Football Turned Inside-Outside

Earlier this season, I wrote a few posts detailing how football positions had changed over the years and suggested that the old-fashioned nomenclature of ‘ruck-rover’ and ‘half-forward flank’ might one day be changed to reflect modern tactical realities. It seems that the AFL Coaches’ Association have had similar thoughts, naming their own all-Australian team with players listed in the traditional eighteen positions but given new names to reflect their roles.

The Association’s chief executive, Mark Brayshaw, is quoted as saying that the line-up reflects the game’s modern tactical evolution, “not what it looked 100 years ago”. The teams is as follows:

B: Easton Wood (Footscray) – Alex Rance (Richmond) – Zach Tuohy (Carlton)

HB: Bob Murphy (Footscray) – Cale Hooker (Essendon) – Jarrad McVeigh (Sydney)

C: Dan Hannebery (Sydney) – Matt Priddis (W. Coast) – Andrew Gaff (W. Coast)

HF: Patrick Dangerfield (Adel.) – Jake Stringer (F’scray) – Brett Deledio (R’mond)

F: Chad Wingard (Pt. Adel.) – Josh J. Kennedy (W. Coast) – Jack Gunston (H’thorn)

Foll: Todd Goldstein (North Melb.) – Nathan Fyfe (Freo) – Josh P. Kennedy (Sydney)

I/C: David Mundy (Freo) – Scott Pendlebury (C’wood) – Bernie Vince (Melb.) – Nick Naitanui (W. Coast)

Rance and Hooker are listed as ‘tall defenders’, Wood as a ‘tall/medium defender’, Tuohy, the only foreign import in this all-Australian side, as a ‘small defender’, and Murphy and McVeigh as ‘medium defenders’.

Goldstein is, naturally, the ruckman, with Naitanui as his understudy. The two starting wingmen are labelled ‘inside/outside midfielders’, as are half-forward flanker Dangerfield and bench-warmers Pendlebury and Vince. The ruck-rover, rover, and centreman are rebranded as ‘inside midfielders’, as is Mundy.

Up forward, we have Stringer and the Coleman Medallist Kennedy as ‘tall forwards’, Deledio as the ‘high half-forward’, Wingard as the ‘small forward’, and Gunston as the ‘tall/medium forward’.

So this, apparently, is how modern football coaches set out their teams: six defenders, seven midfielders, one forward-midfielder hybrid, four forwards, and one ruckman, with three midfielders and a second ruckman on the bench. Forwards and defenders are differentiated, basketball-style, by their height, while midfielders are designated as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’; reflecting the fact that their role in the team is defined by where they are positioned at stoppages.

Due to lax enforcement of the holding the ball and deliberate out of bounds rule, ball-ups have reached an all-time high of seventy-three per match. Football these days is characterised by teams getting bodies to the stoppage; the game either descends into a series of repeat stoppages, or the team extracting the ball from the muck is left with acres of open space in which to play keepings-off footy and string together chains of uncontested possessions.

With so many stoppages, this is the most efficient way to position players. Reduce the number of stoppages, and it becomes more efficient to position players around the ground in something resembling the traditional eighteen positions.

There was nothing wrong with the way football was played between 1899 (when teams were reduced from twenty- to eighteen-a-side) and 1978 (when the interchange bench was introduced). Teams were set out in five lines of three with three players following the ball; followers and rovers were rested in the forward and back pockets every ten or fifteen minutes in an ice hockey-style line shift.

This positional layout was the most efficient way to spread out a team’s human resources across a large oval field. It enabled tactical innovations from Collingwood captain Dick Condon’s combination play of the 1900s to the handball-centric, play-on game of Len Smith’s Fitzroy in the 1960s. In addition, it gave the sport unique positional terminology: what other sport has a ruck-rover, and what would they do with him if they did?

The football played in those days could be good or bad, depending on the teams playing, but the ideal remained a free-flowing, steadily-paced match between two eighteens. Modern football endeavours to create stoppages and structure set plays around them, while interchange ‘rotations’ are seen as a resource at the disposal of the coach, leading to twenty-one players facing twenty-one instead of eighteen facing eighteen.

How do we get the traditional eighteen-position layout back? By enforcing the holding the ball and deliberate out-of-bounds rules to reduce stoppages. By not paying marks for kicks which travel backwards, so as to stifle the uncontested possession-based antipodean tiki-taka practiced by sides like Hawthorn. By legalising the flick pass and the ‘Crow throw’ to help soon-to-be-tackled players clear the ball from congestion (or, more radically, the ‘throw pass’ used in the VFA between 1938 and 1949). And by reducing the use of interchange ‘rotations’: the only thing rotating on a footy field should be the almighty T. W. Sherrin as it circumulocates into the towering arms of an old-school full-forward.

The number of interchanges per team per match in VFL/AFL football evolved gradually upwards from 1978 to the mid-2000s. It has since exploded, only stunted in the last two years by the 120-rotation cap imposed by the league. Modern teams are able to run players on and off the ground in order to ‘flood’, a verb which originally signified getting numbers into the backline but now refers to any part of the field. This means more congestion: from forty-eight stoppages per match in 2005 to seventy-three this season. Rather than correlating with better football, the high-interchange game is a sign of weakness, of a team unable to outwit its opponents with superior skill and tactics so it instead resorts to out-rotating them. There is a reason why the all-time high number of rotations in a home-and-away match was set by the Gold Coast Suns (176 in 2012).

Order must be restored to the system of player replacement. By limiting players to coming off then going back on again twice or three times per match, footballer-athletes will be forced to be endurance runners instead of sprinters, and technically rubbish teams will be unable to compete by swamping their opponents with fresh legs.