Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Whatever it takes

No comments:

In the wake of the on-going supplements affair at the Bombers, and their appointment today of Ziggy Switkowski to review governance and procedures, it’s worth taking a step back and examining the AFL industry from a slightly different viewpoint.

 

Earlier today, a work colleague passed on to AussieRulesBlog a letter purporting to have been posted on a Carlton blog somewhere. It’s genuinely hilarious, but it points to the direction of this post.

 

AFL membership bases are increasingly vocal about perceived lack of success. Or should we say, at those clubs where success has been a fairly constant visitor over the last thirty or so years.

 

The Bombers’ membership slogan for 2013 says it in plain language: Whatever it takes. The apocryphal Carlton supporter’s letter alluded to above takes the same view: the ends justify the means. Certainly during the McGuire ascendancy at the Barcodes, there’s been a sense of entitlement to success.

 

AussieRulesBlog, as an Essendon member for most of the last fifty years, has always had a difficulty with those more recent Bomber adherents who suggest that the Bombers’ “rightful place” is at the top of the AFL tree. Lets not beat around the bush. That’s utter bollocks.

 

We remember the 70s, when the Dons would flatter to win a few games, but were, for the most part semi-competitive and simply making up the numbers.

 

We also remember in the late 60s and 70s the sense of entitlement of the Tiger horde — and we sincerely hope never to see them resurrected — that ended in the recruiting war that humbled the Tigers for a generation and the Barcodes for a decade.

 

The Blues of the 70s and 80s imbibed a sense of entitlement from their loudmouthed, opinionated and omnipresent President: a sense of entitlement that was dealt a blow when they were found to have blatantly rorted the salary cap. Creative salary cap manipulation isn’t a lost art at Princes Park either. Look at our post in recent days about the Judd arrangement with Visy.

 

Tell a St Kilda supporter about entitlement and ends justifying means. One Premiership in a century of competition. A Bulldogs supporter. One Premiership in ninety years of competition. A Fitzroy supporter, who has lost a club and only seen premierships since the mid-40s through a faintly distasteful surrogacy.

 

Club members, at least those at the powerful clubs, are no longer content to merely see their club compete and to enjoy the wins when they come. On-field success is the measuring stick, or at the very least the promise of imminent on-field success. Anything less and administrations are booted out.

 

AussieRulesBlog enjoys our team winning as much as most. We glory in those against-the-odds victories — the Zaharakis goal on Anzac Day, the ‘comeback’ against the Kangaroos — along with the rest. And we love victories against the oldest, most powerful foes. Some, like the Barcodes have earned respect. Some, like the Tigers, hint at the pain should the Bombers’ administration get it wrong, and some, like the Blues, . . . well, it’s just always good to beat the Bluebaggers.

 

And yet, we regard ourselves as fans of football first and the Bombers second. Without the competition around them, the Bombers are a meaningless construct. Success is certainly wonderful, but the game is more important than any club.

 

Whatever it takes? No. Work your hardest, give the best you’ve got to the contest, but respect your opponents and know that you’ve competed with honour.

Read More

Bombers' nuclear option

No comments:
Essendon Football Club has announced a wide-ranging independent review of governance and processes following the dramas of the past three weeks.

The review will be headed by former Telstra CEO and Chairman of ANSTO, Ziggy Switkowski, a long-time Bomber fan. Switkowski, a nuclear physicist, also headed an inquiry into the viability of an Australian nuclear power industry.

At a press conference around the time of his appointment to the top job at Telstra, one enterprising reporter asked a Telstra spokesperson if Ziggy could play guitar — to deathly silence. AussieRulesBlog was there and struggled to contain a loud guffaw. If this goes through to the keeper, look here.

At a stock market briefing, Switkowski, also a former CEO of Optus, told analysts that if they saw an Optus truck out in the bush, it was lost.
Read More

The St Christopher accommodation

No comments:

OK, let’s see if we’ve got this right. Steven Trigg, Peter Blucher and Kurt Tippett are in football stir because they dared to flaunt the AFL’s rules on the salary cap. All three participated in a deal that hid a portion of Tippett’s salary from AFL scrutiny and allowed him to be paid over the odds.

 

Pretty straight forward, really.

 

Of course, there’d been the ghostly presence of one Christopher Judd hovering menacingly in the background while the Tippett affair played itself out. How dare the Crows, Tippett and his manager concoct a deal to squeeze some extra money for a star player! The very cheek!

 

Judd’s deal with Carlton had always included a portion considered outside the salary cap which was paid by Dick Pratt via his Visy Industries operations. Judd, we were told, performed an “ambassadorial” role. Not that any of us actually saw him doing anything in this role.

 

As one wag memorably noted, Judd’s primary activity in this ambassadorial role seemed to be putting out his recycling bin each fortnight.

 

More recently, with the Tippett affair bubbling along, the AFL declared the Blues-Judd-Visy deal they’d signed off five years ago to be a little bit naughty. Include the whole $200k per year inside your salary cap, gentlemen, was the stern message to the bean counters at Princes Park.

 

Now, according to media reports, about half the Visy money is being considered part of the Blues’ injury payments and not under the salary cap.

