The always entertaining Richard Hinds from the ABC's view of AFLX:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-16/aflx-not-an-exciting-new-format-of-a-beloved-sport-richard-hinds/9452570AFLX is the first attempted use of Victoria's voluntary euthanasia lawsIt turns out AFLX is not an exciting new format of a beloved sport ''that will take the world by storm''.
Nor is it the AFL's version of T20 — or even, for that matter, of French cricket.
AFLX is the first attempted use of Victoria's new voluntary euthanasia laws.
What is AFLX?
• The game is played on a rectangular field (100-120m x 60-70m)
• Each side has 10 players - seven on the field, three on the interchange
• Two 10-minute halves will be contested
• A super goal is worth 10 points
• A ruck ball up will be used
If you wanted to kill AFL stone-dead surely you would turn it into this hollow, unappealing, pressure-free, atmosphere-deficient, oval-in-a-rectangle hole yawn-fest.
AFLX is a nothing of a game. One that combines neither the best aspects of Australian Rules, nor those of any other sport, but rather dilutes them so greatly that even the leather-lunged commentary box spruikers struggled to maintain their well-paid enthusiasm.
That said, it would be churlish not to list the highlights of AFLX's debut in Adelaide on Thursday night. So, in order, here they are:
1. The final siren.
Otherwise from just the second game of AFLX, it became apparent this ill-conceived and hopefully short-lived experiment has only one thing in common with the real game — Collingwood can't make the finals.
We were promised AFLX was the format that would make the game accessible to a vast international audience that, deprived of the game they play in Wangaratta, has only the meagre talents of Cristiano Ronaldo or Tom Brady to occupy their footballing hours.
AFLX would not only raise awareness of Aussie Rules in these heathen lands, it would allow said heathens to play this modified version of a game that had not yet heard of on their rectangular fields and in their local parks.
Crocodile Dundee 2, uranium, Air Supply and now AFLX. Can Australia do any more for humankind?
But as night one in Adelaide quickly demonstrated, AFLX will not ''take AFL to the world''.
It will take a version of the game that mostly entails players running up and down the field in something closely approximating a bog standard low pressure training drill to New Zealand for an experimental trial ... if it lasts that long.
Of course, a bog standard low-pressure training drill has the added attraction of a red-faced coach standing in the middle of the ground screaming obscenities as well as the considerable consolation the players would soon do something more entertaining, like spray each other with water bottles.
We can't say we weren't warned. AFL club fitness staff had told us they weren't too concerned about injuries because players did something similar to AFLX during most training sessions.
Which begs the question: Who at AFL thought a virtual training drill would be an attractive, prime-time TV sport when usually only diehard fans, autograph hounds and dog walkers turn up to watch this hamstring stretching?
The smaller rectangular ground would be, we were told, perfect for the seven-a-side game, allowing a free-flowing demonstration of the game's great skills and hard-running aerobic athletes. (Oh, and the use of ''soccer'' grounds was definitely not a land grab for facilities currently being used by football. Oh no!)
Instead, the reduced dimensions and team sizes merely created a tedious demonstration of how meaningless any football code becomes when the essential battle for possession and territory is removed — or, in the case of AFLX, the territory itself is removed.
In that regard, you might as well play AFLX on a ping-pong table and make it ''ideal for indoor use'' too, so ludicrously quick was the transition from (notional) defence to attack.
A basketball guard dribbling up the floor without pressure is one thing. An AFL defender eating up half the playing field while attracting as much interest from the opposition as a sausage roll at a Vegan picnic is an abandonment of the game's greatest fundamental.
Collingwood captain Scott Pendlebury was torched on social media after tweeting before the first AFLX game: ''Who's looking forward to footy being back on the screens tonight?''
It turns out Pendlebury's great sin was not to forget the AFLW had started two weeks ago. It was to suggest that AFLX in any way, shape or form deserved the title ''footy''.
The reflexive condemnation of Pendlebury's faux pas was over the top. However, AFLW players can feel justifiably miffed that the game's charisma-free new cousin was allowed to rob their second season of some media oxygen.
It was hard enough for AFLW to come straight after the conclusion of the Australian Open tennis. It did not need the AFL introducing a ''game'' that robbed it of attention and — even worse — inspired the patronising assertion that ''this could be a great game for women to play''.
This was just one of the pre-packaged claims uttered by the TV spruikers whose enthusiasm for AFLX was only slightly less transparent than that of the North Korean cheerleaders for ice hockey and luge. Particularly when a player attempted to score a long range goal cynically named for a ubiquitous iced confection.
''Great game for the kids'', ''Will be the ideal game to be played in the park'' and — yes — ''A great advertisement for the game overseas'' were the kinds of inanities perpetrated on those who watched to the anticlimactic end.
Surely only happy cricket executives will have lasted that long. They will have been reassured the AFL, despite its slavishly devoted media, cannot dominate every inch of the disputed late summer months, let alone every inch of Australian sporting turf. At least not with this soulless dross.
About the best that can be said of AFLX is that it will soon become another quirky addition to the AFL's history alongside Angry Anderson in a Batmobile, Warwick Capper's singing career and Richmond winning a premiership.
Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 4:07 pm
