AFL teams 'tanking' in second half of year (merged)

[injuryupdate]

Below is an article on the AFL draft, with references to the book "Moneyball", that is reviewed fully in the Books section of this website. Apparently (below), many AFL coaches have read the book and are trying to incorporate some of the ideas. The major one is trying to pick late maturers outside the traditional national draft system. It seems that there have been a few guns in top picks of recent years though (Chris Judd at no. 3, Nick Reiwoldt at no. 1 being the obvious ones) but the top 10 other than the first few picks seem no better than selections 11-30. There is still plenty more science that could be put into the business of rating players (inside and outside the draft).

Draft brings on chill factor
Jenny McAsey
November 20, 2004 - The Australian

"The draft has never been anything but a f***ing crapshoot," Billy Beane had taken to saying. "We take 50 guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for 50 a success? If you did that in the stock market you'd go broke."

AS AFL draft day dawns and dozens of young men wait anxiously to see if their sporting dream will come true, the blunt words of Billy Beane, general manager of California's Oakland Athletics Major League baseball team, are ringing in the ears of AFL coaches and recruiters.

The story of Beane's disdain for drafting raw talent straight out of high school, and his radical move to recruit proven college-level ball players instead, is told in the 2003 book Moneyball by author Michael Lewis.

It is a bestseller in the US and rag-eared copies of the book have been passed around in AFL circles this year as coaches ponder whether today's draft, their lifeblood for the future, is all it is cracked up to be.

Beane challenged accepted scouting wisdom and his tale has inspired coaches, including Geelong's Mark Thompson, Carlton's Denis Pagan and Sydney's Paul Roos.









Roos says he was always sceptical about the value of the national draft even before he became one of the numerous coaches in the AFL to read Moneyball.

"I don't think the draft is anywhere near as good as it should be," Roos said yesterday.

The AFL draft is a pool of the best 17 and 18-year-olds in the country, but like Beane and his high school baseballers, Roos thinks they are too young, too much of an unknown quantity.

That makes it a high-risk way to build future success.

"What Billy Beane basically said was don't take high school kids because they are normally a bust, and that is exactly what we are doing in our draft. He is attacking our whole system, saying it doesn't work," Roos said.

"My view is the draft age is too young because I don't think the guys are fully developed. That is why a lot of them don't go on and play much AFL football. They don't get bigger, they don't get quicker, they don't develop the way the clubs project they will. It is just crystal-balling."

Before October's player trade period, when Sydney gave up their top pick - No.15 - in today's draft for 23-year-old second-string Melbourne ruckman Darren Jolly, Roos did his own research about the draft's success rate.

"I was a bit of a sceptic all along about the draft but when we started to really analyse it, it shocked me," he said.

Sydney's study of 13 drafts between 1989 and 2001 showed that if you had pick No.10 there was only a 40 per cent chance of him developing into what Roos classed as a "good to very good player".

Five of the 13 players taken at pick No.15 in that period have not played one game in the AFL. That made the decision to take Jolly much easier. "To be honest, we weren't giving up that much," Roos said.

Even though the hopefuls are put through a raft of tests at the draft camp, research has shown only two - reaction time and speed over 20 metres - bear any relation to the youngster's chances of being a good AFL player.

"What it does tell you is that the other stuff is garbage; that is not my view, that is what the research is telling you," Roos said.

Former Hawthorn, Carlton and Fitzroy coach, David Parkin, is worried good youngsters are being lost to the AFL system because of the current draft age.

"Exceptional young men who have the potential down the track are being lost because somebody at this crucial time in their life, at 17 or 18 when they are still physically and psychologically immature, says, no, you are not good enough," Parkin said. He suggests players should come out of the under-18 development competition and play at least a year of senior football against men before they are drafted so there would be more hard evidence of what they can achieve, rather than just potential.

"We have to develop the public perception that there are other ways, such as via the rookie draft and state-based leagues, for those who mature around 20 or 21, so they aren't lost to the system," Parkin said.

