WHAT a mess that was.

A week of hysteria was replaced with a weekend of utter confusion and on Tuesday the AFL Commission will continue to take steps to make it even murkier.

The future of football is on the agenda and a host of VIP football folk have been invited to offer ideas, starting with the coaches.

GET THE LATEST NEWS, RE-LIVE ROBBO’S CHAT BELOW

AFL football chief Mark Evans will give a report on the state of the national game to the commission. Decisions won’t be made until maybe the Commission meeting in August and probably the September meeting, and we all await the outcome.

But what hope is there when two giants of the game — Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson and AFL Legend Leigh Matthews — have different philosophies, for example, on how much sway the ball player has over the tackler, and vice versa.

And that’s just one facet of the game.

We have coaches such as Ken Hinkley who wants the game left alone, we have Alan Richardson putting up zones for discussion, Rodney Eade doesn’t believe the game can evolve from the defensive stranglehold without intervention and Clarkson simply wants rules to be better adjudicated to create better flow and rules overall to be left alone.

There continues to be mass confusion about ruck free kicks, mainly because no one can adequately explain the differences between blocking, holding your ground and shepherding. And let’s not start with the third man-up.

And what about the sudden introduction of “dangerous tackles” in response to the sling tackle, which the AFL got right, got wrong and then apologised for getting wrong because it was right in the first place.

Prior opportunity is a dog’s breakfast and suddenly the ball being knocked out in a tackle is a rule which has disappeared. There were countless number of examples at the weekend.

Also, no one can agree on an interchange cap, there’s a suggestion to reduce the teams to 16 players on the field and now there’s discussion, via Chris Scott, about reducing the time of a game to 80 minutes.

Overall, we have teams such as Hawthorn, West Coast, Port Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs attempting and most of them succeeding in playing slick and breathtaking football and we have teams such as Melbourne, Fremantle and this year Richmond playing defensively-minded football.

We have teams who play six-six-six, teams who start with a seventh player in defence and teams who push an extra player to the stoppage, leaving the forward group constantly outnumbered.

And then we had the situation with umpires at the weekend.

And now the AFL Commission is warming to radical change.

TV and radio commentators further confuse the problem because often they _ when they’re not talking about each other to each other _ can’t or don’t understand the rules, either.

If they were confused with the decisions at the weekend and they are the “experts”, what hope does Mr and Mrs Coburg have of understanding what was going on.

The only thing that has stayed the same for 70-year-olds is that it’s still six points for a goal and one point for a behind unless, of course, a boundary umpire overrules a goal umpire who talks to the central umpire who goes to the video umpire who watches six angles on replay and then tells us it was a behind when everyone else believed it was a goal.

After the weekend, the AFL has lost people’s trust.

It wants a think-tank on the future of football, but proceeded to impose itself on a weekend of games without telling anyone they were doing it and why they were doing it.

It’s absurd to suggest the umpires met and decided among themselves that they would pay a free kick for every incidental high contact, or in the back, or a scrag, block, or hold.

And if they did, then umpires boss Wayne Campbell should hold a press conference today and tell us all why he single-handedly diverted the course of umpiring.

No, it had to come from the top and what we saw was a deliberate policy shift to avoid rolling mauls and mass stoppages.

Thanks for telling us, AFL.

How can there be a policy change to interpretations without alerting the two most important groups — the players and the fans.

The Channel Seven Saturday night crew can sometimes act like they are Hey, Hey It’s Saturday reincarnated, but they talked sense during the telecast of the Essendon v Port Adelaide game.

Leave the game alone, they chorused in support of Clarkson. You had to agree.

For the first 10 or so rounds this year, the game was flush with exciting games, exciting styles and sensational individual performances.

The past six rounds have been spasmodic, but ain’t that the case every year?

But even wanting the game to be left alone can leave you accused of being a dinosaur.

You can’t win. If you want change you are deemed to be too progressive and if you want the good old days you are accused of living in the past.

It doesn’t help when high-profile newspaper and radio man, Patrick Smith, harps on daily about the horrendous state of the indigenous game. He won’t be happy until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride along and kill the game altogether.

Agree, we could have more full-forwards kicking goals and more players taking hangers, but the game has changed every decade since John Coleman played under-12s at Hastings.

Coaches hold the whip hand.

They decide how the game is played and, as matter of course, it’s up to the club’s office holders to then decide if they want their coach playing the style he chooses.

If you want a mainly defensive coach, knock yourself out. If you want an offensive coach, go and get one.

The sport itself will dictate who and what succeeds

Since the turn of the century, we’ve had the Essendon blitz, Brisbane’s better blitz, the Swans and Eagles strangling each other, then Bomber’s Geelong saved footy, Clarkson zoned and clustered, Rossy Lyon went defensive, Mick Malthouse went the press, the Cats returned, the Hawks responded, the Swans came back, and the Hawks have won the last two.

Think about it. The styles of football, the players and the coaches all have huge influences at a particular point in time, but all of them come and go and the game remains.

This AFL think-tank should last just 10 minutes and one motion be moved: Reduce the interchange cap to 50 or 60 and we’ll reconvene in 2018.

In the meantime, AFL, just tell us if there’s a policy change in umpiring interpretations.

That’s all we ask.