 

Does AFL House know that the sainted Judd is a physical wreck and unlikely to see out the rigours of the season? Surely they must. How else could they countenance a deal that blatantly flies in the face of the principles Trigg, Tippett and Blucher have apparently traduced?

 

Apparently Joel Selwood and Dane Swan have similar deals.

 

AussieRulesBlog is all for the players earning a fair cop for their efforts. They endure physical punishment the rest of us would need a year to recover from, and they play again the next week! No, our beef is with the AFL.

 

As it happens, we don’t care a fig for Trigg, Tippett or Blucher, but we do think that consistency is important. Or is it simply that Trigg and Blucher didn’t cut the AFL in on the deal? Not financially perhaps, but getting their blessing for the deal before it was inked?

 

It’s unacceptable that one group is hung drawn and quartered and another is assisted to bend the rules. Let’s see some zero tolerance for salary cap abuse. Vlad and his henchmen are so keen for zero tolerance on-field, but don’t seem to apply the same principle to their own efforts.

 

It’s a pretty poor show.

Read More

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Not Guilty! (sort of)

No comments:

The terminology surrounding the decision on the Melbourne ‘tanking’ enquiry is interesting.

 

Melbourne FC, its coach and team did not set out to deliberately lose in any matches

And yet then-coach Dean Bailey is suspended for sixteen weeks and then-Director of Football Chris Connolly for a season, not to mention a half-million dollar fine levied on the club.

 

Add to that mix the then-fashionable view, especially among Demons supporters, that the club was doing its best to shore up the priority Draft pick as well as the number one pick in the main body of the Draft.

 

They may not have set out to lose but there were plenty of suggestions that they found ways to do so once the game was underway. Perhaps that’s where the penalties come from?

 

The statements of the AFL are simply not credible in the context of the penalties applied. If the Board weren’t aware of what was at stake at the time, then they were derelict in their duty. They may not have specifically directed the football department to lose games, but they knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it.

 

This is not an anti-Demons polemic. AussieRulesBlog is on record saying the Demons didn’t do anything that other clubs had hadn’t done before them.

 

We wonder has Vlad fined himself for overseeing the introduction of a Draft process that encouraged teams to lose games to lock in a potentially significant benefit?

 

In the end, we don’t much care whether Melbourne were found innocent or guilty, but it would be nice for the statements and the penalties to be in some sort of sync, and they most definitely are not.

Read More

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Rename AFL House?

No comments:

The publicly available evidence suggests that the AFL may have alerted the Bombers following a briefing from the ACC on the use of banned substances at AFL clubs. More than one journalist is predicting that Melbourne will be slapped with a (financially-based) wet lettuce leaf over the tanking allegations.

 

Perhaps AFL House should be renamed The Colander?

Read More

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Unexpected carbon tax effect

No comments:
As is our want, AussieRulesBlog and companion attended the Docklands stadium last night to witness the return of live football for 2013.

What we hadn't counted on was the unforeseen effect of the carbon tax. Educated readers will recall that the carbon pricing scheme (it's only a tax to meatheads like Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey) puts a price on emitted carbon dioxide as an incentive for emitters to reduce their carbon emissions.

We hadn't factored in that fresh beer emits carbon dioxide in the form of effervescence. Clearly the good people who now own Carlton & United Breweries have done their patriotic duty and reported their beverages as carbon emitters. Well, that's how it seemed when we were charged $6.90 for about 300ml of nondescript beer in a dowdy plastic cup.

It was only in 2009 that we railed against the price of beer at the footy reaching the heady heights of $6.00.

There were plenty of rumblings in the crowd too about the price of food and drink. It's obviously not enough that we shell out our hard-earned cash to get to view the game. We're then charged exorbitant rates for the most rudimentary of food provided in an often desultory fashion.

It could make some sense if there were indications that the caterers had taken steps to provide a superior product with more consistency and in a more efficient fashion. Such is not the case though.
The same barely trained work experience caterers dispense the same inconsistently warmed fare from a menu that can hardly be described as enticing. The same disorganised chaos characterises all catering outlets at the MCG and Docklands. The caterers seem perpetually surprised by large crowds at blockbuster games and appear not to have progressed beyond 1960s vintage pie warmers.

Fair enough to charge us a premium price for a premium product, but we're paying that price for a decidedly INFERIOR product.
Read More

Thursday, February 14, 2013

More zero tolerance rules

No comments:

Does the AFL know any way other than using a sledgehammer to crack a ping-pong ball?

 

The recent release of an official video to accompany the changes to the laws of the game has been somewhat overshadowed by the Bombers’ pre-emptive PR exercise.

 

For those more interested in on-field matters, the changes being introduced are:

  1. Forceful contact below the knees
  2. Separation of ruckmen at stoppages
  3. Umpires the throw the ball up around the ground [rather than bouncing it].

AussieRulesBlog has no quibble with the separation of ruckmen. We have long been an opponent of ruck wrestles and the free kick lottery that accompanies them. When this rule was trialed in the last pre-season comp, it was a gilt-edged winner. It’s not often the AFL gets it 100% right, but in this one they’ve hit the bullseye.

