A Third Way

Much has been made of last week's drawn AFL grand final. On On the Couch on Monday (it's an awkwardly named program, I agree; the "on-on" double-up doesn't exactly roll off the tongue) Andrew Demetriou attempted to justify the grand final re-play in the face of some rather stern resistance from both Gerard Heally and Mike Sheahan. James Hird said he liked the re-play but then he said that he wouldn't put his hand up to coach Essendon next year. Among Demetriou's admittedly flimsy arguments was that Australian rules football is a unique game. Excluding fledgling Aussie rules competitions in Canada, Western Samoa and New South Wales, that Aussie rules is unique is beyond argument, the flimsy part was the reasons Demetriou provided as to it's uniqueness; "a game played with an oval ball on an oval field"; well, rugby's union and league are played with an oval ball and I would question whether the MCG is oval or round but the most annoying part was the implication that a drawn game, final or otherwise, being replayed is unique to the AFL.

All Australian sports, whether indigenous to this country or not, have their genesis in Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Irish roots and Aussie rules and the AFL is no different. Traditionally in European football, which I'll begrudgingly call soccer from here on in, in any given season two principal competitions run in parallel; a league and a cup. A league for the uninitiated is a competition where each team plays each other team an equal number of times both at home and away, points are awarded for wins and draws and the team with the most points at the end of the season is deemed the winner. A cup, on the other hand, is a knock-out competition where if you win, you progress and if you lose, you don't. (I think Dennis Cometti said it best before the Cats v Magpies preliminary final when he said, "the preliminary final; the winners play next week, the losers play golf") Traditionally however, if a cup game was drawn, it was re-played at the other team's ground the following week/fortnight. If it was drawn there, it went back to the original ground and so on and so forth until a team could be bothered winning. I say "traditionally" but it still exists today. It's for that reason that you hear of English teams playing as many as four games a week due to fixture congestion.

Viewed through a traditional sporting framework, the AFL is a kind-of league, in that the teams don't play each other an equal amount, followed an abridged kind-of cup, abridged in that only half the teams play and kind-of in that you can lose and are not knocked out. In that respect it's not unique either but it can be yet.

At the denouement of last week's game the major talking point was whether or not a drawn grand final should be determined on the day by way of extra time or re-played the following week as is presently the case. Posed as such, however, the question is unnecessarily restricting and rigidly binary. There is a third way. In the event of a drawn grand final the CEO of the AFL should take to the dais, thank the crowd, the umpires and the ground staff and announce that no team has won the premiership because no team had what it takes to get up on the day; no team wanted it enough. If he wanted to rub it in he could outline that after 176 home-and-away games, eight preliminary (as in the definition of the word rather than the proscribed "preliminary") finals and 120-odd minutes within which, initially, any team, and on the day, either team, had at its disposal to stand taller than everyone else, none had managed to do so. He should then apologise to the crowd and tell them that he looks forward to seeing them at the MCG on the Thursday before Easter for the tradition round-one blockbuster between Carlton and Richmond aka the Ben Cousins testimonial. If that fat dickhead Demetriou wants a peg to hang the uniqueness of the game on, that'll do it.