The difference between AFL and politics? The footy's easier to predict

Football and politics are this country’s most popular public spectacles, and the similarities between the two sports are plenty enough in number to make for a silly if not fatuous dinner party game. However, after the weekend just gone, there may be one significant difference between the two – the results of this year’s AFL season may be insipidly predictable and feel languid by comparison.

To look at the competition at the completion of round nine is to see two stand-out teams – Geelong (8-1) and Collingwood (7-2), both of who won pulling away on the weekend, and both of who are blessed with talent across every line.

On Saturday, Collingwood was challenged for the second time in as many weeks, and again were ruthless in their pressure and clean with their use of the ball when it mattered most. To paraphrase the brusque New York sportswriter Dick Young, Collingwood’s last quarter dumping of St Kilda belonged on page three with the rest of the axe murders… or at the very least the federal election results in Queensland.

Collingwood coach, Nathan Buckley said that his side’s maturity in being able to control the game after half-time was as good as he’s seen.

“It was a really mature response to the situation and it was pretty sustained over that hour of footy, culminating in a pretty dominant last quarter,” said Buckley, dabbling in understatement after the Magpies closed out the game kicking 6.6 to St Kilda’s solitary goal to hold the competition’s longest active winning streak at six.

Second-year forward Jaidyn Stephenson gave the Pies’ quarter the perfect coda with an audacious 55-metre torpedo goal, just days after Malcolm Blight lamented the ‘torp’ as a dying art.

“Oh my god I was just shaking my head,” said Grundy to Fox Footy after the game. “Absolutely ridiculous, but the kids got some flair and we want to encourage that, so it was awesome.”

On awesome, it is not difficult to rhapsodise about Grundy who finished the game with 24 disposals, 49 hit-outs and enhanced credentials as Collingwood’s most valuable player.

Later that night, Geelong – furbished with another ready-made mature-aged recruit in 25-year-old debutant Darcy Fort – easily took care of the Western Bulldogs by 44 points at Kardinia Park. Like the earlier game there was little in it early with 15 minutes to go, but the Cats, like Collingwood, kicked six goals to one thanks in large part to brilliant ball use, or to use the language of advanced statistics, a kicking efficiency of 82% – a number not seen since the heights of the (first) Rudd government.

In a season of scoreboard mediocrity, Geelong’s 21.7 is the closest set of numbers we have to gauge one of the more important measures of televised sport – watchability. Regardless of your feeling toward the Cats, they put on a show decidedly more, well… fun, than the dirge down the road at the Docklands. Where Geelong needed to touch the ball 321 times for their 21 goals, Essendon and Fremantle combined for 15 goals from more than 800 disposals, with an aesthetic that only Ross Lyon could love.

While there is much to play out for season 2019, and despite the weekend’s other contest rendering any sort of prediction in this country a mug’s game, it is hard to see where the challenges come for the Cats and the Pies. From outside Victoria, a look at the current top eight sees the GWS Giants, Brisbane and West Coast occupying positions three, four and six respectively.

Despite a thumping win at home over Carlton, the Giants take to the MCG like Get Up! to a Queensland mining town, Brisbane need more than nine games of exposed form to be even vaguely considered a threat (although you suspect their time is not as far away as previously advertised) and West Coast, who at home struggled to hold off a Melbourne side that has struggled to rise above self-inflicted ordinariness this year.

If there is a threat, it is perhaps fifth-placed Richmond, who without their captain, Trent Cotchin as well as last year’s All-Australian full-back (Alex Rance) and full-forward (Jack Riewoldt), made light work of Hawthorn in front of 65,000 at the MCG on Sunday. Still, it helps when you’ve a 2017-version Dustin Martin rotating through the forward line and midfield, racking up 37 touches and kicking two goals.

Still, like politics, football has the capacity to be improbable. If you don’t believe that, refer to 18 September 1999, or more recently the Bulldogs’ glorious finals run in 2016. However, unlike politics, more than 90% of us will be disheartened by the ultimate result.

With that in mind, perhaps the best thing most of us can do to enjoy the game is to embrace the Japanese concept of mono no aware – “a sensitivity to ephemera” that suggests the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature. Although for Carlton supporters that tapped out at the five-minute mark of yesterday’s first quarter. They are now set for a week not too dissimilar to that of the Labor Party – daily screeds on the where to from here, most of them ferociously indignant and reminding us that everyone always wants the boss to go down.