 

We’re sad to see the start of what, inevitably, will be the death of the umpire’s bounce. The centre bounce is easier, courtesy of a generally harder, more stable surface, but less practice at bouncing during the game will, inevitably, lead to calls for the bounce to be dispensed with altogether. It’ll be a very sad day, but it will happen, and it won’t be that long. What next, take away the goalie’s flags?

 

So, relatively good news thus far. Unfortunately, the sledgehammer has been dragged out to counter the non-problem of Gary Rohan’s broken leg. Let’s be clear, AussieRulesBlog doesn’t want to see one more player — ever — injured in the way Rohan was. But Lindsay Thomas didn’t go to ground and didn’t try to sweep Rohan’s legs from under him.

 

Adam Goodes’ knees are a problem of a different sort. We’re quite happy to see the intentional taking of a players legs eliminated. This is, effectively, ground-level tunneling.

 

So, how do the AFL legislate against this? By banning any forceful contact below the knees. And just in case there’s insufficient grey in there already, there’s an exemption for players smothering with their hands or arms. We can almost see the players practising low-level smothering right now.

 

The video to accompany this change to the laws of the game doesn’t give all that much hope that a blanket ban can be effectively policed. There’s already a law to ban the Goodes ‘tackle’. We fail to see how adding this new offense will add anything but frustration to the game.

Read More

Check interpretations

No comments:

The AFL’s Laws of the Game webpage incorporates a selection of videos — those that make up the 2013 version of the Laws of the Game DVD distributed to clubs annually — that describe, according to The Giesch, “how our game is to be officiated”.

 

AussieRulesBlog, for one, will be taking close note of these videos and calling The Giesch out when he and his charges fail to live up to the expectations they’ve created.

Read More

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

A new cap never fits properly

No comments:

It’s no surprise that AFL clubs are having a little grizzle about the capped interchanges for the latter rounds of the pre-season competition. Go back a few years and there were very similar concerns being voiced about the substitutes then being trialled.

 

Of course it’s difficult adapting to a new scenario, but coaches and players will adapt.

 

We have to remember that the slowing of the game in the final quarter that we saw when the interchange bench was reduced to three had all but disappeared by the conclusion of the 2012 season. Players had adapted to the changed workloads.

 

AussieRulesBlog doesn’t bet, especially on sport, but we reckon a capped interchange for 2014 is at very short odds.

 

With less than two days before the Bombers, Barcodes and Bulldogs get things underway again, we’re looking forward to the start of the action for 2013.

 

The noises from Essendon seem to suggest that there’ll be a good result for the Bombers out of the performance-enhancing drugs furore fairly soon. If that’s the case, we can hardly wait to read Caroline Wilson’s apology.

Read More

Monday, February 11, 2013

Wilson's attack scurrilous

No comments:
It's fair enough to have a set against certain people. AussieRulesBlog has always had a few 'whipping boys', so we can hardly claim to be purer than the driven snow. But we're happy to provide a rational justification for our comments and to admit they're subjective. That The Age's chief football writer, Caroline Wilson, has a set against Essendon coach James Hird can no longer be doubted after the scurrilous article appearing under her byline today.

Almost a year ago, Wilson accused Paul Roos and James Hird of promoting rascist drafting policies. In response to questions on discussions for a two-interchange, two-substitute bench, Roos and Hird both observed that such a system would put a premium on endurance which might disadvantage highly-skilled indigenous players. Wilson wilfully misrepresented these comments as a call to exclude indigenous players from the AFL Draft simply because they were indigenous. This view was utter nonsense, of course.

Fast forward a year and Wilson still has Hird in her sights. No doubt Wilson the Richmond supporter is enjoying seeing the Bombers in extremis, but she has allowed this to colour her judgement. So far, all that is publicly known is that Essendon have called in the AFL and ASADA to investigate matters of concern to the Essendon Board in relation to ASADA codes. The ACC report release smeared every club in every elite competition, so we learned nothing more. Yesterday, Gillon McLachlan, deputy AFL CEO, confirmed an investigation of the Bombers — which they had initiated — and said one other player at another club was being investigated. Again, nothing more substantive about the Bombers.

Hird's statement accepting responsibility — for nothing definite — as head of the football department was enough for Wilson to wade in with all guns blazing. The investigation could take months and no-one has admitted to anything, but Wilson has decided Hird's position is untenable.

The Age was happy to print rumour as fact in recent days as it pushed Stephen Dank's reputation into the mire. Tellingly, he is suing the media for $10 million for defamation — ARB would make it $100 million.

No doubt those 'journalists' on the bleeding edge will point to incessant news cycles and demand for content to excuse their lack of craft, but that's nonsense. Those journalists who retain their ethics don't write based on rumour. Wilson's stock in trade is rumour. She's not the only one. The time when the discerning football public will cease to support scurrilous rumour is drawing near. Wilson would do well to consider emulating her Age colleague, Michelle Grattan, and leave the field to those who do simple things like checking, corroborating and parking their personal prejudices before they begin writing.
Read More

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Lance avoided tests

No comments:

No, not THAT Lance, the one on two wheels. The now-disgraced cyclist, Lance Armstrong, proudly retorted to those who questioned him that he had never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. That line held for a decade. So how does Andrew Demetriou imagine that the AFL will overcome the issue?

