Focus on (actual) football.

Focus on (actual) football.

GuyWhoLikesSport

I have a novel concept.

One that you might not have considered if you consume football media between Sunday nights after Bounce starts and Friday nights before 7:30pm.

I thought maybe I’d talk about football.

You know, the game played on the grass, four sticks at either end of an oval that typically involves some freak athletes chasing around a ball.

I thought I’d write about that instead of discussing the pseudo-legal process at the AFL tribunal, tackling techniques, or the laws of physics and inertia.

But before I do talk about football during one of the closest seasons in living memory, I wanted to pre-empt the inevitable tribunal discussion of this week with three separate stories.

I will do the thing that I hate but I promise to spend no more than 450 words on the tribunal process.

Word count starts now.

Last week Toby Bedford and Charlie Cameron were suspended for three weeks and then were deemed free to play at the AFL appeals board.

The tackles themselves were intrinsically football tackles and obviously wouldn’t have warranted any ban at all if not for the backdrop of the various class actions and the concussion issue.

The suspensions were under the pretence of player safety.

This is not news.

This week, however, we had two other tackles that were virtually identical to the Bedford tackle that left Tim Taranto concussed.

Ben Keays tackled Jye Caldwell in virtually the exact same way as Bedford did Taranto and Toby Bedford tackled Noah Anderson in the same way as he tackled Taranto.

Let me be clear: neither of these are bad tackles.

The player getting tackled was moving forward, the tackler tried to impede his progress by tackling, the rules of physics took over, and the player hit his head on the deck.

Neither player was concussed.

At the time of writing Keays has already been cleared and there is no news that I can find yet on Toby Bedford this week.

None of that is the point.

The tackles this week were exactly the same as the ones last week, but for some chicanery about having an arm free (not that it stopped Caldwell slamming his head into the turf).

The third, and critical, incident that I really want to talk about is what happened with Harry McKay.

McKay looked dazed in a marking contest late in the third quarter after a clash of heads. Doctors went out to check on him and McKay shooed them away, insisting that he was fine.

He was eventually checked by the club well after the incident occurred.

If the AFL is going to be about player safety, and they should, then be about it.

Instead of punishing players for footy acts and then moving goal posts every week, have independent doctors who will pull players from the ground when they clearly need to be looked at.

Have that person pull players out without the player or club having any say, have them conduct the tests, have them decide if the player can keep playing.

Asking a player if he wants to keep playing is like asking a person if he wants to keep breathing.

Take the decision out of his hands.

Stop looking to punish and start looking to protect.

If you want to be about player safety, be about it.

413 words.

Now to some actual football.

This week we had two of the games of the year, and I want to talk about each of them briefly.

The one I want to start with is the possible Grand Final preview between Brisbane and Sydney.

Oscar De La Hoya famously claimed he had the “blueprint” for beating Floyd Mayweather, before he ultimately lost comprehensively to Floyd Mayweather.

Unlike that blueprint, there is one to beat Sydney.

It’s hard to pull off, but Sydney is 2-3 in their past five so it’s possible.

In each of their losses for the season teams have scored over 50 points off Sydney turnovers and have scored around half of their points from the back half.

They have also, critically, taken over 100 marks.

Sydney’s four losses on the season have been the four games that they have given up the most marks of the year, and the only four games that they’ve given up over 100 marks.

The blueprint is ball control.

Brisbane is the best placed team to execute it.

To beat Sydney you have to force turnover then being methodical with your ball movement.

Force Sydney’s hyper-aggressive defence to overcommit one way or another and punish them from there.

The Swans want speed and turnover above all else. Ball control is the way to make them play left-handed.

The other game that I want to talk about is Adelaide versus Essendon, one of the most electric back and forth games for the season.

There are two angles for this game, one, obviously, is the Essendon of it all.

Early in the year I called them the “good bad team” and haven’t wavered from that, until this week.

The loss to Adelaide was so deplorable that they might just be bad and are, astonishingly, a real chance to miss the finals.

They are definitely not better than the teams sitting 9-11.

The way they played on Friday night was also bizarre, and I am normally a Brad Scott fan.

Their defence was so high it was like they thought there was an offside rule, they got beaten like a drum over the back and never adjusted.

But the story, really, is Adelaide.

For some reason Adelaide pursued the bold strategy of not being good at the thing they were good at last year: scoring.

Last year they were the highest scoring team in footy, this year they’re twelfth.

To my eye, this is mainly because they stopped trying to move the ball quickly and, effectively, tried to fit a square peg game style into round hole personnel.

It has not paid off.

But next season they should get back to their high-scoring ways even if their game style doesn’t change in the same way that Carlton is a high-scoring team – forward line talent.

The system the Blues’ play isn’t terribly impressive and their forward 50 entries are predictable, they just happen to have great players in Charlie Curnow and Harry McKay.

Adeladie could do the same with Darcy Fogarty and Riley Thilthorpe.

If Thilthorpe doesn’t have Charlie Dixon syndrome of physically looking like he should be good at football even when he is not that good, then this forward line should soon be elite on the strength of those two alone.

Fogarty especially should be a star one day with the way he’s able to move up the ground and ping passes around the field, as well as being a beautiful kick for goal. He reminds me of another talented, pure-kicking Adelaide forward.

The comparison goes right down to his kicking action, which really does have echoes of Tex Walker in the way that he guides the ball down onto his boot.

Back Adelaide to take a jump next year.

I hope that this week, unlike last week, the actual footy media rather than lawyers who write about footy on the side talks about footy for once this season.

There is a lot to chew on that goes beyond non-lawyers trying to interpret legal jargon at the AFL tribunal.

 

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