Is “over-coaching” the cause of cautious football?

Action from last Sunday’s WA derby, one of six games in round four won with tallies of 11 goals or less. Photo: AFL MEDIA

Four rounds into a new AFL season, nobody seems to know quite what’s going on. Even the coaches.

Every team has lost at least one game. Had Carlton not somehow once again managed to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, every team would also have won at least one.

Three teams which all finished last year in the bottom six on the ladder, Brisbane, St Kilda and Gold Coast, currently occupy spots in the top six. And two preliminary finalists of 2018, Melbourne and Richmond, are for now stuck in the bottom six.

As for the look of the game itself, as Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson noted on Sunday night, it’s “strange”.

Not for the first time, a raft of rule changes appear to be having unintended consequences, and in some cases, quite the reverse of what they were intended to.

The 6-6-6 rule has certainly cleared up congestion around the centre bounces. But it certainly hasn’t increased scoring.

Last year was the lowest scoring football had seen since 1968, an average score per team per game of just 83 points. Quicker, cleaner centre bounce clearances were supposed to help lift that rate substantially.

But after four rounds, the figure has instead fallen further to just 80 points per team. Six of the nine games over the weekend were decided by scores of just 11 goals or less. On just 13 occasions of 72 have teams managed to reach 100 points, and in just one game of 36 have both teams done so.

The rules surrounding players kicking in from a behind, which offered them more room to move, were supposed to deliver more transition play and coast-to-coast scoring. Instead, we’ve seen more scores from those kick-ins coming straight back.

The one upside of the lower scores might be closer games. So far this season, there’s been 11 decided by 12 points or less. At the same stage last year, there had only been five decided by a couple of goals.

Would the fans prefer to see more goals and more one-sided games or fewer scores and tighter finishes? It’s possible they don’t even know the answer to that themselves.

What the start of this season does appear to be emphasising, however, is how anxious AFL coaches become about surrendering any sort of control over how their teams play. And the lengths to which they will go to attempt to wrestle it back.

The 6-6-6 rules theoretically should have given teams with dominant ruckmen an even bigger advantage at the centre bounces. But last Friday night, before Collingwood rectified the situation in the final term, the Pies had won fewer centre clearances than the Western Bulldogs despite Brodie Grundy at that stage winning the hit-outs 43-4.

The week before, against West Coast, Grundy had been similarly dominant for hit-outs yet Collingwood had lost the centre clearance count.

Melbourne’s Max Gawn won the hit-outs 73-13 against Sydney last Thursday, yet it was the Swans who won the centre takeaways 15-13. That’s not what’s supposed to happen.

So if coaches are having more trouble guaranteeing keeping possession even when they get first hands to the ball, are they perhaps playing it safer once they do take possession? The games in round four certainly seemed to suggest it.

The first half of last Friday night’s Collingwood-Western Bulldogs clash was like a glorified game of keepings off, as both sides became risk averse, continually chipping the ball around the half-back line to unmarked teammates in an absolute snorefest.

Things didn’t get a lot better, with large chunks of the Geelong-GWS, North Melbourne-Adelaide and West Coast-Fremantle games played in a similar fashion. All three finished relatively close contests. But none were games you’d be racing to ever watch again.

It’s still too early to be making definitive calls on the impact the new rules have had on the game. The trends so far, though, are at least a little concerning. And perhaps exposing a deeper, philosophical clash between the attractiveness of the game and the effectiveness of coaching.

Interestingly, one team bucking the trend over the past two rounds has been Essendon, which was in a hole at 0-2, but has won both its last two games playing a freer-flowing, more positive brand of football.

Last year, the Bombers were almost shot at 2-6 before opening things up, taking some more risks with their ball movement, and winning 10 of their last 14 games. It appears a similar pattern has taken place this season, fortunately for them this time early enough to salvage the season.

Is “over-coaching” a thing? Well, it’s only natural that with coaching panels larger and better-resourced than ever, every aspect of the game would be zoomed in upon to try to extract whatever possible advantage.

And in Australian football, that is at odds with a game which has historically prided itself upon the lack of controllables, from the shape of the ball and unpredictability of its bounce, to the size of the playing field and numbers of players on the ground.

That is about uncertainty, and that’s something the AFL’s latest set of rules have actually sought to return more of to the game. That’s not what coaches want.

If the current trends continue, the natives will become restless, with nothing surer than the object of their ire being the AFL and the latest swag of rule changes. That’s just the way it goes. But on what we’ve seen so far in 2019, I reckon the fans would be better advised taking it up with the blokes sitting in their teams’ coaching boxes.

*This article first appeared at SPORTING NEWS.