 

To be fair, we don’t yet know the extent of the problem. The ACC has smeared entire sports with a very wide brush.

 

The simple fact is, whatever the testing regime, there will always be those for whom the end justifies the means. And they’ll find ways to foil the system.

 

The ACC’s announcement was good media (for them), but of little practical use for anyone else save the media proprietors.

Read More

Thursday, February 07, 2013

Only a little bit of effort

No comments:

The announcement on Tuesday that Essendon Football Club had called in the AFL and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority in relation to supplements administered to some players in 2012 has created a tsunami of speculation. Fair enough. It’s a big issue and the implications are potentially devastating.

 

Sadly, some of the reporting has barely reached rudimentary. An example is Greg Baum’s story in The Age today.

 

There’s one crucial part of the story that suggests only the most rudimentary research has been done before writing. Baum writes:

Speculation centres on something called peptide. On ASADA's list, it is banned as a substance, in and out of competition, but permissible as a ''product''.

Last year, says ASADA's register, three Queensland amateur rugby players were caught in possession of, using and/or trafficking peptide, and suspended for two to four years.

There’s a lot in common between this story and the apparently magical special ingredients supposedly found in many women’s cosmetics. Take a simple word from chemistry that few average people would be familiar with, and dress it up as something extraordinary.

 

There is no “substance” called peptide. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids linked by a particular type of bond — a peptide bond, as it happens. A polypeptide is a long, unbroken chain of peptides. Polypeptides are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins are everywhere in organic chemistry. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide

 

AussieRulesBlog found this information in about 45 seconds.

 

Why is this important? Baum’s clear implication is that Essendon players have been using, perhaps inadvertently, a banned substance. The fact is that eating a steak is taking peptides, because the muscle tissue in the steak is built from proteins — which are made up of peptides.

 

The second part of Baum’s assertion focuses on the implications of taking a banned substance. “Peptide…” says Baum, “… is on ASADA’s list… [and] …is banned as a substance.” Well, that’s sort of true, but a long way from the full story.

 

A small number of very specific peptides are on ASADA’s list.

 

asada_peptide 

It’s immediately clear why this issue is big. These banned peptides are responsible for promoting the release of growth hormone which induces the user’s body to create more muscle mass.

 

Regular readers will know that AussieRulesBlog is a passionate Bombers supporter. We are not defending Essendon, because we don’t know what is happening behind closed doors.

 

Notwithstanding our own club loyalties, we would expect a senior journalist to have spent the couple of minutes we spent in researching and to be able to inform his readership more effectively than mimicking a cosmetics commercial. It’s a reflection on the quality of the journalism that the story wasn’t written in that way.

 

As an unfortunate side issue, we were mildly concerned when the Bombers’ 2013 membership collateral began appearing emblazoned with the tagline “Whatever it takes”. We’re betting that someone is wishing they’d knocked back that brazen proposition in favour of something less . . . provocative.

 

As a Bombers fan, we hope the Bombers are found to be clean. As a football fan, we’re wondering about the trajectory of the game we love. “Whatever it takes” implies an ends justify the means attitude that thumbs its nose at rules and regulations. The Bombers aren’t alone in the mindspace to move heaven and earth to achieve success. In the sport as big business era, success seems to be everything and AussieRulesBlog isn’t sure that’s a good place to be. That must sound rather trite to a Bulldogs or Demons fan.

 

The spectre of clubs doing less than their utmost in pursuit of a specific goal isn’t new. Priority draft picks almost mandated those actions. Success, or at least a vision of the future that promises a realistic chance of success, seems to be a ‘fix’ that few can deny themselves.

 

Despite more comfortable stadiums, despite fitter and stronger and more skillful professional players, despite the depredations of the ‘outer’ at suburban football grounds and standing freezing in the rain on the hill, we really miss those days when success was enjoyed, but we were almost as well pleased just to see our boys give a good account of themselves.

 

Whatever it takes? We’re not sure we want to buy that product.

Read More

Sunday, February 03, 2013

More Cloke and dagger

No comments:

It’s not a thought we ponder with relish. Another ‘champion’ player eligible for some form of free agency putting off contract negotiations until season’s end. Come on, Buddy, didn’t we all suffer enough with Travis and David’s games with the Barcodes last season? The Clokes monopolised the media to such an extent that Brendon Goddard flying the Saints’ coop barely rated a mention until the deal was done.

 

Of course the AFL, having squeezed some free-agency toothpaste from the tube, can’t put it back. Well, not without some complicated manoeuvring.

 

What are the odds that Franklin will move away from the Hawks? Long isn’t the word that comes to mind. More like gargantuan or stratospheric. And yet the very fact of not having signed leaves open that infinitesimal chance. Not many would have considered that Goddard would have ditched the white from his playing colours and ended up at Windy Hill.

 

By the way, Goddard’s first visit to Windy Hill must have been interesting. Admittedly the Bombers are ploughing money into their new Melbourne Airport training headquarters, but we’ve seen the Windy Hill facilities and to say they’re a step down from the Saints’ current facilities doesn’t quite capture the differential. More like a chasm or an abyss.

