Australian football starting to resemble rugby league: Matthews
Leigh Matthews presents the AFL Players’s MVP Award to Patrick Dangerfield last year. Picture: Ellen SmithIt’s a bitter pill when your most hallowed player likens your game to an opposing code.
Yes, horror of horrors, Leigh Matthews says Australian football is starting to resemble rugby league.
Worse than that, the Player of the 20th Century has taken to watching the NRL on TV. Although Matthews is struggling to discern the difference between his indigenous game and league.
Australian football’s chronic congestion problem — and the turnovers and clangers created by the heavy traffic — might soon warrant AFL intervention.
Because not only is Matthews a powerful voice in the game, he’s also on the Laws of the Game Committee. And the way he’s talking, the AFL will act if the sport doesn’t find its own way out of the congestion maze.
Yes, there have been some terrific close games this season, Matthews says. And the evenness of the competition has created a “growing middle class” of clubs.
“(But) I’m not sure whether we’re seeing a fantastic spectacle,” he says.
Matthews had a lightbulb moment while switching between the Swans-Demons and Storm-Broncos matches on TV last week.
“It just hit me — how similar the two looks were,” he told Adelaide’s FiveAA this week. “(In league) you pass the ball sideways and after two or three passes that bloke gets tackled and you start again.
“(In Australian rules) it’s one handball, two handballs, three handballs, fourth bloke gets tackled … It just hit me how similar the look that AFL has to rugby now, just the congestion around the footy.”
Setting aside Matthews confusing the name of the game and the league — if anyone can be forgiven for this travesty, it’s Matthews — it is clear Australian football has a serious problem.
And the worst offenders are the Swans, he says.
“They might be the form team of the competition, the Swans, but they do play a ‘smother you’ brand of footy,” Matthews says. “And if it wasn’t for (Lance) Franklin giving you a few highlights up their forward end, I’m not sure whether I’m keen on it, watching the Swans play, to be honest.”
As The Weekend Australian examined in detail last week, football appears to be stuck in an evolutionary cul de sac.
Where in the past the game mutated its way out of impasses (remember the chip, chip, chip style of the mid noughties, an environment in which Nathan Bassett once took 22 marks — one contested — in a game?), it appears to be choking under the weight of the phalanxes of players around the ball.
That feeds into a rising toll of turnovers, clangers and ‘intercept’ marks as sides try to find their way through the defensive zones.
Still they strive for the perfect play. But playing perfect football is next to impossible in the heavy traffic. Too often they instead serve up the opposite — horrible, grating turnovers — because they’re trying to play perfect football.
Confounded by the defence in depth, clubs are trying to ape the handball deployed to such telling effect by the Bulldogs and Swans last year. So handballs are up. The Crows, Cats and Giants are all handballing much more than they were last year.
But all too often it’s handball as a last resort; handball to flat-footed players with their backs to the goal, players who are sitting ducks for the gaggles of opponents flocking to the ball.
Forebodingly, Matthews says we might be stuck with the clutter. After all, the rolling mauls have dominated the game for at least five years now.
We might never again see a free-flowing, open style of football.
“It’s a modern-generation phenomenon that I just can’t see evolving by itself back to a bit of space.”
Think about that for a moment. The Player of the 20th Century says the game is incapable of fixing itself. And if it can’t fix itself, outside intervention might be required.
Which brings us to the vexed topic of netball-like zones. Mandating, for example, that two players must remain inside the 50m arc. There is a precedent here. The centre diamond was introduced in 1973 to create space at centre bounces. Two years later it became the centre square.
Now Matthews, who is on the rules committee, remember, says any change won’t be made this season and probably not even next year. But if the congestion remains, then the authorities are likely to act.
“That’s the only intervention that’s going to alter the current look,” Matthews said of the zones concept. “If the evolution of the game isn’t spreading it out at all, then the only way to spread it out is what we did at the centre bounces.”
He agrees with the principle of zones but says whether they will work in practice is another matter entirely.
Australian football starting to resemble rugby league: Matthews