Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part two

Teams in the major state leagues were first allowed to use a replacement player (generally labelled the ‘nineteenth man’) in 1930, with a second permitted in 1946. Like substitutes in soccer and replacements in rugby union, these could only be used once and the replaced player could not return to the field. They also tended to be used late in matches to replace injured or fatigued players – it was probably not until Ron Barassi’s switch of Ted Hopkins for the under-performing Westralian rover Bert Thornley at half-time in the 1970 VFL Grand Final that the sport awoke to the possibility of tactical substitutions.

The interchange bench was initially used sparingly: Geelong and Hawthorn made only eleven and twelve interchanges respectively in the 1989 Grand Final, but made eighty-one and eighty-two respectively when they next faced in off in the decider in 2008. The more cunning coaches pushed for a larger bench, particularly Kevin Sheedy, who at Football Park in 1985 caused Victoria to lose a State of Origin match on forfeit due to his illegal use of a third replacement. They got it: three interchange players were permitted from 1994, four from 1998, and even larger benches were utilised in pre-season and State of Origin matches.

With the rise of the cult full-forward in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it didn’t seem evident that football was headed towards an era of positional universality. In fact, with the exaltation of Dunstall, Lockett, Kernahan, Modra, and (after his 1993 conversion from wingman/flanker) Ablett, it felt like football was going back to the 1930s, when Coventry, Pratt, Nash, and Todd were their teams’ superstars.

Things, however, were changing. Tactics such as zonal marking and the full-court press were being borrowed from soccer and basketball (often pioneered on these shores by the aforementioned Sheedy) and the dribbling code’s three-way conceptualisation of player positions (defenders-midfielders-forwards), which arose in Brazil in the 1950s (what came to be known as midfielders were previously known as half-backs), began to be adopted in place of football’s traditional six lines of three. There were now six defenders and six forwards and in between them, five or six midfielders, depending on how one classified the ruckman.

This conceptual shift has changed the way the sport is seen and played. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the only player types that exist nowadays are ‘talls’ and ‘midfielders’: a team typically has a ruckman, a full-back, a centre half-back, a centre half-forward, a full-forward, and perhaps a second ruckman resting in a pocket; the remainder are ‘midfielders’. Players stationed in a flank or a pocket will regularly change into a midfield position, and the roles of the centreman, the ruck-rover, and the rover have blurred into each other so much that the three position names are seldom used anymore.

The watershed year in the evolution of modern football was 2000. In that year, Waverley Park was replaced by a boutique stadium in the Docklands with a retractable roof. Essendon adapted best to the new conditions and went one win short of a perfect season; their only loss was to a technically inferior team (Terry Wallace’s Western Bulldogs) who outwitted them with tactics (flooding). The artificial turf and lack of wind or rain made for a more sanitised brand of football, and with the new stadium hosting roughly one-quarter of AFL matches, teams now began to prioritise the recruitment of ‘talls’.

With modern football being characterised by rolling stoppages (the opening round of the 2015 season featured an average of sixty-nine ball-ups per match), the other priority of recruiters is on finding players with the athleticism to attend ruck contests in all parts of the ground. This focus has given us the generic ‘midfielder’: a player who can rotate between ruck-rover, rover, centre, wing, and flank positions in the course of a match (along with his regular spells on the bench) and who dominates Brownlow voting and Dream Team point-scoring. Not specialising in any particular position, he is classified as an ‘inside mid’ or an ‘outside mid’; terminology which brings to mind rugby union’s distinction between the ‘inside centre’ and the ‘outside centre’ and which therefore highlights the stoppage-centric nature of the modern game.