For the best part of a decade now the likelihood of watching and thoroughly understanding a game of AFL football has altered as drastically as at any point in the game’s history. For fans and pundits this means the acknowledgment of two football realms that exist in parallel to each other, never quite meeting.

The first is the one we occupy as observers, looking on from the stands and our sofas as we always have, appreciating skilful players, pack marks, blinding goals and momentum swings, the fundamental elements in which we’ve always emotionally invested ourselves. The other is how footy actually works in 2015 – painstakingly devised and heavily layered tactics, decipherable only to those creating and executing them, the players and coaches.

This isn’t so much interplay as coexistence; two key stakeholders of the game awkwardly bumping against each other, harbouring unspoken but very real resentments. Remember when you could genuinely understand what was happening in a game of football by merely looking at the field? Now it’s all blurry – clusters, zones, rotations, presses and stoppages all squiggled onto a white board inside your head, all in colour-coded acronyms.

ABC journalist James Coventry has pondered the disconnect between these two worlds at length. After reading Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson’s exhaustive and revelatory examination of football’s tactical evolution, he wondered why no such book existed in the Australian Rules section and so set about redressing the balance by writing one himself.



The result is a new and unique history titled Time and Space: the tactics that shaped Australian Rules football and the players and coaches who mastered them. Coventry’s book was three years in the making and charts the game’s technical and tactical evolution since colonial times to now, giving us some pointers as to how the Australian Rules aesthetic grew so unique but also partly explaining how the knowledge gap between those involved and those in the stands has widened so drastically in recent years.

What’s actually reassuring about Coventry’s findings, if you’re the type who frets about the way that modern football looks, is the constant theme of change and evolution throughout the game’s history and how nothing ever stands still for very long. Still, understanding it all as it’s actually happening remains a hurdle for inquisitive fans.

Coventry says that the traditional lack of technical analysis of the game in the media and among fans is a by-product of the fact that it simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to require such breakdowns until the late 1990s and beyond. “The really technical [coaching] systems came with full-time [employment] footy,” he tells Guardian Australia.

According to Coventry the best way for fans to appreciate the evolution of the game in real time now is through the handful of dedicated football writers – Andrew Capel and Rohan Connolly are two he mentions – and TV analysis by the likes of Fox Footy’s Gerard Healy, whose fascinating examination of West Coast’s “Weagles Web” was a notable recent example. “Gerard’s been the leading figure in that regard for at least the last two decades,” he says. “When you see all the tactical trends of the last few decades, he’s the one who coined the names for them – Pagan’s Paddock, Clarko’s Cluster.”

Alastair Clarkson, the brains behind the Hawks’ zone-based defensive mechanism. Photograph: Morne de Klerk/Getty Images

The knowledge gap is not an issue of media or fan indifference either. Put simply, most of those who want to crunch numbers and dig into the data don’t have access to expensive advanced stats packages offered by providers like Champion Data, nor the behind-goal vision used by club football departments to track ball and player movement. On playing surfaces as big as AFL grounds and with 36 players running around at any given point it’s certainly no cinch for the casual observer to figure out what’s going on.

“The advanced stats is a big barrier,” says Coventry, who was able to access Champion Data’s premium database in researching the book and was amazed by its contents. That this information isn’t available to the average fan makes perfect sense of course; no company investing so heavily in logging and presenting such highly specialised and valuable data would want to give it away for free. But while those numbers remain a mystery to most fans the game is less understood by the average observer than it might be and the geeky, US-style sports analytics and sabermetrics subcultures remain a way off for AFL fans.

Another roadblock is coaches, who are naturally not inclined to divulge proprietary tactical information they’ve worked hard at gathering. Among the many reasons to mourn the passing of Phil Walsh was the late Adelaide coach’s insistence that he and colleagues actually had a responsibility to work with the media in helping the average fan understand what they were seeing on field every week. For now, the fans remain locked out. “You get the sense from coaches that some of them are happy with that,” notes Coventry. “It’s probably an issue the AFL needs to look at.”

The disconnect between the perception and reality of what goes on in any given AFL game goes back a number of decades in fact. One instructive example used in Time and Space is that of former Fremantle Dockers coach Gerard Neesham. Derided by the media and fans of the mid-90s as the “chip and charge” guy, Neesham was in fact a tactical pioneer and in an alternative universe might be a revered figure in the game’s development.

A lateral thinker, Neesham brought many tactical and training methods to the sport from his career as a representative water polo player, liberating his players from hackneyed ‘circle work’ training routines and focusing on game-based preparation. In Neesham’s sides clean disposal and maintaining possession were the primary focus, along with the protection of the ball carrier through blocking. It sounds so basic in hindsight but was far from accepted wisdom in the late 80s when he began his WAFL coaching career at Claremont.

