Ball...............No thank you......

I’m not a redneck or a bogan and I don’t insist players ‘kick it long’ and I don't call out ‘deliberate’ and I don’t think footy was better in my day. This being my day though I’m quite far away. I love a ‘ball…yeah’ as much as any other bloke in the outer. I went to a game in Sydney once and they don’t know how to do a ‘ball…yeah’ and for that they are ignorant and maybe that’s why the game may never catch on in that strange and detached city. A ‘ball…yeah’ is like a good root in that sometimes you have to earn it and wait for it and it’s all the more better for the wait. Mostly it doesn’t come easily. Though you may. But things are changing. Change for the sake of change being the mantra of the AFL.

Being a fly on the wall down at umpire ‘training’ (think the biggest bunch of nerds and bullied kids ever) could make for some pretty disturbing viewing. I guess they spend the first half of training trying to remember players’ names and then thinking of nicknames so they can act like the players are their mates. The umpires clearly have no mates and that is why they became umpires. Umpiring is like the law in that it’s enforcement should be detached and consistent but always based around discretion and reason. For this reason umpires should be ice cold and faceless zombies and then they may get the respect they so deeply want.

Consistency is something the fans and players have always yearned for. But it is like a decent shag we all want it but rarely get it. When the AFL at one stage decided that in certain rounds the umpires would concentrate on the enforcement of certain rules (being ‘red hot’ on said rule) the idea of consistency became even more unrealistic. How can umpires be consistent if they admit that they will change the focus of the rules from week to week?

Even worse, the discretion of umpires is slowly being abolished, and rules are being enforced that surely are not in the spirit of the game. The second half of umpire training must surely involve studying and finding new ways to confuse the ‘holding the ball’ rule. The amount of ‘ball…yeahs’ getting paid in round one was quite breathtaking. Do umpires have to fill a quota of ‘ball…yeahs’? Is the ball-up a plague on our game like flooding and tunneling before it? If a player goes for a loose ball, picks it up, gets slung to the ground and then has five players jump on him, is that considered prior opportunity? How can he dispose of the ball correctly if he is semi-conscious? Punishing the player ‘making the play’ is not in the spirit of the game and this obsession with paying holding the ball free kicks has to be stopped. If you were an AFL players perhaps it would be wiser to avoid picking up a loose ball. Simply wait for your opponent to possess it then tackle him and wait for the idiots in the crowd to scream ‘ball…’. The idiot in white will surely oblige.

Good football rules are like decent laws in that they should respect history and democracy and take into accont the viewpoints of all stakeholders. A good law is rarely thought up by a few men in a room without the consultation of the people it will affect.

Coach Swapping. Not mid-season thanks.

It's true that in the past some coaches have been treated extremely badly by their employers. When a team experiences a patch of bad form the media and the public smells blood. And in most cases, all the blame is focused on the coach. With growing professionalism of the league, the treatment of coaches is improving. Sackings by media (Damian Drum) are almost certainly extinct. But the coaches want a little bit more. They want to be told, before their contract is expired, whether or not they will be offered a new one. In one way this is reasonable. If a coach knows that he will not be offered a new contract, he can begin looking for a new job, nice and early. This would also be benefical for a club looking for a new coach, as they can start their search earlier. Under the proposed agreement, by July 1st of every year, out of contract coaches will be told whether or not they will be sacked at the end of their contract. Assumedly this means if they are not told they will be sacked then they will definitely be re-signed? It seems like a better deal for the coaches. But if it is agreed to, it could lead to a few problems.

The first problem is this. If a coach has his team in 8th spot on July 1st of the final year of his contract, how does the club judge his success? If they inform him he won't be sacked, and the team falls apart and finishes 12th, the decision could be considered a mistake, and they are stuck with him for another year. By the same token, if a club decides not to offer a coach a new contract, and that coach leads his team to finals glory (perhaps out of spite), then they will face the wrath of supporters. Will clubs extend coaches contracts by one year, just in case? But then they may have to go through the same awkward process a year later.

If a coach is not re-signed, he will likely begin looking for a new club. Other clubs, who have not re-signed their current coach, may rush to employ a free coach. So a scenario could eventuate where a coach goes into round 16 knowing that he will coach another club the next season. The public will also probably know this. Will he put his heart into coaching out his contract, or will he already be preparing for the final season?

