AFL commissioner Andrew Demetriou might just be the only person in Australia who fails to understand just how much the NAB Cup sucks.
It’s a preseason tournament that means nothing. Your club gets a few bucks for winning the NAB Cup, sure, but not enough to make it worth losing key players to injury in the preseason — and just like the NFL preseason, the AFL preseason is fraught with injury danger.
So in his attempt to make the preseason mean something, man, Demetriou created a preseason tournament, but it’s really an empty competition that has no bearing on the regular season and exists only as a sponsorship vehicle and a testing ground for experimental rules. Some of those rules are so hated by the coaches that they sit out their stars for NAB Cup matches. What’s the point of winning the NAB Cup if it costs you a spot in the Finals Series? Just ask Adelaide Crows midfielder Jason Porplyzia.
“It would be nice to have the medal but in saying that, we would probably rather have round one than on the weekend … the four (premiership) points are more important.”
And the Crows are in the NAB Cup Grand Final. That should tell you how useless this preseason competition really is.
Sydney Swans coach Paul Roos understands this. His team makes a purposeful habit out of early NAB Cup exits. So when he found his team down by only two points with two minutes left, Roos had a simple instruction for one of his players: “Go forward, just don’t kick a goal.”
Well, the commish gets wind of this, and he decides that it’s time to make an example of the man who dares mock his precious preseason competition. Demetriou is accusing Roos of match-fixing and demanding a full investigation. Because there will be no tanking in the all-important NAB Cup.
Right. Even the mainstream press sees right through Demetriou’s charade.
Faced with last season’s farcical situation when Carlton lost 11 consecutive games to secure a priority pick in the national draft and the best chance of landing both Matthew Kreuzer and Chris Judd, Demetriou said of the notion of AFL teams trying to lose: “I think it’s a real blight on the game when people talk about tanking. It questions the integrity of the game. I find it in many ways offensive.”
Confronted with fan surveys showing that 40 per cent of football supporters believed teams tank, comments from West Coast chief executive Trevor Nisbett publicly accusing Carlton of throwing games and a candid admission from Carlton chief executive Greg Swann that bottom clubs don’t always field their best teams available, the AFL remained in denial.
As that column points out, though, it’s possible that Demetriou is only looking to settle an old score with Roos.
The relationship between Roos and Demetriou is said to be poisonous; with AFL football manager Adrian Anderson viewed by Sydney as an overzealous lieutenant to football’s most powerful man. Hostilities flared most spectacularly midway through the 2005 season, when Demetriou described the Swans’ game plan as “ugly” and predicted they would lose more games than they won.
Since then, Roos and Demetriou have been ideologically opposed on almost every major decision in football; from rule changes to game development and, more recently, the commission’s plans for a team in western Sydney as early as 2012.
Demetriou can spin this any way he wants, but there’s only one logical conclusion here: the AFL commissioner only cares about the integrity of his league when it suits his own purposes. He’s too petty, too vindictive and too ham-handed to guide this football code beyond Australia to the rest of the world. If anything, he’ll probably run the AFL into the ground, Gary Bettman-style, before his term is over. More’s the pity.
