and graded a D minus (A to F possible) for their 2012 season. The reason? They hadn’t met expectations to improve on their debut season.

We think that’s a pretty harsh call for a club that boasts more second-year AFL players than any other club.

It’s far from unusual for players to have a down year after an impressive debut year. So much so that the industry calls it second year blues.

The Suns have had a year where the assumptions the young players developed in their first year have been challenged. They can no longer expect to fly under the radar. The other clubs know they’re a danger. Next year the Suns will know that they have to work even harder just to maintain their position in the AFL hierarchy — and one suspects they have far greater ambitions than just maintenance.

It’s not often that AussieRulesBlog comments on matters Essendonian. We prefer to keep this blog about the big picture normally, but the plight of our beloved team moves us to exceptional action.

One of the more notable trends of 2012 when historians pore over the statistics will be the exponential speed of the Bombers’ fall out of the top eight. In the last five weeks a slide has become free fall. Predictably, questions are being asked and those who would cut down tall poppies are readying their scythes to take a shot at James Hird.

Watching the Bombers every week as we do, we’ve noticed a distinct change in the way they play the game that, we think, gives a substantial clue to what is going on. Early on, when Essendon were a surprising entry in the top four and seemingly embarked on a trip to the Grand Final, their zone setup around goal-kicking and kickouts from behinds was sharp, crisp, precise, enthusiastic and ruthlessly effective in denying opposition easy exit out of their backlines. Pressure begets turnovers and turnovers beget goals!

Contrast that with the end of the season. Now those zone setups for goal kicking and kickouts are listless, loose, decidedly unenthusiastic and almost totally ineffective in corralling oppositions inside the Bombers’ forward 50 metre arc. There’s no lack of effort, most of the time, at the contest or at the ball carrier, but there’s not much happening, teamwise, off the ball, and that’s where we think the problem lies. Injury, training load, mental tiredness in the face of mounting losses? We’re not sure of the cause, but it’s off-the-ball work rate that is the problem for the Bombers at present.

The Cats have won three of the last five Premierships and played in four of the past five Grand Finals. There would seem to be some aspect of the Cats that could be studied and emulated. The Bombers took advantage of Mark Thompson’s ‘burnout’ — we’ve commented often that the smell of smoke hangs around those events — and secured one of the brains behind the Cats’ amazing run of high performance as a means of obtaining the intellectual property involved.

A significant feature of the high-flying Cats under Thompson was their ability to escape from trouble and turn it into attack. To a large extent, that success was founded on unrewarded running: workrate. When a Geelong player was in trouble, there were often two or three players loose behind him offering get-out options from where precision disposal created attacking moves.

It’s hardly a shock to note that the Bombers displayed some of this style during their heady start to 2012, and the setup at goal kicking and kickouts is a signifier of the effort being put into unrewarded running. It takes an effort to quickly make that ground to create the pressure of an effective zone.

It’s also worth noting that the 2006 Cats finished 10th with only 10 wins for the season, having won about 40% of their games, and a percentage of 99%. A year later they finished on top with 18 wins and 152%, three games clear, and were runaway winners of the Grand Final.

Will history repeat itself with the Bombers emulating the 2007 Cats in 2013? Only time will tell, but it’s certainly too early, given the Dons’ sparkling early season, to throw out the baby with the bathwater as we’ve heard many Bombers fans mooting.

Hey folks! We’ve got this harebrained scheme to sell ‘purified’ air to punters. We’ll just fill plastic bags with plain old air and seal them and we need someone to put up the capital. That’s it! We’ll tell the AFL Tribunal about it! They’ll believe anything!

Bulldog Will Minson, an apparently intelligent gent, we’re told, but with a burgeoning history of poor decisions, told the AFL Tribunal that he was trying to step over Swan Kieren Jack on Sunday. And the suckers believed him and downgraded his charge from intentional to reckless.

There’s a wonderful scene in Mel Brooks’ classic comedy, Blazing Saddles, where Cleavon Little pulls his own gun on himself and takes himself hostage to escape a lynch mob.

We suspect that the AFL Tribunal has been drawn from the townsfolk of Rock Ridge.

Check out a video of the Minson-Jack incident here.

Simply breathtaking.

The only consistent aspect of the Match Review Panel is, paradoxically, its inconsistency. Jack Ziebell accidentally hits an opponent in the head whilst competing for the ball and cops a four-week holiday, courtesy of the MRP. Lenny Hayes does, essentially, the same thing and is free to ply his trade!

This system was supposed to reduce uncertainty and deliver consistency, but is increasingly delivering exactly the opposite.

AussieRulesBlog freely acknowledges that Aussie Rules is an incredibly difficult game to officiate. Those very difficulties, that we’ve acknowledged again recently, mean that there are no ‘templates’ for judging incidents like the Ziebell and Hayes cases. Nevertheless, the Ziebell ruling called into question one of the central tenets of the game and the Hayes decision makes a complete mockery of the Ziebell decision.

This open sore cannot be allowed to continue.

AFL Umpires boss Jeff Gieschen says that eight out of the nine deliberate out of bounds decisions last Friday night were correct and that he did not instruct the umpires to change their interpretation.

