- Sep 17, 2010
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I reckon you're spot-on with this.,
The game including coaching has become a full-time professional sport.
They come up with new strategies or variation's, there's no need to be reactionary and change the rules at all.
Players are in many ways bigger and better than ever and the football quite frankly in most area's is miles better than when I was young.
People are having a winge about nothing IMO.
These perceived problems will resolve themselves, that last thing we need is more rules and hence more power in the hands of umpires.
The one area they haven't improved is set shots on goal, some of the inaccuracy may be down to the amount of ground they cover.
Because of the nature of our sport played by such few people, it was an incredibly naive game tactically for such a long time. It was also a pretty ordinary spectacle looking back on it in the old days. Leigh Matthews made a comment on how he's embarrassed to look at old vision and cringes, he's spot on with that, watch a game from the 60's , it is dreadful and looks nothing like the game it evolved into in the 80s and beyond.
What has happened since the 2000s is the coaches got better and weren't just man managers who would give a bake when needed and moved a few magnets around. Many of them have looked to other sports where tactics are very developed and copied them. You can't stop that, especially in the global world we live in now.
The problem with coaching in Australia is that there aren't enough good ones and it is a "follow-the-leader" industry. Because the majority of coaches aren't talented enough (yet) to create gameplans of their own to suit them and be successful, they just rip off the previous winner. This becomes a real problem if, as we are seeing now, the previous winners play a pressure heavy and unattractive style.... then everyone starts doing it and we get the problems we are seeing this year spectacle wise.
The thing everyone needs to know is the world isn't ending if we have a year or two of relatively unnatractive football... it will pass, it always does. Remember after the Swans Eagles dour era came the amazing Geelong attacking wave, then followed by the Lyon cage dour style then followed by the attacking Clarko possession based footy now followed by the manic pressure Bulldogs and Tigers.... it's pretty easy to see the pattern and realise it will change again before too long.
The good news is that, we are actually organically heading into a direction where fans are demanding more from coaches as we are understanding that they are the main issue here. It is a sign of our sport maturing and in time both fans and the media will question coaches more about negative ugly gameplans. But this is a process that takes time.... it has happened in other sports because they have more coaches/media/everything around them to allow it to happen.
The other bit of good news is organically we will see in the coming years smart coaches realising we can't all "follow-the-leader" and start looking at how certain tactics can counteract certain other tactics more. I see a great future where teams switch tactics from press, to zone, to man-to-man, to different offensive set-ups more often in game and in season and we won't have one game plan dominating too much for too long. The only true visionary we have in the sport at the moment is Clarko, he's a purist that will play his way all the time regardless... we need more of his type but the pool of coaches is shallow so it will take time.
The bad news is though that we have the rulers of our sport that like tinkering with the rules to try and fix things. This is very, very dangerous and leads to the great analogy VDS66 had about a house with too many extensions. Changing a rule, any rule, should be seen as a very serious and dangerous thing to do for a sport. It should never be done lightly and we shouldn't have those in charge being too trigger-happy with this and too reactive to complaints.
I still watch 5-6 games a week and still love it, I love how the sport is evolving year-on-year and see it only getting better with better coaching so maybe I'm not the best person to ask on this but I would be very, very careful with making big changes to fundamental rule changes. I also feel the media hysteria about the game is overblown and becoming a bit of an echo chamber. The AFL need to hold firm now but I doubt they will and who knows what will happen to the game when they keep making changes on the run.