Roos said Sydney would scrutinise those leagues much more closely. "They are an untapped market," he said.

As they mull over their picks today, clubs should remember the case of Aaron Davey last year.

Originally from Darwin, he played a year in the SANFL and a year in the VFL and was named most promising player in the league.

However, he was passed over in last year's draft and only given a chance on Melbourne's rookie list.

By season's end, it was evident Melbourne had snared a gem from under the noses of other clubs as Davey came second in the national rising star award.

"How was he missed? That is the sort of stuff clubs would have been asking internally in the past 12 months. They are all looking to get the edge in a competitive environment and they have to get better at working out what makes the difference in a player," Kevin Sheehan, the AFL's national talent manager, said.

Carlton coach Pagan cites former VFL player Adrian Deluca, who was overlooked in several drafts but taken at pick No.72 last year. "He played every game for us this year. At 22 years of age, he is ready to make his name," Pagan said.

Pagan has been forced to look outside the square when drafting because the Blues lost their first and second-round picks due to salary cap breaches.

He opted to recycle players from other clubs and said he took lessons from Billy Beane's novel approach.

[Beno48]

Is the blooding of young players "due to injuries" a ploy that allows teams, out of the premiership race, to plummet towards the wooden spoon. Therefore ensuring better draft pics? Kind of a win win situation because they don't cop too much flak about poor performances (because of the amount of debutants running around) and at the same time get valuable games under the belt of the rookies.

Is there such a thing as playing for pride anymore?

the thought came after watching Essendon on the weekend and reading Mike Sheehans column in Sport Monday... to say that Essendon, "often looked UNINTERESTED" for mine was a huge understatement...

apart from the Hawks... because they do seem to be having a dip, the race is on for Carlton, Essendon & Collingwood for those pics!

[Dreamteam Boy]

Although 16th place on the ladder has the obvious up side of high draft picks but the idea of deliberate losses to get them seems highly unlikely. Nothing could really take away the shame of the wooden spoon.

How bout the people playing? You can't say that players like Fletcher would throw games towards the end of his career. These are peoples' careers and no one wants to be a loser, especially Essondon, arguably the league's most successful team.

And the captain, Hird wouldn't want any loses next to his name as captain and no leader would. Even though their season is finished, you still have to play for some respect. At the moment, they are financially sound and that's because of their successful history which gives you members and each year it's gone down due to their declining performance.

Playing for good draft picks would go against everything Sheedy is and if they do end up last, they would end up there fighting.

[injuryupdate]

The history of the draft lottery in the USA (whereby bottom team doesn't get first pick, just more tickets in a lottery for the first pick) is that basketball teams apparently were found to have deliberately tried to lose games in the early 1980s in the NBA.

Interesting links to NBA writers on the history of the draft lottery, including a very damning report that when incentives were removed for teams to lose to gain high picks in certain years that the bottom teams improved their performances:

http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=3658

http://www.ajur.uni.edu/v2n3/Florke%20&%20Ecker.pdf

In the AFL, no one has ever suspected that a team has deliberately thrown a game once the selected 22 players have taken the field (except perhaps Fremantle in round 22 of 1999, for which Dwayne Russell indirectly made this accusation in a newspaper article a few years later:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/03/1054406188896.html
)

However, there is a lot of evidence that bottom teams don't pick their best 22 in the second half of the year if they are going for draft picks.

Nick Holland is on close to $500,000 per year, yet he can't get a game at the second bottom team in the comp this year.

Last year, Croft and Garlick appeared to be shut out of the Western Bulldogs in similar circumstances.

Before Malthouse arrived, Tony Shaw was kept on for half a season beyond his apparent use-by date at Collingwood for the stated reason that "Collingwood does not treat favourite sons poorly", when conveniently keeping on a coach that had lost the players' confidence (rather than sacking him mid season) was a great way to make sure they didn't accidentally win a few games and collect the wooden spoon.