Missing the point a little bit, Jeff?

Deliberate out of bounds decisions have been a relative rarity in 2012, and then there are nine in one game and there’s not a problem? If these eight correct decisions were all so clear cut, we’re sure we see those same scenarios many times a game and they’re not penalised. So, does that mean the umpires have been making eight glaring mistakes per game?

This is the sort of denialist spin we expect from politicians. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes again. Everyone but the AFL can see that there’s a problem here.

The solution? Release the Giesch!

Australian rules football is a complex sport. Its speed, free-flowing 360° nature, physicality and eccentric ball all combine to give a unique character to the wonderful game we love. Paradoxically, those same aspects make it one of the most difficult sports to officiate.

AussieRulesBlog thinks most will agree that a key criterion for on-field officials is an indefinable ‘feel’ for the game.

‘Feel’ is that mysterious quality of understanding that was missing on Friday night when deciding deliberate out of bounds decisions. It’s the quality missing when umpires officiate the game strictly, literally, ‘by the book’.

Some umpires have a feel for the game, organically. Peter Cameron and Glen James are two that come to mind from the past. Some others clearly don’t. Of the current crop, Steve McBurney, Dean Margetts, Justin Schmidt and Michael Jennings are those who we think don’t have a feel for the game. Match Review Panel chairman Mark Fraser, previously both an AFL player and senior umpire, seems not to have that feel in his current role.

It’s obviously difficult to recruit umpires. It’s a key element of supporters’ self-appointed role to provide vociferous advice to umpires on the job, even at under-age levels. At the top level, umpires are not professional and only those with flexible employment arrangements can contemplate taking the job on.

It is past time the game had fully-professional field umpires who could devote themselves to the task more fully. Not least of the benefits we might perceive could be a greater consistency of interpretation, but perhaps the AFL Umpiring department could do more to develop and encourage a ‘feel’ for the game as its umpires develop.

There was a sign held up by a spectator as the umpires exited the field on Friday night. It was obviously not a spur of the moment production, but it was curiously appropriate on a night when the interpretation of deliberate out of bounds had been turned on its head. “Umpire: All we want is consistency!” the sign stridently demanded. Ditto!

Friday night’s Round 20 WCE-Geelong game was remarkable for the glut of decisions penalising players for putting the ball out of bounds deliberately.

This rule has always been a bone of contention, relying as it does on the umpire’s ability to discern the player’s intent.

15.6 Free kicks — relating to out of bounds
15.6.1 When awarded
A free kick shall be awarded against a player who:
(c)  intentionally kicks, handballs or forces the football over the boundary line without the football being touched by another player;

So, the problem here is the umpire’s divination of intent. And the problem on Friday night related to some new, parallel universe version of intent that appeared mysteriously without regular precedent.

AussieRulesBlog is currently on leave, enjoying balmy sunshine in the Aussie Rules virtual media blackout that is south-east Queensland, so we’ve only seen snippets of the Suns and Lions games since the Friday night debacle. The mysterious interpretations of deliberate out of bounds don’t appear to have escaped the rabbit-proof fence as far as we can discern.

We have long championed the notion that the interpretation of the laws of the game should be the same in the first minute of pre-season as in the last minute of the Grand Final. Now, let’s add an extra demand: interpretations should be the same in every State in which the game is played.

Release The Giesch!

‘Saint’ Stephen Milne is fined $3000 by his club after a report from umpire Dean Margetts that he called Magpie Harry O’Brien a “f------ homo c---”, as reported in The Age.

The story goes on to quote AFL Operations boss Adrian Anderson labelling Milne’s comments “simply not acceptable … for AFL players to use homophobic insults on the football field”.

Aren’t you being a bit selective, Adrian? What about the other word? Around 50% of the population would find it at least as objectionable as the homophobic portion of the comment, but your reported comments make no mention of it.

More to the point, we’re in serious danger of a vain attempt at trying to turn the AFL field into a sledge-free, swear-free environment. How sanitised can we realistically make a physical contest between grown men?

Standards do change, as we’ve seen with the AFL’s much-applauded stance against racial abuse, but AussieRulesBlog wonders where we draw the line when we start to sanction “unacceptable language”. The first question to answer? Unacceptable to whom?

It’s inevitable that there’ll be widespread condemnation of Tom Liberatore after what today’s Age calls “his disastrous night out”.

But AussieRulesBlog advises caution. We’ll reluctantly admit to our sixth decade and we could never have been labelled a hellraiser, yet we can recall too many instances of similarly ill-considered behaviour. Fortunately for us, at least in the this respect, we weren’t listed by an AFL club and there wasn’t a 24-hour news monster that demanded fresh blood every day like some grubby vampire.

Lest anyone be tempted to moralise, we encourage them to quickly review the tape of their own lives and decide whether they’re in a position to comment.

For those of our loyal readers still muddling their way through their second or third decade, believe us: you’ll do something stupid one day. It might not be drink, it might not be drugs, but it will be stupid.

Does AussieRulesBlog condone what happened? Hell, no! Can we understand how otherwise sober and responsible people can cross a line? Hell, yes!