They say
that the secret of making people think you’re smart is not to say anything to
contradict that. For some people, that means not to say anything at all.
(The U.S. President is a case in point. He’ll read from a prepared text, and
sound very presidential, very intelligent – and then look up and speak off the
cuff, and that image goes right out the window – “gone”.)
Speaking
of which, that reminds me of several questions I’ve been meaning to ask you,
you born-‘n-raised Australian football aficionados. As an American who has
never had the privilege of visiting "Down Under", and who’s only
followed the sport for fifteen or eighteen years from afar, there are a few
things that I’ve never completely understood. At the risk of bursting the
balloon of any of you who thought the rookie with the buffalo avatar was
Einstein reincarnated, I’d like to ask you a few questions. And these are
legit: please comment with answers if you see that no one else has already
provided the right answer, okay?
…Why do we yell “Gone” when someone
carrying the ball is tackled and turns the ball over to the tackling team? Why
not “Down”, or “Got him!”, or something else? Nothing wrong with the phrase –
I’m just not sure why we use it in that situation.
…Is there
any rule-related purpose to the 50-meter
arc? It’s an absolutely invaluable tool for players to gauge distance, it
makes for very functional statistics, and frankly it lends an aesthetic to the
look of the field. But I can’t think of anything in the rulebook that utilizes
it at all.
…And the over-the-head-and backwards,
chuck-it-as-far-as-you-can toss in by the ref from the sideline on dead
balls – where did that come from? I remember the first time I saw that
years ago, when I was first introduced to the sport of gods, thinking, “Lord,
that may be the silliest thing I’ve ever seen a ref be required to do in my
life.” But it sure creates a problem if you have to declare a ruck and you
really have no faith in where the ref’s going to throw it on a windy or
storm-riddled day. My vote is to do away with the no third man rule on those tosses
alone – that seems to be when the most confusion happens.
…Speaking
of “over-the-head”, is it only because of the spectacle involved that we’ve chosen to ignore the physical interference caused
by a spectacular marking effort on the player below him? If you shoved a
defender like that without the jump and attempted catch, you’d give up a free
kick, minimum, every time. Mind you, I prefer the highlight package leaps, so
I’m answering my own question here.
…It seems
very strange to send a player out
to face the media mid-week to report on injuries and how the team’s doing
and all the things I’d expect to hear a coach report. I happened to
watch a “’round the league” report on Wednesday, and it was Ross Lyon and John
Longmire for the Dockers and Swans, of course, but it seems that the Eagles and
Cats sent Elliot Yeo and Tom Hawkins out to do the same job for their teams.
And for Zach Merrett, all of 22 years of age, to have to handle those duties of
who’s hurting where and what the general plans are and (by inference) how much
to admit and how much to shade to prevent the opponent from getting information
they could use in battle? I can’t imagine that happening in an American sport.
If we ever see a player doing “coach-speak” work, it’s a LeBron James or
a Tom Brady, not the hotshot rookie or even the fourth-year running back.
...The Tribunal. Compared to having a
single commissioner, or worse yet a VP-CFO type handling the disciplinary and
punitive actions of the league, having a public hearing, a set of relatively
concrete guidelines that are fairly transparent, and (best of all!) the ability
to appeal becomes a wager rather than
a free swing, reducing the frivolous dragging out of the legal element to
almost nothing? Infinitely superior to anything in the US. Is this something
that happens in all the other Aussie sports, or is it unique to the footy
landscape? I know the VFL has it, but I don’t follow Series A or netball or the
other pro leagues closely enough to know this detail about them.
…Have the outrageously tall banners been a part
of the game forever? I love them, but their stateside counterparts are
(generally) much smaller. Occasionally you’ll see a good sized college football
banner, but that’s usually in Texas, where everything’s reputedly bigger. Until
we added Alaska as a state.
One of the greatest putdowns ever
made was an Alaskan who listened to a Texas brag incessantly in a bar one night
about how “EVERY-thing is bigger down yonder in Texas!” The Alaskan
finally replied, “Mister, if you don’t shut your yapper, Alaska’ll split itself
in half down the middle, and you’ll become the third largest state in
the union!” (And that’s accurate: Alaska is literally 2.5 times the size of
Texas, fully one quarter of the size of Australia.)
Wandering back to last week’s topic
in this column, we
mentioned our “meta-Brownlow”, our AFL Player of the Year, utilizing as many other
Player of the Year/ Week/ Month/ Fortnight/ Whatever recognitions as I can
track down. To address a topic we bandied about in the comments last week, this
scorecard is NOT statistics-based – in the vast majority of cases, the points
come from some form of human judgment rather than anything numerical. The
exceptions to that would be the AFL’s Player Rating data, which creates its
weekly tweeted Team of the Week based on ratings changes, and the Fantasy
scoring element (I use the Supercoach numbers for this, partly to avoid
duplication from the above, and partly because it seems to best recognize a balance between the requirements of the
different regions of the field a player spends his day in. Translation: It’s not all about the midfielders.)
Through
Round 7 (data for R8 will trickle in over the next couple of days), Rory Sloane of the Adelaide Crows still held a big lead with 256 points
despite a one-point total in R7. West Coast’s Elliot Yeo, who was on nobody’s short list of Brownlow
candidates in March, is second with 190, having just passed Dustin Martin of Richmond, currently at
181.
The defending
champ, Geelong’s Paddy Dangerfield, sits
at 164 in fourth, and the pack behind him includes his teammate Joel Selwood and Magpie Scott Pendlebury, who had transport
waiting if his wife goes into labor with their first child during the game with
GWS Saturday; Port Adelaide’s Ollie
Wines at 147, fallen to seventh after two low-tallying games and being
closed on by Western’s Marcus
Bontempelli at 145. The Bont has surged 51 points in his prior two games
(Wines had only four).
Rounding
out the top 20 are Robbie Gray of
Port (136), Rory Laird of Adelaide
(130), Gold Coast’s Gary Ablett
(129), the Eagles’ Josh Kennedy (126),
Sydney’s Lance Franklin and GWS’ Toby Greene (both at 119), and Zach Merrett of Essendon (116).
Sixteenth is St. Kilda’s Jack Steven
(113), followed by Luke Shuey of
West Coast (111), Fremantle’s Nat Fyfe (103),
and Richmond’s duo of Trent Cotchin and
Jack Riewoldt (102 each).
Another
categorization I use is what I call “dominant” and “prominent” performances.
Dominant performances receive recognition from at least 90% of our sources;
prominent performances at least 80% of those sources. Basically, it says that everyone
or nearly everyone thought that player had a very remarkable performance
that round. 42 different players have produced “dominant” performances; Sloane
put four in a row together in rounds three through six, and Yeo has three
“dominant” and two other “prominent” performances in his seven games. Nine
other players have had two dominants, including Rory Laird (two dominants, two
prominents) and Ollie Wines (two of each as well).
My final
thought is to return to my first: remember that this is not based on statistical analysis of the players’ games, but on the recognition of those games as among the
top performances of the week by human evaluators – as the Brownlow and most
other awards are. Before you criticize, remember the intent of the
meta-Brownlow scoring system. (Okay, now you can criticize.)
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