 

Anyway, it appears like we’ll be treated to another season of guesses and prognostications about a contract. Hopefully Franklin’s management decide to follow a different path to the Clokes and don’t conduct guerrilla war through the media.

Read More

Saturday, February 02, 2013

About time we put a cap on

No comments:

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.

Read More

Whatever it takes

In the wake of the on-going supplements affair at the Bombers, and their appointment today of Ziggy Switkowski to review governance and procedures, it’s worth taking a step back and examining the AFL industry from a slightly different viewpoint.

 

Earlier today, a work colleague passed on to AussieRulesBlog a letter purporting to have been posted on a Carlton blog somewhere. It’s genuinely hilarious, but it points to the direction of this post.

 

AFL membership bases are increasingly vocal about perceived lack of success. Or should we say, at those clubs where success has been a fairly constant visitor over the last thirty or so years.

 

The Bombers’ membership slogan for 2013 says it in plain language: Whatever it takes. The apocryphal Carlton supporter’s letter alluded to above takes the same view: the ends justify the means. Certainly during the McGuire ascendancy at the Barcodes, there’s been a sense of entitlement to success.

 

AussieRulesBlog, as an Essendon member for most of the last fifty years, has always had a difficulty with those more recent Bomber adherents who suggest that the Bombers’ “rightful place” is at the top of the AFL tree. Lets not beat around the bush. That’s utter bollocks.

 

We remember the 70s, when the Dons would flatter to win a few games, but were, for the most part semi-competitive and simply making up the numbers.

 

We also remember in the late 60s and 70s the sense of entitlement of the Tiger horde — and we sincerely hope never to see them resurrected — that ended in the recruiting war that humbled the Tigers for a generation and the Barcodes for a decade.

 

The Blues of the 70s and 80s imbibed a sense of entitlement from their loudmouthed, opinionated and omnipresent President: a sense of entitlement that was dealt a blow when they were found to have blatantly rorted the salary cap. Creative salary cap manipulation isn’t a lost art at Princes Park either. Look at our post in recent days about the Judd arrangement with Visy.

 

Tell a St Kilda supporter about entitlement and ends justifying means. One Premiership in a century of competition. A Bulldogs supporter. One Premiership in ninety years of competition. A Fitzroy supporter, who has lost a club and only seen premierships since the mid-40s through a faintly distasteful surrogacy.

 

Club members, at least those at the powerful clubs, are no longer content to merely see their club compete and to enjoy the wins when they come. On-field success is the measuring stick, or at the very least the promise of imminent on-field success. Anything less and administrations are booted out.

 

AussieRulesBlog enjoys our team winning as much as most. We glory in those against-the-odds victories — the Zaharakis goal on Anzac Day, the ‘comeback’ against the Kangaroos — along with the rest. And we love victories against the oldest, most powerful foes. Some, like the Barcodes have earned respect. Some, like the Tigers, hint at the pain should the Bombers’ administration get it wrong, and some, like the Blues, . . . well, it’s just always good to beat the Bluebaggers.

 

And yet, we regard ourselves as fans of football first and the Bombers second. Without the competition around them, the Bombers are a meaningless construct. Success is certainly wonderful, but the game is more important than any club.

 

Whatever it takes? No. Work your hardest, give the best you’ve got to the contest, but respect your opponents and know that you’ve competed with honour.

Bombers' nuclear option

Essendon Football Club has announced a wide-ranging independent review of governance and processes following the dramas of the past three weeks.

The review will be headed by former Telstra CEO and Chairman of ANSTO, Ziggy Switkowski, a long-time Bomber fan. Switkowski, a nuclear physicist, also headed an inquiry into the viability of an Australian nuclear power industry.

At a press conference around the time of his appointment to the top job at Telstra, one enterprising reporter asked a Telstra spokesperson if Ziggy could play guitar — to deathly silence. AussieRulesBlog was there and struggled to contain a loud guffaw. If this goes through to the keeper, look here.

At a stock market briefing, Switkowski, also a former CEO of Optus, told analysts that if they saw an Optus truck out in the bush, it was lost.

The St Christopher accommodation

OK, let’s see if we’ve got this right. Steven Trigg, Peter Blucher and Kurt Tippett are in football stir because they dared to flaunt the AFL’s rules on the salary cap. All three participated in a deal that hid a portion of Tippett’s salary from AFL scrutiny and allowed him to be paid over the odds.

 

Pretty straight forward, really.

 

Of course, there’d been the ghostly presence of one Christopher Judd hovering menacingly in the background while the Tippett affair played itself out. How dare the Crows, Tippett and his manager concoct a deal to squeeze some extra money for a star player! The very cheek!

 

Judd’s deal with Carlton had always included a portion considered outside the salary cap which was paid by Dick Pratt via his Visy Industries operations. Judd, we were told, performed an “ambassadorial” role. Not that any of us actually saw him doing anything in this role.

 

As one wag memorably noted, Judd’s primary activity in this ambassadorial role seemed to be putting out his recycling bin each fortnight.

 

More recently, with the Tippett affair bubbling along, the AFL declared the Blues-Judd-Visy deal they’d signed off five years ago to be a little bit naughty. Include the whole $200k per year inside your salary cap, gentlemen, was the stern message to the bean counters at Princes Park.

