It is also the AFL itself drawing the line Moi (see article below). In my opinion the AFL has nothing to do with ANZAC day. The public holiday represents a great opportunity to showcase the game at a packed MCG, and they fully realise this. The AFL should ask the RSL if they are happy with distinctions like "The ANZAC Medal is awarded to the player in the match who best exemplifies the ANZAC Spirit - skill, courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork and fair play". The best thing to do would be to have a round this weekend, but no footy on ANZAC day itself, IMO.
True Anzac medals
By Greg Baum
April 25, 2005
There have been times this weekend when it was hard to tell whether we were observing Anzac Day or football's appropriation of Anzac Day. Before every game, a verse has been read, a trumpet played and a flag raised, even one beneath the closed roof of Telstra Dome on Saturday, which, predictably enough, did not so much fly as dangle. There have been so many minutes of silence that it might be easier to reckon them up in hours. This was all before Anzac Day dawned.
This is a delicate subject to broach. It courts the risk of appearing curmudgeonly and disrespectful, even nihilistic. But it is not to suggest that the intentions of football authorities are not honourable, nor that football is not an ideal platform upon which to bring attention to a cause. The Richmond/TAC saga was a reminder of that.
Of course, it is as important for the football community as any other to remember the dead, celebrate the living, recount the stories and dwell on their meaning. The Dick Reynolds lunch last Friday, at which 75 digger-footballers were guests of honour, was a worthy event. There was a bit of war, a bit of footy, a lot of humour and a toast.
This is how it should be. But elsewhere, two manifestly different legends have been conflated over the years, equating football and war until it begins to seem that the qualities needed to survive and triumph in one are much the same as in the other. Perhaps this is because war is simpler and easier to understand as a game, and soldiers as players.
The citation accompanying the Anzac Medal reflects this. "The ANZAC Medal is awarded to the player in the match who best exemplifies the ANZAC Spirit - skill, courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork and fair play," it reads.
The Anzac Medal is now one of a handful presented on Anzac weekend at the football. Subliminally, the effect is to put the medals around the footballer's necks on a par with the medals on the old soldiers' chests. It is to purport that a medal-winning footballer also would have been a medal-winning soldier.
But war is not a game. A footballer might have few or none of the so-called Anzac qualities and still win. A soldier might have them all and still be ripped apart by bullet, or die of infection. Footballers are called heroes. So, this weekend, are soldiers. But the scale is vastly different.
Football is a game. A footballer knows what he is signing on for, plays because he loves it and when it all goes horribly wrong, he still goes home that night. The fact most worthy of celebration about the diggers at the Reynolds lunch is that they were there to tell their stories. It was sombrely noted that 134 footballers went to war and did not come back.
It is rare to meet an old footballer who cannot think of a single redeeming feature about his career. It is rare to meet an old soldier who can think of one redeeming grace about war. Football helped soldiers cling to a sense of normality in times and places of apocalyptic abnormality. It is part of the Anzac legend. But it seems sometimes that it has become a substitute for the legend.
This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/04/24/1114281449410.html 