Another supposed advantage for coaches is that they will rarely be fired mid contract. If a club terminates a coaches contract after round 22, for example, they will be two months behind other clubs in the search for a new coach. But what about this scenario? A coach has a three year contract. Halfway through the second year, his team is still performing very poorly. For a club, choosing to sack a coach mid season may be a more attractive choice than waiting out the contract. If they do sack the coach early they can join the race as soon as possible.

It could all become very complicated. July may become coach swapping season. Does the AFL want this month dominated by media speculation about which coaches will go where? Do coaches really want to finish their contracts knowing they are doomed? Deciding who will coach the club is a very important decision. During the season, clubs should be focusing on football. They should not also have to be courting new coaches, or agonising over the future of the current coach. Coach swapping season should begin after round 22.

Within the Walls of Reason??? Not really.

Robert Walls earns his crust writing provocative articles. And I feel for the bloke sometimes. Because he is under pressure to come up with his little bit of talkback controversy every week, and every time he writes an article some of his credibility gets lost. It seems like a strange time to question the future of Mick Malthouse. The Pies are in the Panasonic cup Grand Final and they have a young list with a lot of potential and some valuable finals experience. Last year they won a final in Adelaide with an injury depleted team missing key players. So what can Malthouse do to ensure his future?

Make a grand final, according to Walls. The finals are miles away, so speculating on whether they will make it is pointless. But to say that Malthouse should already be feeling the pressure is baseless. His record is very good. His win-loss record at Collingwood is 50 percent. Walls argues that the Collingwood board may view this percentage as unacceptable. But in the modern AFL every team is expected to ‘bottom out’ every 3-4 years. At some stage in a cycle, playing young players, performing poorly and receiving high draft picks is accepted, if not actively encouraged, by supporters. So a 50 percent ratio is very respectable. Malthouse has bottomed out once at Collingwood, where they finished two seasons in the bottom three, but he has made the finals five times in nine years, including two Grand Finals. In recent years he has also made a brave attempt to introduce a lot of young players whilst still aiming for the finals. In comparison to other experienced coaches in the league, his record is also quite good. Eade has a better ratio, but no grand final, and his team seems still seems a way off. Roos and Worsfold have won flags but the Eagles are rebuilding now and the Swans’ demise is widely predicted. Clarkson has a poorer ratio but a premiership. Malthouse’s most powerful team was only beaten by the almighty Brisbane Lions.

So if his win-loss ratio is not a problem, Malthouse might be worried about Nathan Buckley waiting in the wings. Buckley is much too savvy to even think about coaching Collingwood until Malthouse is well and truly gone. He also has Tony Shaw in the adjoining commentary box to remind him of the perils of the favourite son. Eddie McGuire is much too savvy to think about crossing Malthouse to introduce Buckley. Malthouse will have to have a very ordinary year, or to resign, before Buckley gets that job. Would Collingwood sack him if he won another final with a young team? No. Which makes Walls’ speculation quite meaningless. But a lot of his opinion pieces are. Malthouse is not young, but his team is, and he and Collingwood should be pretty optimistic about 2009 and 2010.



The Demise of Sydney....Based on...?

The trend towards 'rebuilding' and 'bottoming out' has gone much too far in the last decade. As soon as a team starts losing a few games supporters and the media begin talking of bottoming out. Losing games and giving up midway through seasons so a club can get good draft picks is now the norm. Unfortunately, it is assumed that a period of success is inevitably followed by a period of failure. Hawthorn's premiership is the first example of a team hitting rock bottom, getting draft picks, and rebuilding to a flag. But some of the experienced coaches in the AFL may have a problem with the common opinion that success is cyclical. Malthouse is already bucking the trend. He plays very young players in important positions and continues to make the finals. Paul Roos is the same. The age of his team is well documented, and most experts will probably predict that they will miss the eight this year. But the players are only 6 months older than the team that won a final last year. They are experienced, well coached and good. On the other hand, Carlton are widely tipped to be the rising team this year. As Roos pointed out last year, the Blues, despite their masses of draft picks (and Juddy!), have yet to play a decent season since the horrible Pagan years. For all their potential, they are only that. Potential. They have no results to speak of. Sydney have results, and winning experience. The same as North Melbourne, another team that is always on the slide, but often in the finals. Looking to the future is natural, but a good team doesn't disintegrate overnight. Maybe the obsession with football being a young man's game has gone a little bit too far.

