Regular readers will know that AussieRulesBlog has something of a penchant for scrutinising Match Review Panel assessments. This week we discovered that, for the MRP at least, nothing can indeed be more than something. (This post follows our investigative process.)

We found ourselves bemused that the Barcodes’ Ben Johnson “has no existing good or bad record”. This is a crucial statement because a bad record effectively adds points in the MRP’s assessment system, whilst a good record allows a discount of points before a penalty is calculated.

A bad record is defined as having been “found guilty of a reportable offence or reportable offences or taken an early plea resulting in suspension” within the preceding three years.

A good record is defined as not having been suspended or reprimanded for any reportable offence in the AFL competition or a State League competition associated with the AFL in the previous five years. A good record attracts a 25% discount on base points.

If Johnson, according to the MRP’s own report, “has no existing good or bad record”, we’re quite curious as to how one might gain a good record. Has he been suspended or reprimanded in the previous five years? It’s a fairly black and white question (if you’ll pardon the Barcodes pun). Was he suspended or reprimanded?

We’ve seen this statement before, in connection with newer players if we recall correctly. We’d assumed that a player has to have played for five years to get the benefit of a discount. According to the Barcodes’ own website, Johnson debuted in round one, 2000. AussieRulesBlog isn’t a world-class mathematician, but we make that an eleven-year career, so he certainly has five years’ service up.

In August 2007, Johnson received a six-game suspension (after an early plea). The savants among our audience will have quickly calculated that this incident was a hair under four years ago. The bad record consideration is within the preceding three years. The good record consideration relates to the receding five years. Johnson falls somewhere in the middle. Now we come to the point of decoding the MRP’s semantics.

Johnson hasn’t been naughty in the past three years, so we can’t slap an extra penalty on him, but he also hasn’t kept his nose clean for at least five years, so he can’t claim a discount for good behaviour. Why the euphemisms? Why “no existing good or bad record”?Why can’t they just say he ironed a bloke out four years ago and got six weeks with an early plea?

There will be those who will suggest that the previous offense shouldn’t be raised in the same way that prior convictions can’t be raised during a courtroom trial. That’s all well and good, except that suspensions within the preceding three years are counted and a clean record for the preceding five years earns a discount. So there’s no parallel with the civil legal system.

So, we ask again. Why can’t the MRP just say that he ironed a bloke out four years ago and got six weeks after an early plea and be done with it? To paraphrase British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies: lies; damned lies; and semantics!

AussieRulesBlog is fascinated by the logical inconsistencies thrown up in the discussions on tanking and blowouts. On the one hand, it seems football community opinion is strongly against not doing everything possible to win every game, and on the other there’s a notion that the fixture has to be even further compromised to lessen the number of blowout games.

As we’ve made clear in recent posts, AussieRulesBlog isn’t perturbed by teams maximising their draft opportunities through selection and/or in-game match up decisions. If an opportunity exists, and it’s within the existing rules, clubs would be negligent not to seek to exploit it. We have a generally pragmatic idealistic view of the world, but we think those wringing their hands over so-called tanking are extraordinarily naive.

On the blowouts issue, who would have predicted last year — or even earlier this year — that Melbourne could have crashed to such a low ebb. AussieRulesBlog nominated the Demons, Tigers, Kangaroos and Bombers as the next ‘big four’ based on our assessment of the prospects with their developing lists. How could fixturing have accounted for the veritable white flag performances of Port and the Demons? Simple. It can’t. No-one outside of any club’s inner sanctum knows the true state of the playing list, both physically and mentally, or the capacity of the coaching panel or the patience of the Board or the overall cohesion of the club. Any of these factors can profoundly influence the on-field output of the club.

Clubs will always seek to gain maximum advantage from opportunities presented to them. Some teams will have days when they can do no wrong when playing a team that can do little right. No matter how assiduous the AFL might be in its efforts at equalisation, there are simply too many factors involved for there to be a perpetually ‘even’ on-field competition.

A few words from a departing coach and we’re all off on the chase again — led by that paragon of virtue and honesty, The Rt Hon Jeffrey Gibb Kennett — desperate to label someone as a cheat because they ‘tanked’.

Well, what IS tanking? Here’s a couple of pertinent excerpts from a definition on dictionary.reference.com:

7. Slang . to do poorly or decline rapidly; fail: The movie tanked at the box office.

9. go in the tank, Boxing Slang. to go through the motions of a match but deliberately lose because of an illicit prearrangement or fix; throw a fight.

