About time we put a cap on

In Melbourne town at least, summer 2012–3 has been a funny beast. Four, five or six days of quite pleasant mid- to high-20s days with a high-30s exclamation point. And we’ve had that sentence more or less non-stop since late November. The only downers have been the Spring Carnival [yawn] and the Australian Open [ … z z z z z z z z …]. And with less than two weeks to the beginning of the pre-season competition, the AFL insists that the clubs put their cap on.

 

No, not the now-familiar baseball-style caps — or the dreadful “New Era” caps copied from trendy urban youth among our trans-Pacific cousins — but a trial interchange cap. Yes, you read correctly. An interchange cap.

 

Finally, after mammoth efforts to avoid doing the obvious and sensible, the AFL is trialling an interchange cap during the two rounds of normal games during the pre-season competition plus the Grand Final of that competition. Teams will be limited to 20 interchanges per quarter, with changes made at quarter-time, half-time and three-quarter-time not counted as part of the cap.

 

Alarmingly, with less than a fortnight to go, the AFL have not yet settled on the method for monitoring the number of interchanges. We confidently predict they’ll make it as cumbersome and prone to error as possible. At least that’s been their modus operandi thus far! We also predict it will involve sticky notes: a favourite AFL tool for such tasks.

 

Why we’ve wasted two years, and now a third in 2013, with the dreadful substitute system beggars belief. It must have been obvious to anyone with an education past year two level that capping interchanges was the quickest, surest, easiest to manage and implement system for reducing the overall speed of the game without unduly disadvantaging any particular team. Well, obvious to all except our former football operations boss, it seems.

 

The big nasty in the substitute system has been the early loss of a player. Employing the substitute early maintains the team’s uncapped rotation capacity, but they are seriously disadvantaged in not having a fresh player to introduce in the crucial latter stages.

 

By contrast, with a capped interchange, losing a player early is a significantly smaller disadvantage as the 20 interchanges per quarter are still available.

 

It’s not clear in the article announcing the trial whether the substitutes will still play a part in the trial games or not.