 

Now, according to media reports, about half the Visy money is being considered part of the Blues’ injury payments and not under the salary cap.

 

Does AFL House know that the sainted Judd is a physical wreck and unlikely to see out the rigours of the season? Surely they must. How else could they countenance a deal that blatantly flies in the face of the principles Trigg, Tippett and Blucher have apparently traduced?

 

Apparently Joel Selwood and Dane Swan have similar deals.

 

AussieRulesBlog is all for the players earning a fair cop for their efforts. They endure physical punishment the rest of us would need a year to recover from, and they play again the next week! No, our beef is with the AFL.

 

As it happens, we don’t care a fig for Trigg, Tippett or Blucher, but we do think that consistency is important. Or is it simply that Trigg and Blucher didn’t cut the AFL in on the deal? Not financially perhaps, but getting their blessing for the deal before it was inked?

 

It’s unacceptable that one group is hung drawn and quartered and another is assisted to bend the rules. Let’s see some zero tolerance for salary cap abuse. Vlad and his henchmen are so keen for zero tolerance on-field, but don’t seem to apply the same principle to their own efforts.

 

It’s a pretty poor show.

Not Guilty! (sort of)

The terminology surrounding the decision on the Melbourne ‘tanking’ enquiry is interesting.

 

Melbourne FC, its coach and team did not set out to deliberately lose in any matches

And yet then-coach Dean Bailey is suspended for sixteen weeks and then-Director of Football Chris Connolly for a season, not to mention a half-million dollar fine levied on the club.

 

Add to that mix the then-fashionable view, especially among Demons supporters, that the club was doing its best to shore up the priority Draft pick as well as the number one pick in the main body of the Draft.

 

They may not have set out to lose but there were plenty of suggestions that they found ways to do so once the game was underway. Perhaps that’s where the penalties come from?

 

The statements of the AFL are simply not credible in the context of the penalties applied. If the Board weren’t aware of what was at stake at the time, then they were derelict in their duty. They may not have specifically directed the football department to lose games, but they knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it.

 

This is not an anti-Demons polemic. AussieRulesBlog is on record saying the Demons didn’t do anything that other clubs had hadn’t done before them.

 

We wonder has Vlad fined himself for overseeing the introduction of a Draft process that encouraged teams to lose games to lock in a potentially significant benefit?

 

In the end, we don’t much care whether Melbourne were found innocent or guilty, but it would be nice for the statements and the penalties to be in some sort of sync, and they most definitely are not.

Rename AFL House?

The publicly available evidence suggests that the AFL may have alerted the Bombers following a briefing from the ACC on the use of banned substances at AFL clubs. More than one journalist is predicting that Melbourne will be slapped with a (financially-based) wet lettuce leaf over the tanking allegations.

 

Perhaps AFL House should be renamed The Colander?

Unexpected carbon tax effect

As is our want, AussieRulesBlog and companion attended the Docklands stadium last night to witness the return of live football for 2013.

What we hadn't counted on was the unforeseen effect of the carbon tax. Educated readers will recall that the carbon pricing scheme (it's only a tax to meatheads like Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey) puts a price on emitted carbon dioxide as an incentive for emitters to reduce their carbon emissions.

We hadn't factored in that fresh beer emits carbon dioxide in the form of effervescence. Clearly the good people who now own Carlton & United Breweries have done their patriotic duty and reported their beverages as carbon emitters. Well, that's how it seemed when we were charged $6.90 for about 300ml of nondescript beer in a dowdy plastic cup.

It was only in 2009 that we railed against the price of beer at the footy reaching the heady heights of $6.00.

There were plenty of rumblings in the crowd too about the price of food and drink. It's obviously not enough that we shell out our hard-earned cash to get to view the game. We're then charged exorbitant rates for the most rudimentary of food provided in an often desultory fashion.

It could make some sense if there were indications that the caterers had taken steps to provide a superior product with more consistency and in a more efficient fashion. Such is not the case though.
The same barely trained work experience caterers dispense the same inconsistently warmed fare from a menu that can hardly be described as enticing. The same disorganised chaos characterises all catering outlets at the MCG and Docklands. The caterers seem perpetually surprised by large crowds at blockbuster games and appear not to have progressed beyond 1960s vintage pie warmers.

Fair enough to charge us a premium price for a premium product, but we're paying that price for a decidedly INFERIOR product.

More zero tolerance rules

Does the AFL know any way other than using a sledgehammer to crack a ping-pong ball?

 

The recent release of an official video to accompany the changes to the laws of the game has been somewhat overshadowed by the Bombers’ pre-emptive PR exercise.

 

For those more interested in on-field matters, the changes being introduced are:

  1. Forceful contact below the knees
  2. Separation of ruckmen at stoppages
  3. Umpires the throw the ball up around the ground [rather than bouncing it].

AussieRulesBlog has no quibble with the separation of ruckmen. We have long been an opponent of ruck wrestles and the free kick lottery that accompanies them. When this rule was trialed in the last pre-season comp, it was a gilt-edged winner. It’s not often the AFL gets it 100% right, but in this one they’ve hit the bullseye.