…

tank "to lose or fail," 1976, originally in tennis jargon, but said there to be from boxing, from tank (n.) in some sense. Tanked "drunk" is from 1893.

…

tv. & in. to lose a game deliberately. : The manager got wind of a plan to tank Friday's game.

From the Oxford dictionaries online:

2 [no object] US informal fail completely, especially at great financial cost.
[with object] North American informal (in sport) deliberately lose or fail to finish (a match).

 

And the Merriam Webster dictionaries online:

2: to make no effort to win : lose intentionally <tanked the match>

1: to lose intentionally : give up in competition

I hope we can agree, readers, that the preponderance of learned opinion is that tanking means deliberately or intentionally losing.

Since much of the tanking debate has focussed on Dean Bailey’s Melbourne, let’s consider some scenarios.

Does anyone seriously contend that Bailey told his players to go out and give less than 100%? Does anyone seriously believe that Bailey would have pulled key players from the ground to turn around a winning position in a game? Does anyone expect any sane person to believe that Dean Bailey instructed his players not to win?

The answer to all is, of course, No. Did the Demons tank? No.

Is it possible to enter a sporting contest with long-term objectives over and above simply winning or losing? Of course it is.

Does anyone seriously suggest that the likes of Jack Watts did not get valuable experience for the future in playing against bigger and stronger opponents? Were those the best possible match-ups on the day? Possibly not. Did they make the difference between winning and losing? Probably not. Will Watts be a better player sooner for having the experience? Probably.

AussieRulesBlog felt for Neil Craig last weekend. It really was the cruellest goodbye.

The team ran out for its first game under former assistant and now temporary head coach Mark Bickley and produced the sort of football that would have saved Craig’s job for him. Admittedly they were only up against the doormats of the competition in Port Adelaide, but it was still a Showdown.

If you fancy a bet — and AussieRulesBlog doesn’t — you could do a lot worse than covering the Demons to either beat the Blues or come within a whisker of it. But, you say, the Cats licked the Dees to the tune of 180-odd points just a few days ago. How can they possibly get up to compete against the Blues.

Well, of course, the answer is simple — the coach was sacked. And apparently the players think the world of him.

We haven’t worried about looking for statistics. It’s happened often enough. Coach sacked mid-season after players give nothing, players play out of their skins the next week.

Yeah, well thanks for that guys. Just a bit @^%$*#~ late!

In the previous post we looked at Melbourne Football Club’s coaches since the famous sacking of the legendary Norm Smith, the Demons’ last Premiership coach.

We were surprised. A radio commentary that Melbourne’s coaches had all been inexperienced, with the exception of Ron Barassi, seems to be quite a way off the mark. It seems there are other reasons for the Demons’ least successful period in their history*.

One year that stands out starkly is 1964, the year of the Demons’ last Premiership. Over the ensuing forty-six years, the club has competed in the Grand Final just twice. With seven first or second placings in seven consecutive years during the fifties (1954–60), expectations — and some might say a misplaced sense of entitlement that has persisted amongst Demon fans — have always been high.

The key event in the wake of the 1964 Premiership was the arrangement to share the MCG with Richmond from 1965. This was a controversial arrangement at the time. As an outsider, we can only speculate on the impact inside the club, but within two years Norm Smith was gone, Ron Barassi was gone and the Demons, it seems, were also gone.

Is it possible that this loss of entitlement to their spiritual home, could so take the wind out of a club’s sails? The MGC has always had an iconic status in the city and, especially through the super-successful fifties, it must have seemed that the club was foredestined, by virtue of its ‘home’ ground in the VFL competition, to almost perpetual success. Seemingly small events may have consequences out of all proportion. Many have argued, for instance, that the Demons lack of on-field fortitude in 2011 stemmed from the forced retirement of popular and respected captain James McDonald.

____________
*
Foundation VFL club, 1897
VFL/AFL Premiers 12 times: 1900, 1926, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1948, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1964
VFL/AFL Runners Up 5 times: 1946, 1954, 1958, 1988, 2000

AussieRulesBlog was surprised to hear on the radio yesterday that Melbourne have only had one experienced coach since they sacked Norm Smith back in the mists of pre-history (1967) — Ronald Dale Barassi. That lead us to think again about our views on coaching selections.

Let’s start by looking at Melbourne’s coaches since 1967, especially their prior experience and elite-level Premiership exposure.

