It’s a tight game. There can’t be long to go. The team we’re supporting is three points up and can’t get the ball out of the opposition forward line. Out of nowhere, an opposition player flukes a goal! Now we’re three points down. the ball goes back to the centre to restart the game. Can we get the ball into our forward line to get the vital goal to win the game? The tension is electric! There’s a clearance from the centre bounce, it goes to our star player who takes the ball inside 50 and is steadying for a kick for goal . . . .

The tension is obvious. Put in a countdown clock and it’s diminished by a huge degree. But that doesn’t stop the boosters pushing the idea.

AussieRulesBlog simply cannot understand why anyone would want to know ten or twenty seconds before the siren goes that their team’s chances of winning were zero. Watching broadcast games where there is a countdown clock, we know the game is done and dusted and we simply turn it off. There’s just no reason to continue to watch. It’s the unknown time remaining that creates and builds the tension. Once you know, there is no tension.

Last year, in the wake of drawn games in consecutive weeks, I commented on then-widespread calls for some means of breaking the draw in home and away matches.

This last weekend, we have two teams being coached by stand-in coaches — desperate for victories to enhance their chances at securing their role for 2010 and beyond — fighting out a thrilling draw. Not surprisingly, stand-in Richmond coach Jade Rawlings calls for a draw-breaking mechanism. Also not surprisingly, Patrick Smith, speaking on SEN radio, opines that there's a fundamental problem in having draws through the home-and-away season when there are draw-breaking mechanisms in place through the final series.

Rawlings position is understandable and sentimentally attractive — although the odds are his team would have lost. Smith's position is less understandable.

I, for one, don't understand why a draw is such a terrible result, especially when it's such a relative rarity. If we were discussing fudball, the situation is somewhat different with nil-all, or one-all draws commonplace.

For two aussie rules teams to find themselves on exactly the same points tally at the end of four quarters of hectic football is, and should be widely acknowledged as, a testament to the never-say-die courage and determination of two groups of athletes fighting each other to a standstill over an allotted period.

Far from seeking mechanisms to thwart draws, we should be celebrating these rare occurrences and lauding the athletes involved.

Watching the game on television from the comfort of my lounge chair, the excitement of the finish was almost stolen by the presence on the screen of a countdown clock. If not for the derring-do of Mitch Morton, the tension would have been gone from the game with more than 90 seconds still to play. Earlier this year, amid proposals to place countdown clocks on the main scoreboard, I challenged the rationale for countdown clocks. I am firmly of the view that countdown clocks should be banned full-stop — none in the media, none for the teams, none on the scoreboard.

Aussie rules audiences have suffered the tension of not knowing how long a quarter would run for a hundred or more years. Strategically, the game is different if you know exactly how much time is left, and it's UGLY.

Lets remove ALL countdown clocks. There's nothing to be gained and many moments of heart-rending tension to be experienced.

I’d like someone to explain the benefit to be gained from countdown clocks being displayed (The Age). I don't just mean at the ground for the paying customers, I mean on television and radio (you know what I mean!) and especially to the competing teams.

Who is not bored to the back teeth with players holding the ball up like some Olympian trophy to signify that the team is attempting to "ice the clock"?

If it's a close contest, I definitely don't want to know how much time is left. That knowledge kills the suspense and excitement. I want the players to be desperate at the contest right to the final second, not chipping the ball around a deserted backline to waste the few seconds the bench has notified them are left.

We've just killed off (hopefully) the Bowden Manoeuvre, which was nothing more than a time-wasting trick. I want to keep the coaches, media and crowd in total suspense until the siren sounds, and avoid the ugly time-wasting exercises that blight our game.