Wallace: footy not as we love it
22 May 2007 Herald-Sun
Terry Wallace
TWELVE months ago to the day I was under siege for bringing the game into disrepute by playing "basketball crap" to win against a highly fancied Adelaide, Terry Wallace writes.On Saturday night I painfully sat through a similar game at the MCG.
It was not a game I had to watch for work, it was for entertainment.
At the weekend my son had a billet over from Pembroke College in South Australia for a sports weekend.
It was his first trip to Melbourne, so we took the boys for their first look at the MCG under lights.
By halftime everyone was bored to death and the boys wanted to go home. I convinced them to stay until we knew the result, which saw us leave 10 minutes into the last quarter.
Trying to answer why the teams played that way was difficult as I knew the style of game had robbed these kids of seeing champion footballers apply their trade.
Never in this game was Nick Riewoldt or Fraser Gehrig going to be allowed to compete for a contested mark, nor would they see a legitimate "one-on-one" duel between Lance Franklin and his opponent Leigh Fisher.
At the very least I thought there was a chance of watching Mitchell and Ball go "head-to-head" in the middle, but even that was taken away as players zoned rather than playing one-on-one football.
Who created this? SOME games evolve differently to the coach's plans, so it is difficult to determine exactly which team was at fault on Saturday night.
With current personnel and form Hawthorn would have won regardless of how it was played, so the result was not changed by the style of play.
Both teams have a distinct style, with St Kilda more likely to play "shut down one-on-one" football, while Hawthorn likes to set up with numbers behind the ball to generate counter attack from the half back line.
The Hawks were keen to play with a seven-man defence to give support inside 50 against Gehrig and Riewoldt and if St Kilda's half forward line went high up the ground, the Hawks' backs were always going to hold their structure to make it difficult for St Kilda to score.
At this stage Saints coach Ross Lyon had a couple of options available to him:
1: The Saints could have held their ground and played six stay at home forwards. Then they would have needed at least one of their back men to have played forward to make it strictly a one-on-one ball game. The problem with this was the Saints' forward line would have been cluttered with up to eight pairs of players opening up the Hawks end, which would have only had four. I sensed that if Lyon had taken this option, the Hawks would have continued to send one extra back down to St Kilda's end, making it a logjam in St Kilda's forward half.
2: The second option, which the Saints chose, was to have a "Mexican stand-off" and allow the Hawks extra numbers at their end, while keeping their extras also in their defensive end. This allowed Fisher to be loose, racking up extraordinary numbers of uncontested marks as the chip and hold football continued.
Sport entertainment SPORTS entertainment is our business, whether we see it that way or not. But this game would have only been entertaining for Hawks fans in the final 15 minutes when they knew the win was theirs.
For those "theatre goers" who went along for the spectacle, or perhaps to watch AFL for the first time, this game was a blight on the football entertainment industry and likely to prevent first-timers returning.
Who's responsible? MOST games at the weekend were extremely entertaining including exciting free-flowing wins from Essendon and the Western Bulldogs. Which makes the Hawks-Saints game very unusual to say the least.
But if coaches see teams having success through flooding, what stops them doing the same?
On Sunday I watched the Melbourne-West Coast game which was over by quarter time. Sitting with a Dees fan I asked him would he have preferred coach Neil Daniher to clog the game up and play two players behind the ball and try to make it a more even contest. His reply was that he is a purest of the game and would prefer to see a one-on-one contest.
The dilemma coaches have is based upon winning football games and delivering an exciting game for fans to watch.
The best teams, such as the Eagles, do not have to play with tactics or tricks and if they know they are allowed to go head-to-head they will win more often than not.
But it is the lower sides who will employ tactics to stay in the match.
On Sunday, Daniher would have been within his rights to play loose men in the back line. No one expected Melbourne to win.
It is only a love of the game that prevents coaches using tactics and tricks more often -- as Daniher could have chosen to do on Sunday.
Can we stop the rot? AS A football lover and someone who has been involved in the game for 30 years, I would refuse to go if I knew the game was going to be played in the manner in which I watched on Saturday night.
In saying this, I realise I have won matches playing the same way, but taking my coach's hat off and putting my football lover's one on, I have no doubt this was a blight on the game.
On my way out of the match I ran into Chris Connolly, who has the Saints next week.
He said we may have just witnessed football as it will be played in the 21st century.
I shook my head and hoped we can all do something to ensure that is not the case.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/footy/common/story_page/0,8033,21772126%255E20322,00.html