 

We’re sad to see the start of what, inevitably, will be the death of the umpire’s bounce. The centre bounce is easier, courtesy of a generally harder, more stable surface, but less practice at bouncing during the game will, inevitably, lead to calls for the bounce to be dispensed with altogether. It’ll be a very sad day, but it will happen, and it won’t be that long. What next, take away the goalie’s flags?

 

So, relatively good news thus far. Unfortunately, the sledgehammer has been dragged out to counter the non-problem of Gary Rohan’s broken leg. Let’s be clear, AussieRulesBlog doesn’t want to see one more player — ever — injured in the way Rohan was. But Lindsay Thomas didn’t go to ground and didn’t try to sweep Rohan’s legs from under him.

 

Adam Goodes’ knees are a problem of a different sort. We’re quite happy to see the intentional taking of a players legs eliminated. This is, effectively, ground-level tunneling.

 

So, how do the AFL legislate against this? By banning any forceful contact below the knees. And just in case there’s insufficient grey in there already, there’s an exemption for players smothering with their hands or arms. We can almost see the players practising low-level smothering right now.

 

The video to accompany this change to the laws of the game doesn’t give all that much hope that a blanket ban can be effectively policed. There’s already a law to ban the Goodes ‘tackle’. We fail to see how adding this new offense will add anything but frustration to the game.

Check interpretations

The AFL’s Laws of the Game webpage incorporates a selection of videos — those that make up the 2013 version of the Laws of the Game DVD distributed to clubs annually — that describe, according to The Giesch, “how our game is to be officiated”.

 

AussieRulesBlog, for one, will be taking close note of these videos and calling The Giesch out when he and his charges fail to live up to the expectations they’ve created.

A new cap never fits properly

It’s no surprise that AFL clubs are having a little grizzle about the capped interchanges for the latter rounds of the pre-season competition. Go back a few years and there were very similar concerns being voiced about the substitutes then being trialled.

 

Of course it’s difficult adapting to a new scenario, but coaches and players will adapt.

 

We have to remember that the slowing of the game in the final quarter that we saw when the interchange bench was reduced to three had all but disappeared by the conclusion of the 2012 season. Players had adapted to the changed workloads.

 

AussieRulesBlog doesn’t bet, especially on sport, but we reckon a capped interchange for 2014 is at very short odds.

 

With less than two days before the Bombers, Barcodes and Bulldogs get things underway again, we’re looking forward to the start of the action for 2013.

 

The noises from Essendon seem to suggest that there’ll be a good result for the Bombers out of the performance-enhancing drugs furore fairly soon. If that’s the case, we can hardly wait to read Caroline Wilson’s apology.

Wilson's attack scurrilous

It's fair enough to have a set against certain people. AussieRulesBlog has always had a few 'whipping boys', so we can hardly claim to be purer than the driven snow. But we're happy to provide a rational justification for our comments and to admit they're subjective. That The Age's chief football writer, Caroline Wilson, has a set against Essendon coach James Hird can no longer be doubted after the scurrilous article appearing under her byline today.

Almost a year ago, Wilson accused Paul Roos and James Hird of promoting rascist drafting policies. In response to questions on discussions for a two-interchange, two-substitute bench, Roos and Hird both observed that such a system would put a premium on endurance which might disadvantage highly-skilled indigenous players. Wilson wilfully misrepresented these comments as a call to exclude indigenous players from the AFL Draft simply because they were indigenous. This view was utter nonsense, of course.

Fast forward a year and Wilson still has Hird in her sights. No doubt Wilson the Richmond supporter is enjoying seeing the Bombers in extremis, but she has allowed this to colour her judgement. So far, all that is publicly known is that Essendon have called in the AFL and ASADA to investigate matters of concern to the Essendon Board in relation to ASADA codes. The ACC report release smeared every club in every elite competition, so we learned nothing more. Yesterday, Gillon McLachlan, deputy AFL CEO, confirmed an investigation of the Bombers — which they had initiated — and said one other player at another club was being investigated. Again, nothing more substantive about the Bombers.

Hird's statement accepting responsibility — for nothing definite — as head of the football department was enough for Wilson to wade in with all guns blazing. The investigation could take months and no-one has admitted to anything, but Wilson has decided Hird's position is untenable.

The Age was happy to print rumour as fact in recent days as it pushed Stephen Dank's reputation into the mire. Tellingly, he is suing the media for $10 million for defamation — ARB would make it $100 million.

No doubt those 'journalists' on the bleeding edge will point to incessant news cycles and demand for content to excuse their lack of craft, but that's nonsense. Those journalists who retain their ethics don't write based on rumour. Wilson's stock in trade is rumour. She's not the only one. The time when the discerning football public will cease to support scurrilous rumour is drawing near. Wilson would do well to consider emulating her Age colleague, Michelle Grattan, and leave the field to those who do simple things like checking, corroborating and parking their personal prejudices before they begin writing.

Lance avoided tests

No, not THAT Lance, the one on two wheels. The now-disgraced cyclist, Lance Armstrong, proudly retorted to those who questioned him that he had never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. That line held for a decade. So how does Andrew Demetriou imagine that the AFL will overcome the issue?

