

The cup they’re fighting for. But will the AFL’s controversial pre-finals bye be seen to have given them a helping hand? Photo: GETTY IMAGES

AFL tinkering flags questions that needn’t have been asked

There’s an obvious consequence when you incessantly tinker with something. It’s that you never really know whether the fiddling was actually needed. A bit like the AFL has been in recent times.

We see it continually with the rules of the game. We’ve seen it with the Match Review Panel. Now we’re seeing it with even higher stakes, the integrity of the AFL premiership. And for a second year, even the club that emerges with the spoils may end up wearing some of the consequences.

Perhaps no premiership side has had the amount of goodwill directed their way as the Western Bulldogs in 2016, the success-starved club finally breaking a 62-year flag drought in a magnificent finals campaign.

Yet the suggestion that the Bulldogs had a more-than-handy leg-up on their way via the week off granted all eight finalists and which enabled them to regain four key injured players for their difficult elimination final against West Coast in Perth remains an annoying thorn in the side of one of the game’s greatest accomplishments.

The Dogs played a level of football better than anyone else last September. They might have been unstoppable even had they not had a week’s spell between the home and away games and finals, and even without those stars in their first knockout game.

But the impact not only of that extra rest for the Dogs, but a resultant lack of football for two better-qualified top-four teams in Geelong and GWS effectively penalised for winning their first finals are questions which simply can’t be avoided.

And now, on the eve of the 2017 finals campaign, it’s Sydney staring squarely at a similar no-win situation.

Since the current final eight system began in 2000, never has there been a team as well-qualified to win a flag from the bottom half of the eight as the Swans. They’re the form side of the competition with 14 wins from 16 games since that horrendous 0-6 start. They’ve got the requisite experience on the big stage. And they’ve clearly got the cattle.

Had the pre-finals break never been instituted, had the Bulldogs’ fairytale never happened, Sydney this year would still be at the shortest odds we’ve seen for a bottom-half-of-the-eight side to create history. Yet if they do so under these revised conditions, there’s going to be a question asked that needn’t have been.

The fact is the week off has completely compromised the advantage the top four teams have worked to gain over their rivals across 22 home and away rounds.

Due to the pre-finals break last year, Geelong and GWS both went into their respective preliminary finals having played one match over a four-week period. The Giants nearly won anyway. The Cats were jumped by Sydney in a seven-goals-to-nothing first term and never looked likely.

Perhaps both might have lost whatever the circumstances. Sydney had already accounted for Geelong during the regular season. But for the first time in 17 seasons under the current final eight system, both qualifying final winners bowed out at the preliminary final stage.

That should have been enough of a red flag of its own for some serious reconsideration. And some of us have been banging this drum since the AFL first announced the week’s break when it released the 2016 fixture.

But it’s only been since Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson recently joined the debate, free to speak his mind on the issue and not be accused of sour grapes with his team for once out of contention, that it has publicly emerged again.

Not that Clarkson is by any means on his own. In fact, when the AFL’s own website surveyed the 18 senior coaches on the pre-finals bye last year, every single one opposed the idea. This season, it was 15-3 against.

When the game’s most respected coach is unequivocal about finishing top four actually being a disadvantage, you at the very least have a problem of perception.

And when he’s this blunt: “If a team wins from outside the top four this year, I’ll tell you where everyone will be targeting their finishing position next year, it’ll be fifth to eighth, they won’t worry about top four,” you have a bigger problem still.

It’s worth remembering the AFL’s stated intent with the pre-finals break. It was to avoid a repeat of Fremantle and North Melbourne between 2013-15 resting up to half their senior sides in their final home and away games with their finals positions already set, players in need of a spell, and nothing to be gained from going flat-out.

So we addressed the integrity of a couple of meaningless home and away games out of the 198 played each season, and at the same time completely changed the playing field upon which the most important nine of each season are played.

The AFL also insisted that the week off would help focus more attention on important end-of-season honours such as the All-Australian team and Rising Star awards.

It hasn’t. Both those occasions over the last week played very much second fiddle to matters such as Nathan Buckley and Brad Scott’s coaching contract extensions and the soap opera that has been Dustin Martin’s playing future.

Essentially, if the issue of coaches like Ross Lyon resting players in final rounds was a walnut, the AFL sought to crack it not just with a sledgehammer, but a nuclear bomb. Is it any wonder that even the premiership side each now risks copping a dose of the resultant radiation?