We must be six weeks into the AFL season, because it’s that time again when everyone starts screaming from the rooftops that the game is dying.
It moves too quick, it moves too slow, it’s too violent, it’s too soft, it costs too much, it goes too long, the fixture’s uneven, the rules need to be changed, the rules need to stop being changed etc, etc, etc.
This year the complaint is that skill levels have dropped, no one can kick properly and scoring’s going backwards.
And it’s all true.
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Because pressure has gone up on the back of Richmond winning an AFL premiership that no one expected them too, simply by hassling the bejesus out of their opposition.
Suddenly everyone is loading up on angsty small forwards who may not ever be invited to a Brownlow night, but know how to get in your face like a shop assistant at the chemist when you’re trying to quietly buy lotion for anal fissures.
If the pressure goes up 15 per cent then disposal time goes down about the same, causing players to bang the ball on the boot without caring where the hell it goes, as long as it gets away from them.
It feels like a final thanks to awesome pressure from both sides. #AFLCrowsCats pic.twitter.com/SCYMMr6FeS
— AFL (@AFL) July 21, 2017
And handballs find it a lot harder to hit a target when there’s half a dozen midgets between you and the guy you want to get the ball to.
But don’t fret, snowflakes.
Like every other change in style that’s swept through the modern AFL game, other teams try to copy it, realise they can’t and then work out how to combat it.
Whether it’s Pagan’s paddock, handball club, rolling zones, Clarko’s cluster or the famed Sydney tactic of simply having a whole lot more money than everybody else to spend on star players, they get studied, opened up and torn apart.
Or, should the 17 teams that aren’t Richmond get better at the Tigers’ style of play then we can expect footballers that are exciting to watch, because the fact is, Richmond, the ones who supposedly caused this backwards step in the game, are the most entertaining team.
Sure they’ve got Butler, Castagna, Cotchin and pretty much everyone else chasing and hassling opponents till their hair turns grey, but they’ve also got Riewoldt taking high grabs, Dusty taking the ‘don’t argue’ to another level and Jack Higgins getting more fun out of ‘kicking snags’ than a 10-year-old flicking rubber bands at the cat. Even punching a ball into the crowd looks good the way Alex Rance does it.
This ‘low-scoring, congested football’ doesn’t have to be boring. It’s not something devised by Paul Roos, it just has to be done right, which will happen soon enough.
The downside is that while we wait, we need to put up with the whingers and naysayers with their doomsday predictions that the end is nigh for the AFL’s Golden Age.
Again.
Scores have dropped by average of 6 points over 10 years. 1 goal per game. Is it really that bad #afl360
— michael meehan (@richoman1967) May 2, 2018
#AFL360 I would much rather watch current day footy than footy from the 70's and 80's. Today's footy player is so much more skilled, generally athletic, and tough.
— Luke Goss (@gossy82) May 2, 2018
#AFL360 Tinkering with the game is what brought us to this point, might be time to just leave it alone for a while...
— Booda (@booda_zax) May 2, 2018