Like a Beijing two way-street: hostile

Caroline Wilson has a point. The media is a two-way street. But the two-way traffic between clubs and the media is sometimes pretty combative territory. Clubs can use the media to promote their teams and players. They can get the word out about their pre-season (the best in recent history!) and they can warm our hearts with human interest stories about their community minded youngsters (bloody do gooders). The media needs the clubs for stories and club information that they can feed to the insatiable public. Reciprocity is paramount.

The importance of this street does not stop the media from taking risks that endanger the balance of said street. Sometimes they take dirty side roads and allies and stray from the street. Sometimes they create stories that harm the relationship, and the street becomes a dangerous, hostile street. Some media do voyeuristic, inexcusable and unjustifiable things. See the Herald-Sun. Other media mostly stick to the rules, but they too report on things that are not always true. They take hearsay, sell it as hearsay until it becomes a sort of fact in the muddy consciousness of the information-overloaded public. No wonder clubs become hostile. The clubs are constantly fighting to assert their importance. They put barriers up on the street like we did at our neighbourhood street parties in the nineties. And the media, like those idiot drivers who wanted to drive down the street, piss and moan about the injustice of it all.

Caroline Wilson has been involved for years. Like a player, some media writers lose all perspective stuck in the little Melbourne fish bowl. Wilson’s job as a woman in a man’s world is doubly difficult. She has never been the most popular journo amongst the boys club of the AFL. And to her credit she has never backed down from reporting the facts as she sees or hears them. But perhaps some of the animosity towards her comes from the fact that most of her comments are unrelated to actual on-field games. They are usually focused on the politics and media created controversies of the league. She seldom offers positives on the beauty of the physical game itself. Her focus on Ben Cousins is rarely on his on-field performance (thought they are admittedly rare) but on the media storm around him. A number of media commentators feel they have the right to sit back and comment on the rights and wrongs of the storm that they and their colleagues have created. That job should be left to people like me. The “Today Tonight” tactics of other journalists has led to club hostility towards all media. Can the responsible media legitimately complain? Isn’t it the same as the reputation of all players being stained by the misbehaviour of a small few?

But what about the public’s right to know? What is the public’s right to know? Is it the same as our appetite for such knowledge, which is close to insatiable? Does the media, the dominant channel of information from club to public, have the responsibility of deciding what rights we have to know? Is it the guardian of good and evil, the moral intermediary between club and public? A sobering thought. When a player is relentlessly judged for a minor off-field misdemeanour the media has the nerve to talk about the public’s right to know. They just report the story and let the public react. The public may want to know, but it may not have a right. The clubs do have the right to conceal any information they choose, within reason. They have financial obligations too. The media is publishing the news for purely financial reasons, and justifying the publication of its ‘stories’ as heeding to public rights is simply nonsense. So if one is to concede that the media is just reporting facts according to public demand for such facts, what is the justification for the unreasonable demands placed on the behaviour of players?

When players do suffer from the merciless judgment of the public and media, the question gets asked. Why are players of a sport held to much higher standards than to those of the general public? The most common response is that they are role models for our youth. Simply, they must do only good things so our kids will be good too. The role model topic needs to be researched more. Do kids become successful because they idolized Chris Judd? It’s a long bow to draw. Even if a youngster obsesses over every step that Juddy takes (he could even be a youngster older than Juddy!), will this youngster do everything that Juddy does? Will an easily influenced youngster lose interest in footy after reading about the Ben Cousins’ drug problems? Will the kid give up the game and turn to drugs? It seems unlikely. Perhaps the best reason for the high demands placed on the players is their responsibility to their clubs reputation and their clubs sponsors. This reason is much more believable than the unproven role model theory. Whatever the justification, the media and public scrutiny of a player’s every move is a steam train that won’t slow down. As long as the media continues to speculate over the unproven, minor off-field mistakes of players there is going to be hostility between clubs and reporters. And those reporters who do report on hearsay and rumour cannot complain when clubs refuse interviews.