betrayal

I still see the occasional bumper sticker proclaiming, “I’d rather be sailing.” For years I tell people I’d rather be playing footy. But not any more. Footy has changed; so have I.

As a 32 year-old I eschew a young woman’s ardent plea for me to fuck her one Saturday afternoon. I’d rather be in the shed listening on the steam radio to an AFL semi-final that doesn’t involve my team. I relent out of courtesy, even though I don’t fancy her at all. Next to sex, footy has always been number one.

I don’t want to be an it-was-better-when sort of bloke. I watch today’s AFL football in awe of the players skills, the ability to shoot a handpass from deep within a pack, the smothering, the non-stop running. The irony is that the game is a bore these days. At the elite level the game is over-coached, its libertarian genius sacrificed to the god of win-at-all-costs. Its wondrous aesthetic is gone.

Occasionally circumstances throw up a game that defies the modern way, the ball flowing from end to end, the lock-down mauling packs somehow unable or unwilling to form. The tightness of the scores is the only thing that redeems some games.

Worse still is the adoption of the tactics of other codes, giving the lie to the notion that our Australian game is made in heaven. Players dink the ball around endlessly waiting for openings, for the one hundred per cent certainty that the kick will hit its target. If this means kicking the pill backwards 50 or 80 metres, it matters not.

This is Association football, or soccer, as Australians insist on calling it. Australian Rules should never be played like soccer. Even worse are the mauling packs, the gang-tackling scramble, pure rugby.

We have sold out our once-unique national game. It is now a hybrid bastard, its integrity lost. The blood-sport that is the business of the game—the sacking of coaches, the trade in players, the socialism of the draft—is far more engaging theatre.

Were it not for the blood-borne virus called Carlton in my system I would abandon football.

The other day the chief of the AFL Commission admits that he’s none too keen on the way the game is played these days. He cops a lambasting for his lack of faith. No, he speaks the truth and well he might. The game has betrayed itself I’m afraid.

Rock on.