There is no draft in the Super 12 or the NRL and unfortunately the same teams hover around the bottom for too long in these competitions. But at least no one accuses them of throwing games late in the season for draft picks. In the AFL it is taken as unspoken law that the quickest way to rocket all the way up the ladder is to start at the very bottom with some priority picks. Brisbane, St. Kilda, Collingwood and Melbourne have all been there in recent years. To the credit of Port Adelaide, Adelaide, Essendon and the Kangaroos, they have achieved their success in the last decade without the help of the greatest leg-up of all. The other sides have existed in no man's land - not good enough to make a Grand Final, but not bad enough to score enough priority picks to make it back up the table (Richmond, Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs might get their rewards in the next 2-3 years).

No one has suspected

[Syd Uni sports clinic]

The NBA has a lottery to decide no. 1 draft picks to stop teams from 'tanking' towards the end of the season. With all the talk about this happening in the AFL, surely it must be on the drawing board for them to consider?

Battling for Bryce? Or someone else?
Emma Quayle (realfooty.com.au)
July 18, 2006

Bryce Gibbs will not be in Melbourne on Saturday to check out his potential AFL home, as Essendon takes on Carlton in the match named unofficially in his honour.

While an estimated 40,000 people head to the MCG to see if their struggling club can finally score a win, the South Australian teenager whose name is being linked to the match will be in a yellow-and-black guernsey playing for SANFL club Glenelg.

The irony is that Gibbs, a polished midfielder, is no certainty to be nabbed with the No. 1 draft pick by whoever loses on Saturday and therefore becomes favourite for the wooden spoon. In hindsight, the match might become known as the Scott Gumbleton Trophy, the Lachlan Hansen Plate, the James Sellar Gift or the Joel Selwood Ribbon.

Certainly, the one-win Bombers have tired of suggestions they're up for some short-term pain if it means they get their hands on the best kid in the country. "Players' careers are on the line and our senior players are very proud," wrote James Hird on Essendon's website. "If people think any of them are worrying about the No. 1 draft pick when they cross the white line, they don't know what they are talking about."

While 60,000-plus crowds are the norm when Essendon and Carlton sit high on the ladder, the Melbourne Cricket Club is less optimistic about Saturday. Events manager Trevor Dohnt expected about 40,000 — on a forecast fine day — depending on how many Bomber members turned up. "It's hard to call. We're estimating about 40,000 people will be there, which is a middle-of-the-road sort of crowd," he said. "If we get more than 40, with the two bottom teams playing, that would be a good result."

The loser will get first call on Gibbs — or powerful ball magnet Selwood, whose knee injury forced him to miss the national under-18 championships, but who has made big impressions. Or Gumbleton, Hansen or Sellar, should the bottom club decide big, brave, ready-to-go marking players are too hard to pass up.

There may be others; Collingwood's No. 2 pick Dale Thomas surged up the rankings after last year's TAC Cup grand final and draft camp.

The AFL's national talent manager, Kevin Sheehan, thought Gibbs embraced his high rating at the national carnival, where he was named in the All-Australian team with West Australian Gumbleton and Victorian Hansen.

But he thought Selwood — who captained Australia's under-17 team two years ago and was its best player — still would be high on recruiters' lists.

"He's the one who should come into this debate, no doubt," he said. "Don't underestimate the midfield playmaker. That's what he is, and there's very little between them in their potential to be outstanding players at AFL level.

"Bryce was terrific at the carnival. All of the features were there — he reads it well, shows courage, works off players who are playing tight on him. He just makes great decisions with the footy, and then you've got tall blokes. They're brave, they show exceptional courage in the air, they're athletic and they compete when things aren't going well.

"People say you take the best player, but they're all very good players. There's plenty for clubs to debate."

[Laurens]

who would be the best draft picks?
gibbs, selwood who else

[injuryupdate]

We'll know in about 3 years time!

