Two weeks ago, Hawthorn's Alastair Clarkson called a game of football he'd just coached a "terrible spectacle", and asked "what's happened to our game?".
Former North Melbourne champion turned Fox Sports analyst David King was even more alarmed: "Let's get our game back."
Such crisis talk is now an annual feature of the game's media cycle — often a multi-week festival of soul-searching and self-loathing.
But Clarkson and King were merely expressing a widely held belief: in the last 20 years, the aesthetic of AFL football has changed markedly and maybe irreversibly.
We're not going back to end-to-end goal fests, when Clarkson's coaching predecessors like Ron Barassi commanded their men to kick "long bombs to Snake".
The prevailing view of fans and pundits in recent times is that AFL coaches, their heads full of imported theories and self-serving tactics, have become overwhelmingly negative and ruined the game's visual appeal, and that administrators, bumbling and reactionary, have failed to keep them in line.
But what if there is an alternative explanation for modern footy's so-called ugliness, and it's been staring us in the face since COVID-19 closed football stadiums off to fans?
What if AFL football's problem is not the football itself, but the way it is filmed and broadcast? What if we're literally looking at AFL action from the wrong angle?
Scarcely acknowledged in these discussions is the widening gap of understanding that has opened up between those intimately involved in the game at club level — the coaches, assistants and analysts who have access to every available piece of footage filmed on game day — and the average fan and even journalists, who, if they're not sitting in the stands, are entirely reliant on what's shown by the Seven Network and Fox Sports.
This week, under the condition of anonymity, I asked AFL coaches and team analysts a simple question: would they be able to understand a game of modern AFL football from the television broadcast alone?
Their blunt answers of "no" gave way to detailed observations that painted a picture of AFL broadcasting as something closer to a coaching fraternity in-joke.
The outline of grievances is simple enough:
- The tactical battle can now only be truly understood with vision from behind the goals, an angle from which the home viewer rarely sees anything other than replays of goals or reportable incidents
- How a team sets up at a stoppage is crucial to the outcome of the contest but a total mystery on TV
- There are too many lingering close-ups that serve no purpose other than to familiarise viewers with players' haircuts and tattoos, and obscure what is really happening in the game
- When the game slows down and the ball carrier is launching a transition of play, home viewers rarely, if ever, see the options available to him
- Some of these gaps in knowledge could be overcome if commentators explained tactical scenarios or anticipated the decision-making of players, but they rarely offer anything other than a description of what has already occurred.
