The time has already come for AFL CEO Andrew Dillon to bite the bullet on the Opening Round concept. Photo: AFL MEDIA
The AFL’s Opening Round experiment should be done and dusted, never to be seen again.
Two helpings of this manufactured idea cooked up by a league marketing employee to justify his or her job has provided more than enough data to suggest it no longer deserves a place in the fixture.
And this has nothing to do with Cyclone Alfred hitting south-east Queensland and forcing two matches to be postponed.
Four games staged outside of the sport’s heartland states is absolutely no way to kick things off for the biggest code in the country.
The fizz, excitement and wind gets sucked out of the occasion and it severely detracts from the grandeur of the first weekend of footy, which should be full of expectation and anticipation for fans of all 18 clubs, not just eight.
And having only two games this year, through no fault of the AFL, only served to further dilute the opening weekend which should always be jampacked with action, highlights and jaw-dropping moments to immediately get the juices flowing and set the tone for the next six months.
However, instead of opting to open proceedings with a bang, the league, seemingly enamoured with changing things for change’s sake, decided to go with a whimper.
One of the main arguments in favour of Opening Round is that it’s good for the northern states as they usually give the NRL a big head start at this time of the year.
But surely that rationale is overrated. Does giving rugby league an extra week or two unimpeded in March really concern the AFL, considering it is the top dog of the Australian sporting landscape?
Last year, Sydney’s average home crowd was 38,202 and Brisbane’s was 29,045 while the NRL’s competition-wide average attendance was 20,611. And after the Lions and Swans faced off in the grand final last season, one would assume that their crowd numbers aren’t in danger of being caught by rugby league any time soon.
The AFL maintaining its status as the most popular code in the country is certainly not dependent on an annual phony-baloney Opening Round.
Cutting out the game’s heartland states from the first round of the season certainly has a whiff of arrogance and madness about it.
Ticket sales might have been great for the inaugural Opening Round last year, but how would they be adversely impacted by staging four games north of the Barassi Line in addition to five games spread across Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia on the same weekend?
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Alternatively, if the AFL is still hellbent on having a glorified standalone Gather Round in New South Wales and Queensland, it can do so in the middle of the year some time when the season is well and truly underway.
A similar thing occurred in 2004 when Sydney and Collingwood did battle at Stadium Australia in the only game of the second weekend of Round 13 – but this time, there would be an extra three matches and an additional state.
The other incredible thing to emerge from the chaos of this year’s first weekend of the season was the manner in which the AFL rescheduled the Brisbane-Geelong and Gold Coast-Essendon games.
The first one was done easily enough considering both the Lions and Cats originally had the bye in Round 3, so their encounter slotted in nicely there.
But as for the Suns and Bombers, they have been shunted six months from their March 8 date all the way to the pre-finals bye following Round 24.
Now, the amazing thing about this is that the league has effectively admitted that the late season week off, which was introduced in 2016, is a bit of a joke.
After all, if it was so important to ensure no sides played during that week to ensure integrity of selection in the final round, which was why it came about after then-Fremantle coach Ross Lyon and then-North Melbourne coach Brad Scott rested basically half their best side to ensure an optimal lead-in to the finals, then why would the league now schedule two teams to play on that weekend?
What happened to all that fixture agility and flexibility from the COVID-ravaged 2020 and 2021 seasons?
Now, all of a sudden, just four years later, the fixture has become so rigid that Gold Coast and Essendon couldn’t have staged their match much earlier in the season? Was the only solution dumping them in late August?
The cynics would suggest that this move by is essentially the AFL writing off the Suns and Bombers as legitimate top-eight threats.
But even if the league top brass is right, it is not the AFL’s job as the impartial governing body of the competition to be making calls like that. Who would’ve picked Hawthorn to make the finals last year after starting 0-5?
Players from two clubs are now at risk of missing the first week of finals due to concussion protocols on the off chance they sneak into the top eight.
The league’s primary concern should be protecting the integrity and fairness of the AFL at all costs, but on a couple of counts in this instance, it has been found wanting badly.
