http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/o ... 6893911877
A sport taken for granted — even abused — by its administrators will not grow, never mind blossom.
Club membership has climbed this year. However, they are not people drawn freshly to the game, rather supporters making a financial commitment to their clubs. It is merely a monetary conversion.
What should worry the AFL is that attendance this season is down more than 5 per cent. That is an accurate guide to calibrate how many newcomers are being wooed by any appeal the game might have left.
A study of recent attendance figures must discomfort the AFL. In 2011, when Gold Coast joined the competition, there were 187 home and away games watched by 6,525,071 people. Last year, with the addition of another team, GWS, 6,368,346 people attended 198 games.
In 2008, the average crowds were at their peak at 36,992. In 2012 it was 31,503 and the following year not much better at 32,163. This season crowds are tracking below that.
The messy, almost slapstick adjudication of the Essendon drug scandal has left a potent stench. The variable-prices protocols introduced this season are adding excessively to the cost for punters to watch their football teams. The ticket system is expensive, clumsy and opaque.
No amount of spinning will convince supporters who have forked out decent money for membership that they should be hit again for matches the AFL deems ripe for the picking (of punters’ pockets).
It was made worse with the unthinking, callous — panic in there somewhere as well, we suspect — decision to remove the extra cost midmorning prior to the Geelong-Hawthorn match. Some supporters paid the extra loading, others didn’t. Fury followed.
Very few people are happy with the look of the game. Weak administration and sycophantic thinking from the umpire department have further reduced the game to two hours of mucking. Rolling around on the ground with the ball somewhere in the middle of massive conglomerates of highly paid footballers.
The AFL football department convinced a gullible league commission to ignore laws of the game committee recommendations for an interchange cap of 80 and introduced a soft cap of 120. The club coaches chuckled at their power, for they had surely been in the ear of Mark Evans, AFL football operations manager, and his men.
The umpiring department incredibly thought it a good idea to pay fewer free kicks and thus the blobs of players on the field got bigger and the game even more tedious and uninteresting.
Coaches Paul Roos and Ross Lyon are bewildered and unsure how the rules now apply.
A unique game was being transformed even more into a mix ’n’ match of every other football code. As a result, the crowds are collapsing and everybody has a cure for the game’s ills. Kevin Sheedy, Leigh Matthews, Kevin Bartlett all have different remedies. Garry Wilson, that brave and brilliant Fitzroy and Victorian rover, thinks the distance for a legal kick must be stretched from 15m to 20. The game’s greats fear for football’s future.
Commentators have cottoned on that a unique game is being trashed by the very people placed in charge to nurture and promote it. AFL football is now home to the mediocre and mundane.
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Demetriou no longer has the support of the public or the time and incentive to swing the game away from this spiral into the unexceptional.
The search for Demetriou’s replacement is under way and the spread is said to be worldwide. It is appropriate that McLachlan simply not be handed the job but the waters tested for other big fish. But a quick trawl should have shown up any likely challenger. Given the position has not been filled, no one outside the AFL appears to have been hooked.
