News today that the Saints have delisted Ryan Gamble after just one season — yielding eleven games — along with teammates Zac Dawson, Brett Peake, Farren Ray and Dean Polo remaining out of contract as the deadline for final list lodgement looms.

What’s remarkable about this story is that all five arrived at the Saints from other clubs.

Crucial in this story is the departure of coach Ross Lyon, who must have had some sort of input into recruiting these recycled players for a team he and the club believed were on the cusp of Premiership success.

What’s pretty clear at this point is that new coach Scott Watters has a different goal.

Recycled players have had a chequered history as a breed. Some, Greg Williams (Carlton and ex-Sydney and Geelong), his nemesis Sean Denham (Essendon and ex-Geelong), Sean Wellman (Essendon and ex-Adelaide) and Leigh Brown (Barcodes and ex-North Melbourne and Fremantle) to name a few, tasted Premiership success.

For a great many others, and the five Saints named above are probably going to fall into this category, their new club eventually discovered why they’d been on the trade table.

It’s worth noting that other recent Saints “recycled” toward the end of their career include Steven King, Michael Gardiner and Charlie Gardiner. No wonder that the pundits have criticised the Saints for their failure to play many kids — there wasn’t any room on the list for kids!

Rohan Connolly’s analysis of the 2012 fixture, in The Age today, is a thing of beauty!

Covering all of the important elements that, all other things being equal, make games more or less likely to be advantageous, Connolly shows that the Barcodes have one of the hardest assignments next year. And why not? Two Grand Finals in two years (well, three, strictly speaking, but you know what we mean) should mean that they are best positioned to meet the challenges — unlike the immature Essendon team of a couple of years ago that was saddled with a similarly challenging task.

Forget about any bleating by those success-starved, long-suffering Barcodes supporters looking for ‘fair’ treatment in the fixture. In ANY other aspect of football, these people aggressively celebrate their club’s strength.

Based on Connolly’s analysis, it’s Melbourne and North Melbourne fans who can feel most pleased with their situation, and Port and Brisbane fans who might feel most aggrieved.

All in all, given the necessities for so-called blockbuster games and complexities of venue availability and broadcast requirements, this fixture has a lot more of the silk purse feel than might be expected.

AFL Operations Manager Adrian Anderson is reported in The Age to have spoken about proposals for experimental rules for the 2012 pre-season competition.

Among the possibilities are 12 points for a torpedo goal from outside the fifty-metre arc, which we regard as populist nonsense, despite the obvious difficulties in defining whether a torpedo that’s not quite right is a torpedo or not.

Other possibilities are:

■ Boundary and goal umpires allowed to pay obvious free kicks for holding and high contact. [Let’s define obvious, shall we?]

■ Ruckmen not permitted to make contact for boundary throw-ins and around-the-ground bounces.

■ Free kicks not paid for last touch over the boundary but for last kick, handball or when a player walked the ball over the line. [Still a turkey of an idea.]

AussieRulesBlog is glad to see a mention of ruck contests in the range of issues to be addressed. The description provided can only be regarded as a quick shorthand because a literal implementation of “no contact” for boundary and around-the-ground ruck contests is simply not practical.

For what it’s worth, AussieRulesBlog would like to see anything that looks like a hold or a shepherd with the arms in a ruck contest penalised. We’re really over the ruck wrestling. Fair enough if players want to engage in a test of strength, but holding or shepherding is just plain ugly. We recognise that limiting contact to the body advantages athletic, high-leaping players such as Nic Naitanui and Paddy Ryder quite strongly, however they are similarly disadvantaged in the current wrestling matches that pass for ruck contests.

Let’s have an end to umpires shouting, “Both holding!”

In the same story, there are more hints that some sort of video decision assist will be implemented, sooner rather than later. We’ve already indicated our disquiet. The story notes that only seven scoring decision errors were recorded by the AFL in 2011. Seven! How many goals, behinds, out-of-bounds and goal-line marks and scrambles were adjudicated through the season, and there were seven errors. We’re pretty sure most fans would prefer to see fewer errors of interpretation of rules in the field of play, or, at the very least, consistent interpretations across the season, rather than this manic determination to find a solution to a non-problem.

Pardon us for breaking through the wall of publicity encouraging all sports fans to get in early to get their fill of Gaelic-Australian football. [Do we hear the sound of yawning?]

Mike Sheahan makes a couple of quite valid points in his column yesterday. Who knows which AFL players are in the squad for the Irish series? Or where the “Tests” will be played and when? And we’ll add our own question: Who the hell knows what the “rules” are?

We’ll give the AFL points for persistence, but the concept of blending two vaguely similar national games to create a series where national pride is supposedly on the line has surely run its race and should be mercifully put down as soon as possible.

There’s an old management consulting adage that suggests a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Well, the AFL-GAA International Rules series is an ugly camel.

