Fremantle coach Ross Lyon. Photo: Pat Scala
After a year of sport involving pharmacology, match-fixing, gambling and bad behaviour, off and on the field, one code has come down to tomorrow. For all the wrong reasons.
For this Saturday may well be the darkest day in Australian sport. And it will occur on the field.
The threat to football traditions comes from a "win at all costs" culture, and how the game is played. Football has changed over the last 20 years, at first imperceptibly, now fundamentally.
The on-field threat comes from the seeming good, and the certainly inscrutable – the $1.5 million man, Paul Roos, and the laconic coach of Fremantle, Ross Lyon.
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These orchestrators, or evil geniuses, have fundamentally changed the character of the game, with a little help from Rodney, Mick, John and others. Rodney Eade introduced the flood, Roos turned it into the forward press, as did Lyon at St Kilda, and, at Collingwood, Mick Malthouse added love of the boundary line.
Gyms, rugby league-style tackling and aerobic capacity have created the new siege game perfected in all its ugliness by Fremantle. I call it Tackleball and Stoppageball, Robert Walls uses "rolling scrum", Drew Morphett "mobile wrestling", Ted Hopkins refers to Ugby (fusing rugby and ugly). In this Umpireball, the game of stoppages and throw-ins, the umpires get more touches than most players.
The Lyon game is the extreme version of the forward press: ugliness personified and "Smotherball" are the latest deformities imposed on the game. Footy is about the contested ball. It is also about kicking and marking, handballing and goaling. At its best it is hard but honourable, as in tough finals. There is nothing honourable about a culture expressed in the new Lyon language of football. No coach has ever referred as much as the Freo supremo to the game as "war", to "going into battle", to a "brutal" game.
The new game, where more than 30 players are inside the 50-metre line of one side, and where the ball ricochets from one scrambled or smothered kick or handball to another, might interest some rugby aficionados. "Manic (or maniac) pressure" is not football. That's why seasoned commentators, including Walls and David Parkin, celebrate watching Geelong play, and more recently Hawthorn.
Fremantle is appreciated for endeavour and for winning tight games. While, as with Lyon's losing St Kilda sides, some talented players, such as Nick Riewoldt and Lenny Hayes, Matthew Pavlich and Michael Walters, temporarily redeem the ugliness, the game they play is not football.
Lyon is the Douglas Jardine – the England Bodyline captain – of Australian football. He operates within the rules, but against the spirit of the game, and with that Essendon-style theme of "win at all costs".
The Lyon experiment failed at St Kilda. Why? Because if you turn the game into trench warfare you can win or lose by inches. Because the infamous "bubble", insulating players from the world around them, may have led to recurrent bad behaviour.
There is a very simple solution to save footy from the coaches.
Aside from Hawthorn kicking long beyond the press to strong-marking players on Saturday, one simple rule change will save the game from coaching destructiveness. That is each team must have a minimum of four players behind each 50-metre line.
That simple measure, controlled by the video umpire, will ensure that the maximum number of players in the press is 28. Players will take contested marks at both ends of the ground, particularly as the eight players in the other goals compete for the ball. Most footy supporters don't want a mad scramble – an Auskick match with everyone on the ball. They like close matches, but they want a football game to break out on a footy oval, not just an arm-wrestle inside 50.
The future of Australian football is under threat on Saturday. If Fremantle prevails in the "brutal battle", all coaches will be turned into boa constrictors seeking to deny their opposition "time and space". That will appeal to wrestling and rugby aficionados. But the destructive press and low scores are not what the most creative of the football codes is about.
A Lyon premiership, which will make every coach emulate his strategies and tactics, will not be good for football. As David Cooney observes, if all football becomes Lyonised, how many will turn up to watch?
As a Geelong supporter who also barracks for the future of footy, reluctantly I say, "Go Hawks!"
RMIT University sports historian Stephen Alomes is the author of Australian Football The People's Game 1958-2058.
I have absolutely no interest in this game. The AFL competition is currently very ugly and morally bankrupt.