The Melbourne-Carlton game was "a scrappy affair". Typically, "six or eight fellow were tugging and hauling with their arms round one another's necks and throats, like so many Dublin fishwives, or Lambeth washerwomen". So reported The Australasian in 1873, footy's Jurassic age.
A year later, The Leader reflected on "an unusually brilliant season", distinguished by "the large number of goals kicked and the great popularity of the game with public", stamping it as "the beginning of a brighter era in football, which may now be considered the as national game".
Footy in Yarra Park in 1874. Just look at all that congestion. For shame.
But a decade further on, it had all turned to faeces. "Players fall upon the leather and thereby stop all play till the ball is thrown up," harrumphed the Ballarat Courier. "This not only occupies a great deal of time in the match, but makes it wretchedly slow."
In footy, it has ever been thus. You can turn to almost any page in the game's history and find disgruntlement and bewitchment in equal measure. "What's wrong with footy?" asked the headline over a Mike Sheahan column in The Herald in 1983. "It's turning into basketball," groaned Allan Jeans four years later.
You can also find tinkering. When footy was first codified in 1859, it had only 10 rules, but
an 11th was added a month later, and two revisions followed the next year. Incidentally, in the beginning, kick-ins were taken from a line 20 yards in from the goals, as proposed again now by some.
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Historian Mark Pennings says that the original laws reflected the game as it evolved on the field. Now, the rule-makers try to shape it. Sam Mitchell might be right that it is mostly grumpy old men calling for a return to the rosy future, but he is wrong to think that it is media-driven. The reform push comes straight from the HQ.
'Jolly good show, old bean.' OR WAS IT?
Style? Success? The means or the end? These are age-old contemplations. Soccer, occupying all hearts and minds now, has always had an alternative school devoted to the game's beauty, regardless of the outcome. "I go about the world, hand outstretched," writes the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, "and in the stadiums I plead: A pretty move, for the love of God'."
Nick Hornby, of Fever Pitch fame, can't have it. People might lose themselves in "the patterns and rhythms of football without caring about the score," he wrote. "I go to football for lots of reasons, but I don't go for entertainment."
Footy people, in my experience, also tend to the pragmatic rather than the aesthetic. We say we love the spectacle, but what we really cherish is the result. Martin Flanagan is an exception. "People ask me who I barrack for," he said in delivering the Norm Smith oration this week. "I barrack for the game." But he is an honourable rarity. One thing is certain: you won't find a TV executive demanding more goals in soccer, so as to show more ads.
Soccer, notably, doesn't meddle with itself endlessly. This suggests innate strength. In 50 years, the only significant change has been to the backpass rule. Soccer came last to technology, and mostly hates it even when it is right, because it jars on the game. With that, followers of all sports can emphasise.
AFL is taking its cue from soccer in one crucial way. This week, the seeming grab bag of mooted rule changes – banning runners, for instance – was described as a policy to lessen the influence of coaches on matches. As that, it becomes coherent.
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis
Coaches are by nature and necessity control freaks, so they won't like it. But it is not anti-coach. Rather, it is suggested that they be allowed to manage, but not to micro-manage. Once a soccer match starts, there is not much a coach/manager can do except to make three irreversible substitutions and shout a lot. The rest is up to the players, combining rehearsal with instinct.
No one thinks this somehow emasculates the manager. But it does give the players more responsibility and more freedom, too. If AFL players were allowed to be honest, most would welcome it, I suspect. After all, AFL's distinction among codes always has been its relative free form. Let's see.
But the hands of time can only be wound back so far. Originally in Australian rules, the captains decided free kicks. Once, in a Melbourne-South Yarra match, Melbourne captain HCA Harrison's lumbering opposite number wanted the game stopped and a free kick awarded because someone had called him a "lump of blubber".
Greg Baum is chief sports columnist and associate editor with The Age
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