What made former sports journalist Andrew Ramsey give up watching AFL entirely?

[Hotdog60]

LIKE most who went to the recent AFL qualifying final between Adelaide and Sydney, I arrived at AAMI Stadium carrying high hopes.

Not through any slavish allegiance to either side.

Instead, I imagined a sunny Saturday footy match between the Australia's second and third-best teams might rekindle my flickering interest in AFL.

An appetite that had waned so badly, I had watched just three matches during the previous five years.

It was not even half-time when I swore never to add to that tally. After 45 minutes of elite level football on a flawless spring afternoon, Sydney led Adelaide by five goals to one. A scoreline not unthinkable in soccer's A-League.

Around me, children rustled through bags and pockets in search of smart phones or game consoles to combat the tedium.

Packing neither, I filled the entertainment vacuum by analysing what had become of a sport that once claimed (if only to itself) to be the world's most spectacular.



As a Melbourne-based sports journalist for a decade, I attended upwards of 50 AFL matches a year. A vast majority were erased from my memory within a day, but fragments of some remain.

Like round 21 in 2000, when Western Bulldogs coach Terry Wallace unveiled his "super flood" to inflict Essendon's only loss of that season.

It was the night the AFL jumped the shark.

By cramming most of his players into Essendon's forward line, Wallace flagged the moment at which the game was snatched from its fan base to be held hostage by a crazed group of strategy-drunk zealots (aka coaching staff).

Like the sport itself, match day planning used to be fairly basic. Select your best available players, drill them to win the ball and kick it to pre-determined targets, and back your guys to do it better and more often than your opponents. Today's strategy is hewn from an opposite, negative premise. Strangle the life out of the other mob, and then somehow winkle a handful of goals yourself.

Advocates of this philosophy claim that lower scores create tighter finishes.

But a narrow margin does not necessarily equate to interest. Witness any America's Cup race. Besides, if watching a team ceaselessly frustrate and harass its opponent without creating something meaningful itself qualified as a spectator sport, parliamentary question time would routinely sell out.

Even the modern game's vernacular has been hijacked by fanatics. Traditional Australian football terms like "screamer", "quagmire" and "lairising" have gone the way of the pack mark.

Instead, barbecue chat is littered with the gibberish peddled by those who shuffle names on magnetic boards for a living - "contested footy" (getting the ball), "transition" (kicking it) and "stoppage work" (no idea - possibly a collective bargaining term).

Apart from occasionally musing if Adelaide might sneak more than one goal per quarter, I passed the rest of that afternoon pondering whether Australian football could ever recapture its high watermark of the early 1990s.

The days before Tony Liberatore turned the role of tagger into Australian Rules' second-most famous blight. Seasons like 1993, when Tony Modra, Gary Ablett and Jason Dunstall kicked more goals between them than Collingwood has managed this year.

While the era of the century goalkicker has sadly passed, around 40 players laid 100 tackles or more in 2012.

Back in 1993, only one reached that milestone - Liberatore. Consequently, as its players kick less goals and get tackled infinitely more, the indigenous game is surrendering its point of difference to the rugby codes that it spends billions trying to supplant.

That might help explain why the AFL's home and away attendances this year fell almost 10 per cent to the lowest season aggregate since 2006 - despite tacking an extra 22 matches on to its fixture.

What doesn't add up is why - if AFL is the people's game as its marketers keep telling us - the people don't rise up and demand it be returned to them.

And in a form they fondly remember, when its innate flair could regularly lift fans out of their seats.

Why don't short-changed crowds insist games be freed up by restricting on-field numbers to 15 per team?

Or call for the abandonment of the nonsensical interchange system that allows "gut running" midfielders to take a breather more regularly than public servants duck out for a smoke.

The answer, obviously, is that sport isn't like other forms of commercial entertainment. It doesn't rely on positive customer reviews to stay in business because the product is immaterial. People buy it for the packaging. Doesn't matter if the whole event looks as ugly as a carbuncle, provided the shirt you barrack for ends up in front.

Boutique consumers who enjoy the game for its aesthetics rather than its tribalism are therefore inconsequential to its bottom line. We'll never buy a season ticket or a club membership, so we can just make do with our old VHS highlights tapes and memories of matches gone by.

As a result, my estrangement from the AFL is now absolute.

And, in one of sport's few glorious certainties, I know that neither affected party will lose a wink of sleep because of it.
LINK

[bornadog]

AFL has ruined this once great game by constantly changing it and diluting it by adding extra teams.