In their shoes

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.