 

To be fair, we don’t yet know the extent of the problem. The ACC has smeared entire sports with a very wide brush.

 

The simple fact is, whatever the testing regime, there will always be those for whom the end justifies the means. And they’ll find ways to foil the system.

 

The ACC’s announcement was good media (for them), but of little practical use for anyone else save the media proprietors.

Only a little bit of effort

The announcement on Tuesday that Essendon Football Club had called in the AFL and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority in relation to supplements administered to some players in 2012 has created a tsunami of speculation. Fair enough. It’s a big issue and the implications are potentially devastating.

 

Sadly, some of the reporting has barely reached rudimentary. An example is Greg Baum’s story in The Age today.

 

There’s one crucial part of the story that suggests only the most rudimentary research has been done before writing. Baum writes:

Speculation centres on something called peptide. On ASADA's list, it is banned as a substance, in and out of competition, but permissible as a ''product''.

Last year, says ASADA's register, three Queensland amateur rugby players were caught in possession of, using and/or trafficking peptide, and suspended for two to four years.

There’s a lot in common between this story and the apparently magical special ingredients supposedly found in many women’s cosmetics. Take a simple word from chemistry that few average people would be familiar with, and dress it up as something extraordinary.

 

There is no “substance” called peptide. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids linked by a particular type of bond — a peptide bond, as it happens. A polypeptide is a long, unbroken chain of peptides. Polypeptides are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins are everywhere in organic chemistry. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide

 

AussieRulesBlog found this information in about 45 seconds.

 

Why is this important? Baum’s clear implication is that Essendon players have been using, perhaps inadvertently, a banned substance. The fact is that eating a steak is taking peptides, because the muscle tissue in the steak is built from proteins — which are made up of peptides.

 

The second part of Baum’s assertion focuses on the implications of taking a banned substance. “Peptide…” says Baum, “… is on ASADA’s list… [and] …is banned as a substance.” Well, that’s sort of true, but a long way from the full story.

 

A small number of very specific peptides are on ASADA’s list.

 

asada_peptide 

It’s immediately clear why this issue is big. These banned peptides are responsible for promoting the release of growth hormone which induces the user’s body to create more muscle mass.

 

Regular readers will know that AussieRulesBlog is a passionate Bombers supporter. We are not defending Essendon, because we don’t know what is happening behind closed doors.

 

Notwithstanding our own club loyalties, we would expect a senior journalist to have spent the couple of minutes we spent in researching and to be able to inform his readership more effectively than mimicking a cosmetics commercial. It’s a reflection on the quality of the journalism that the story wasn’t written in that way.

 

As an unfortunate side issue, we were mildly concerned when the Bombers’ 2013 membership collateral began appearing emblazoned with the tagline “Whatever it takes”. We’re betting that someone is wishing they’d knocked back that brazen proposition in favour of something less . . . provocative.

 

As a Bombers fan, we hope the Bombers are found to be clean. As a football fan, we’re wondering about the trajectory of the game we love. “Whatever it takes” implies an ends justify the means attitude that thumbs its nose at rules and regulations. The Bombers aren’t alone in the mindspace to move heaven and earth to achieve success. In the sport as big business era, success seems to be everything and AussieRulesBlog isn’t sure that’s a good place to be. That must sound rather trite to a Bulldogs or Demons fan.

 

The spectre of clubs doing less than their utmost in pursuit of a specific goal isn’t new. Priority draft picks almost mandated those actions. Success, or at least a vision of the future that promises a realistic chance of success, seems to be a ‘fix’ that few can deny themselves.

 

Despite more comfortable stadiums, despite fitter and stronger and more skillful professional players, despite the depredations of the ‘outer’ at suburban football grounds and standing freezing in the rain on the hill, we really miss those days when success was enjoyed, but we were almost as well pleased just to see our boys give a good account of themselves.

 

Whatever it takes? We’re not sure we want to buy that product.

More Cloke and dagger

It’s not a thought we ponder with relish. Another ‘champion’ player eligible for some form of free agency putting off contract negotiations until season’s end. Come on, Buddy, didn’t we all suffer enough with Travis and David’s games with the Barcodes last season? The Clokes monopolised the media to such an extent that Brendon Goddard flying the Saints’ coop barely rated a mention until the deal was done.

 

Of course the AFL, having squeezed some free-agency toothpaste from the tube, can’t put it back. Well, not without some complicated manoeuvring.

 

What are the odds that Franklin will move away from the Hawks? Long isn’t the word that comes to mind. More like gargantuan or stratospheric. And yet the very fact of not having signed leaves open that infinitesimal chance. Not many would have considered that Goddard would have ditched the white from his playing colours and ended up at Windy Hill.

 

By the way, Goddard’s first visit to Windy Hill must have been interesting. Admittedly the Bombers are ploughing money into their new Melbourne Airport training headquarters, but we’ve seen the Windy Hill facilities and to say they’re a step down from the Saints’ current facilities doesn’t quite capture the differential. More like a chasm or an abyss.

 

Anyway, it appears like we’ll be treated to another season of guesses and prognostications about a contract. Hopefully Franklin’s management decide to follow a different path to the Clokes and don’t conduct guerrilla war through the media.

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.