Neesham’s second major innovation was to implement a ‘press’ system similar to that seen in football and basketball but entirely foreign to Australian Rules at the time. In it players never overcommitted to tackling the ball carrier, hovering away slightly but always providing stifling pressure, forcing panic and disposal errors. Fifteen years later the very same technique was employed with great success and to universal acclaim by Ross Lyon and Mick Malthouse.

Mick Malthouse, when in charge of Collingwood. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

Unique too was the fact that during his Claremont days, the Neesham ‘system’ was implemented at the club’s reserves and colts levels as well, creating a squad environment in which any player could step up a grade and fit in with team needs. After four years without a finals appearance at the Dockers he was gone from league football and is now not spoken of as frequently nor as reverentially as he might.

Equally fascinating is the marginalisation of another former Dockers coach, Chris Connolly, a true groundbreaker in the area of interchange rotations and arguably the key architect of the game’s current congestion-heavy style. Unlike Neesham, Connolly had been forced by circumstance to develop his style, assessing the Dockers’ threadbare playing resources and thinking laterally to extract maximum intensity from his players.

On account of the rotation system Connolly and the plan’s co-author – fitness coach Adam Larcom – were pilloried in the press, by fans and initially even their own colleagues and players, but within two years they’d taken the club from a wooden spoon to its first finals appearance. Those methods were also soon adapted with premiership-winning success by Paul Roos’ Sydney side of 2005 and Malthouse’s 2010 Collingwood team.

Barely a decade earlier the bench had been a boundary-side purgatory for banished, injured or unrequired players but thanks to Connolly and Larcom it became a key component of a coach’s tactical arsenal. Technically and aesthetically, the game was never the same again. “They’ve probably had more impact on the game since 2000 than anyone else,” Coventry says of the pair. “Without their innovation there, a lot of other things wouldn’t have flowed on from that.”

Elsewhere Time and Space is brim-full of fascinating and long-forgotten nuggets, like the fact that ‘Pagan’s Paddock’ (the man himself, Denis Pagan, called it the far less catchy ‘three-quarter-ground concertina’) was originally devised to exploit the pace of then-North Melbourne Under-19 forward Leigh Tudor, not its better-known beneficiary Wayne Carey.

Long obscured too was the fact that Adelaide’s ‘Crow throw’ handballing technique of the 1990s was the net result of training drills borrowed by Adelaide’s first coach Graham Cornes from former Hawk and Crow Tony Hall, who’d developed lightening hands during the long lay-off after his infamous knee injury.

All the coaching legends – McHale, Barassi, Hafey, Sheedy and Jeans – get their dues but lesser-heralded Len Smith comes into the spotlight too for providing them all with a quite literal template in the form of his coaching manifesto, a document held dear by league coaches for decades after. “There’s no way you can overstate his influence,” Coventry says of Smith. “He was pivotal.” So too Reg Hickey, Jack Oatey, Polly Farmer, Jack Sheedy and the vastly underrated Ken Farmer.

The late Phil Walsh was a big advocate of helping the layman understand the deeper tactical side of AFL football. Photograph: David Mariuz/AAP

Coventry’s book is also a valuable reminder of how brutally rough the game once was and how for all its inevitable collisions, scrapes and MRP-induced controversies, it’s now as safe and well officiated as it’s ever been. What sort of national scandal would it be if Aaron Sandilands and not 1910s South Australian ruck legend Tom Leahy had been hacked into retirement while playing for his state against Victoria, a clump of flesh gouged from his bloodied knee by opponents in clear sight of spectators?

After surveying so much literature and data related to the evolution of the game, Coventry is balanced in his views of its current aesthetic state. “I’m a little bit agnostic about it,” he admits. “When you look at the history of football as a whole, it changes so regularly. Every few years there are debates and it’s pretty rare not to have rule changes year by year. The sport always seems to survive and adapt to those.

“At the moment with the stoppages, I think that’s directly linked to the interchange still,” he says. “I reckon, and Phil Walsh was big about this as well, if you cut the [interchange] cap, that’s probably the next logical thing. It’s probably a step too far at the moment but I think the cap’s probably the next logical step, to get it down to 80.”

It’s also true to say that the general feeling around coaching circles now is that the game is heading into a more attacking phase, partly because the defensive approach reached saturation point over the last decade but also because clubs tend to follow the premiership-winning formula and at present that is offensively-minded Hawthorn.

So perhaps the game’s not in such bad shape after all. “If history is a guide,” concludes Coventry, “one of the lessons from the book is not to be scared of change because good can come of it and the game can improve.”