Jake Niall, writing in The Age, 3/8/2009, re Melbourne v Richmond:

“Tanking speculation aside, the upshot was that the frenetic final few minutes salvaged one of the season’s worst standard games.”

Pardon me while I beg to differ, with no disrespect intended to Jake, but considerable disrespect intended to Melbourne v Richmond, Round 18.

The “frenetic final few minutes”, if that’s what they were, salvaged nothing. The game, which was seldom detectable as anything resembling senior AFL football, locked the entire claimed crowd of 30,000 and change (looked like around 27/28000 tops to me and various adjacent experienced amateur crowd estimators who are usually pretty much right on the money) into a coma for large portions of the encounter, and reactions from the crowd were eerily non-existent for most of the match.

The quality of the football played therein beggared description. It largely consisted of a glorified and slightly more elaborate game of kick-to-kick, in which Richmond would routinely stream across the centre-line and deliver the ball with pinpoint precision onto the chest of an opponent, following which Melbourne, abetted by an incomprehensible and entirely ineffectual zoning system of Richmond’s, would easily clear the ball from defence and into attack, prior to exhibiting some peculiar brain-fade which was less a case of butchering the football than mutilating it, thus returning possession to Richmond. And so on, and so forth.

There would have hardly been a game of park football played across the state over the weekend which wouldn’t have been better to watch. Probably the vast majority of these games would have given a general indication that either team in it had more clue about what it was doing out there than either Melbourne or Richmond showed.

There’s this bizarre theory out there, at least among the exceptionally easily-pleased, or “theatre-goer” type football fans, or phenomenological train-spotters, that as long as a game is tight on the scoreboard at the end, that this somehow raises it to the level of a spectacle worth beholding, or something. This was a spectacle worth beheading.

When a winning coach is, by his own testimony, disappointed to the level of being quite dispirited by a victory, it tells a story, you’d reckon. Close or not, this was a stinker of incredible magnitude. It must be considered by anyone voting in Worst Game of the Year polls, and was probably duller and more inept than the deadlier portions of that Carlton-Collingwood game in Round 17, which were at least as hard to watch as any proposed Hey Hey It’s Saturday cast reunion.

Naming half a dozen players for each side whose performance didn’t suck by any reasonable standard, probably including their own, would be a monumental chore akin to the twelve labours of Hercules. If the match will be remembered for one stand-out event, and it’s doubtful at best, that would be Jordan McMahon achieving with one kick, what it used to routinely take former Tiger stalwart Greg Tivendale – known to some Richmond fans as “Mr Awesome in August” – an entire month’s worth of games to achieve, in that McMahon is now presumably un-delistable for at least another year. (He kicked the winning goal after the siren, for those who missed it, or were there and already snoring deeply by that point.)

The AFL could considerably advance the code and cause of Australian Rules football by buying any existing master tape, disc, or if necessary any machine containing a hard-drive recording of this match, and burning it. Excelsior!

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