Is it for players? No, they’re racing for the exits in their droves, giving rise to fears about a quorum. Star turn of the roving entertainment: the astonishing disappearing footballer. For every giveaway, a getaway, up over the climbing wall. A batch from Hawthorn appear to have developed “general soreness” in advance. Port Adelaide’s Robbie Gray felt a hamstring coming on weeks ago. Is it for fans? If so, they’re scarcely racing for the entrances in droves. Ticket prices have been reduced, and AFL members can get in for free. So can kids. It’s the modern sports administrator’s infallible, all-purpose, go-everywhere, no-questions-asked alibi: it’s all for the kiddies. Loading But poor darlings: they’ve barely let the air out of their thundersticks and now they’re going to have to paint their faces all over again. Is it for women? Can’t be, or else the AFL wouldn’t stage it at the same time as its still emerging women’s competition, surely? Surely?

Is it for TV? Well, der. But only a bit. The AFLX draft was pre-recorded and put to air 24 hours later, and no-one tumbled to it. You’d think that someone would have cared enough to leak it ... Is it to promote the game in the non-AFL states? That is, can they be lured away from their long-established, culturally-embedded contact football codes by AFL lite, sans the game’s two most distinct and saleable elements, 360-degree contact and high marking, in other words a shadow version of a code they don’t understand and don’t much care for anyway? Is X for the international market, as we’re told, because it fits on a soccer pitch? But it occurs to us that there already is a code that is played on a soccer pitch, and it has built up quite a following of its own around the world, and if you give it a bit of time will probably do very well. It’s called soccer. Is it specifically to expose the game in China? Um, do you think there’s much about the AFL that China doesn’t already know? Chances are there is a hacker or two in China who by now knows more about AFL than Leigh Matthews. A game that works quite well on a soccer pitch. Credit:MARTIN MEISSNER

Is X for the AFL itself? Emphatically, yes. We think. Maybe. Perhaps. They’ll get back to us. Last year, the X series was between all 18 real teams across three nights, in three cities. This year, it’s four scratch teams, one city and one night, or as the AFL puts it, trying to make it sound preciously scarce, “one night only”. That looks and sounds very much like what economists would call “negative growth”. That looks and sounds very much like the AFL saying what it has never said before: we were, um, you know, wro… wron … Right, as we always are, except for the number of teams, the venues, the format and the rules. This year, AFLX is all new, as distinct from last year, when it was all new. The teams will have funky names and guernseys. The stars are going to dress up as superheroes, or in Patrick Dangerfield’s case, dress down as a superhero. There’s going to be on each team a nominated game-changer, whose scores will count for double in the last five minutes, and no Carlton, you can’t have one. It occurs to us that there already is a code that is played on a soccer pitch, and it has built up quite a following of its own around the world, and if you give it a bit of time will probably do very well. It’s called soccer.

There’s going to be … oh, honestly, who cares? With the big dance just around the corner, who among clubs, players and fans really gives a stuff about a pajama party? Why have we been tricked into allowing it to take up even this many column centimetres? It must be the kids. The AFL can hype and pipe all it wants, but the true unknown about X is why?