The differences between AFL and Gaelic are simply too large to credibly blend the two games together. It comes down to the issue of tackling — a staple skill of the Aussie game and approached with greater intensity every year. It is laughable that the AFL expect players who are trained to tackle fiercely to back off. It’s even more laughable for the GAA to expect their blokes, who play a light-contact sport, to suddenly approach every contest with red-blooded vigour.

There’s no doubting the courage of the Irish players, but the task confronting them is insurmountable. A round ball and a crossbar don’t make up for tackling, albeit that it’s toned down. Lest there be any doubting the scope of the task, consider how many Irish players have carved out a steady career in AFL even when they were living and breathing it every day. Four. Jim Stynes, Sean Wight, Tadgh Kennelly and Marty Clark. That’s it! Setanta O’hAilpin was, in the end, despite playing eighty games, a curiosity rather than a genuine AFL player, and no-one else has come within a bull’s roar.

Time for the canvas curtain to be erected and the lead aspro to be administered to this hotch-potch.

Ed: Let’s ask another question: How is it that any contest against a foreign team seems to be tagged with the moniker “Test” these days? Test cricket is called that because that’s what it is — a test. We think it’s an affront for sports like the rugbies and netball, as much as others less lofty, to award themselves the accolade. For hybrid events like AFL-GAA International Rules to call themselves “Tests” is a travesty.

It is reported today that Carlton have delisted Setanta O’hAilpin. The decision was forced on the Blues by the AFL’s rules requiring all clubs to free up places on their lists each year leading up to the national draft. Carlton had apparently indicated they were happy to keep O’hAilpin on their list, and could, were O’hAilpin to nominate, draft him again.

There are two issues: Forced turnover of club lists; and the Irish experiment. We want to focus on the second in this post.

There have been a steady flow of recruits to AFL from the emerald isle. Of course, the similarities between Gaelic Football and Australian rules mean that there’s a slightly shallower learning curve than for rugby (league or union), soccer or gridiron players.

Clearly the most successful of those recruits has been the Demons President, Brownlow medallist Jim Stynes. Despite looking like a fish out of water on-field, Stynes carved out a unique career in AFL and prompted a number of lateral thinkers in the game to plunder the ranks of up and coming Gaelic footballers looking for the next Jim Stynes.

The results have been mixed. The Barcodes’ Marty Clark, set to resume his AFL career in 2012, looked the most natural of the Irish imports to make the big time in our view. AussieRulesBlog saw ex-Saint, new Swan, Tommy Walsh, during the pre-season competition and thought he looked quite at home — although he failed to win selection for the Saints during 2011. Recently retired Tadgh Kennelly, a Premiership player with the Swans, is probably the most successful after Stynes. For the rest, at least in football terms, AFL has proved to be a quite tough task. The Bombers’ Michael Quinn, with whom we’re a little more familiar due to our Bombers allegiance, played a couple of senior games in 2009 and looked, frankly, a little like a rabbit in the headlights.

Setanta O’hAilpin has played 80 games for the Blues and kicked 67 goals.

In the wake of the surprise recent emergence of James Podsiadly at Geelong, Michael Barlow at the Dockers and Stuart Crameri at the Bombers, to name just a couple of mature-age recruits, we wonder whether AFL recruiters will remain interested in immigrants without the instinctive feel for Aussie Rules that kids who’ve grown up with the game possess.

Ed (19 Oct 2011): And the answer is “Yes, they can!” (as long as it’s a special deal that doesn’t impinge on their ‘normal’ list).

In the 80s, it seemed like Tom Hafey’s players dominated the ranks of senior coaches. In the 90s, there were a crop of Allan Jeans’ acolytes followed by a gaggle of Sheedy disciples. Leigh Matthews, Mark Thompson and Mick Malthouse have recently had their mark stamped on the game with a rash of former players taking the reins at AFL clubs.

Spot the common thread?

Winning culture. Time will tell who can best pass on the magic to their crew.

James Hird and Mark Thompson. Mark Neeld and Neil Craig. Brenton Sanderson and Dean Bailey. Nathan Buckley and Rodney Eade. And now it seems the Saints are chasing Dean Laidley to assist the newly-appointed Scott Watters. Thus far, only Brendan McCartney is soloing in his debutante year.

For what it’s worth, AussieRulesBlog thinks the Saints’ strategy is the right one, and Laidley ticks a lot of boxes despite his involvement with Port Adelaide recently.

Of recent debutante appointments going solo, Chris Scott is the standout, but the bootstudder could probably have coached that Geelong team to the Grand Final. John Longmire gained credit for a competitive season from his Swans. Brad Scott has impressed, especially in his gig on Foxtel’s AFL Insider. Damien Hardwick hasn’t set the world on fire, but he is coming from a looooong way back. The recently-sacked Mark Harvey seemed to take a while to come to grips with the top job, and that may have cost him the gig in the end as expectation crashed into practicality — that and a black cat breaking a mirror under a ladder’s worth of injuries.

It’s worth revisiting the ‘winning’ experience of the senior coaches for 2012.

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