• John Beckwith (1968–70) — five years coaching in the country, one year assistant coach at Melbourne
  176 games (Melbourne) (1951–60), five-time Premiership player
• Ian Ridley (1971–3) — no prior experience
  130 games (Melbourne) (1954–61), five-time Premiership player
• Bob Skilton (1974–7) — two years captain-coach South Melbourne
  238 games (South Melbourne) (1956–71), triple Brownlow medallist
• Dennis Jones (1978) — coaching in SANFL and WAFL
  59 games (Melbourne) (1956–60, 1962)
• Carl Ditterich (1979–80), captain-coach — no prior experience
  285 games (203 St Kilda, 82 Melbourne), suspended for St Kilda’s 1966 Premiership
• Ron Barassi (1981–5) — captain-coach and coach at Carlton, coach at North Melbourne
  254 games (204 Melbourne, 50 Carlton), six-time Premiership player, four-time Premiership coach (all previous to being appointed as Melbourne coach)
• John Northey (1986–92) — fourteen years in VFL assistant roles, one year as coach at Sydney.
  118 games (Richmond), two-time Premiership player
• Neil Balme (1993–7) — twelve years coaching in SANFL for two Premierships
  159 games (Richmond), two-time Premiership player
• Neale Daniher (1998–2007) — assistant coach at Fremantle (AFL)
  82 games (Essendon), on Essendon’s list in 1985 (Premiership year) and 1990 (Grand Final year)
• Dean Bailey (2008–11) — development coach (Essendon) 2000, assistant coach Port Adelaide (incl 2004 Premiership)
  53 games (Essendon),

What emerges here is that there’s been no shortage of exposure to elite Premiership culture — admittedly more tenuous recently.

Melbourne’s sacking of Dean Bailey and Neil Craig’s resignation put the end-of-season focus back onto the crucial question of selecting a coach for an elite team.

Over coming weeks, AussieRulesBlog will start to look at some of the factors to be considered

It seems it happens once a month or so. A team cops a couple of early injuries, is forced to deploy their substitute earlier than anticipated and loses a rotation. Yesterday at the ’G, it was the Bombers’ turn.

What’s really the most depressing aspect of this is the media machinations around it.

Coaches will be asked, quite legitimately in our view, how the injuries affected the team’s performance. The coaches, of course denying that injuries made the difference, go on to wistfully dream about a larger interchange bench and highlight injured players remaining on the field for lack of a rotation. James Hird, quite tongue-in-cheek, yesterday drew a contrast with basketball where the bench is a full one-for-one ratio. [Ed: Yeah, an eighteen-man bench! That’s really gonna fly, Jim.] That comment then becomes a headline claiming the coach has slammed the 2011 interchange arrangements.

Come on, people! This handwringing about reduced rotations is more about fairness than it’s about player welfare. AussieRulesBlog has a newsflash! The game isn’t fair! We have an oval ball with unpredictable bounce and flight. Ask Stephen Milne how fair the game is — one bounce away from a Premiership.

We haven’t done any research, but injuries and a reduced interchange manifestly influencing results in about one game a month doesn’t sound too out of the ordinary. That’s a rate of less than 4%.

Hird’s Bombers would still have been disadvantaged with a four-man interchange. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, a team collects more than its share of injuries. Sometimes they’re at training, sometimes they’re during a game.

Let’s all just get over it. Teams have been finishing games with injured players forced to remain on the ground since God’s dog was a pup.

Yesterday at the ’G, AussieRulesBlog sat down next to a guy wearing a Barcodes scarf.

As the game began and the other Barcodes fans around us began their routine abuse of any free kick against the Barcodes, any perceived free kick for the Barcodes that wasn’t paid and any other perceived injustice against the Barcodes, the chap beside us began his own quietly-spoken response to each new round of invective.

“Idiots! That’s not a free kick!” “Learn the rules! That’s not holding the ball!” and so on.

At quarter time. we turned to him and noted that he was destroying many of our fondest prejudices. Behind his wraparound Raybans he had two working eyes. Quite remarkable! While obviously passionate about his team, not only did he perceive the faults of his own tribe, but he willingly praised the best efforts of the Bombers — and there were plenty in that first half.

At the end of the game, after the expected — but, pleasingly, delayed — opening of the Barcodes’ floodgates, we thanked him for the chat and shook his hand, wishing him good luck for the finals.

The overwhelming majority of fans watching a game can’t see anything other than through the lens of their team’s success. It’s such a surprise to come up against a discriminating, intelligent and knowledgeable fan.

Thank you, sir, wherever you are, for one of the most enjoyable afternoons of AFL we have experienced in a very long time.