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?