[Whoskins]

Mothball policy 'no-brainer'
Chip Le Grand and Malcolm Conn
August 08, 2006
The Australian

THE increasingly common practice of poor-performing clubs writing off the final weeks of a season by booking star players into early surgery was yesterday backed by the competition's premiership coach and a respected conditioning expert and given tacit approval by the AFL.
But if the Kangaroos' decision to schedule its captain Adam Simpson and best player Shannon Grant for elective surgery in the first week of August has barely raised an eyebrow within the clubs and AFL administration, it has renewed calls for a revamp of draft rules or the introduction of financial incentives to protect the integrity of late-season matches involving bottom-placed teams.

To prepare for an earlier than usual pre-season, the Kangaroos trio of Simpson, Grant and Daniel Pratt will today meet their respective surgeons to decide a course of treatment for undisclosed injuries which were not serious enough to prevent them from playing in a winning side against Port Adelaide last Sunday.

Any measure of that victory was tempered by the knowledge that the Power had already mothballed two of its most dangerous forwards - captain Warren Tredrea and Daniel Motlop - two weeks earlier.

While Tredrea had struggled to play with a chronic knee condition, Motlop's recurring shoulder dislocations had not prevented him from taking one of the marks of the season in the dying minutes of Port Adelaide's loss to St Kilda. Motlop's greater pain on that day was missing what would have been a winning goal after the siren.

Elsewhere in the AFL, clubs have taken the decision to trade-off their immediate on-field prospects for a flying start to the pre-season.

At Brisbane, senior coach Leigh Matthews has declared Jonathan Brown and Chris Johnson will not play again this year while Nigel Lappin will sit out the entire 2006 season despite his preference to play in the final rounds. Had the Lions been in finals contention, all three would have played over the next month.

Essendon conditioning coach John Quinn revealed that if the Bombers were on a finals footing, captain Matthew Lloyd would be fit to play against Collingwood on Friday night. Instead, he will spend the rest of the season recovering from hamstring surgery.

"The situation we are in, we can gain more by having players available to start pre-season training than being competitive in games now," Quinn told The Australian. "We may as well just get them all done. It is the same philosophy at the Kangaroos and certainly Collingwood last year.

"With the salary cap the way it is, there is no great incentive. If you can't make the finals, what are you actually playing for? The incentive is to get your team as healthy as you can as quickly as you can so you can be in the top eight the following year."

Sydney coach Paul Roos described the practice of mothballing players as a "no-brainer" and said it would continue until the AFL either changed the draft rules which favour the worse-performed clubs or provided a financial incentive for clubs placed 16th through to ninth.

He cited the example of the NBA draft, where each year's order of selection is decided by a lottery.

"From a club point of view it is the smart thing to do," Roos said. "From an AFL point of view there are things we can do to put in place more of an incentive to keep your better players on the field right through to the end of the season. Unless there is, clubs are going to do it now and you won't be able to do anything about it.

"It is a bit of a no-brainer the way the system is set up now. There is not a lot of incentive to finish ninth."

AFL chief executive Demetriou said he did not think the practice was damaging the sport and cited Collingwood's dramatic improvement this season as a positive example.

League football operations manager Adrian Anderson said he had no reason to believe that players were having surgery for reasons other than their best interests and the interests of their clubs.

Not all clubs out of finals contention have decided to mothball stars. The notable exceptions are Carlton and Richmond, who have both spent the past two seasons near the bottom of the ladder.

"We haven't had anyone who, just because we are out of the finals, we have decided to put in cotton wool and get them fixed," said Richmond football manager Paul Armstrong. "We still want to have an improving season and we have still got some opportunities in the next month. There are four games to go, which is a nearly a fifth of the season."

But Armstrong said it was a decision every club was entitled to make. "It depends on where you are and how much success you have had. I think supporter and members like to see you go as hard as you can for as long as you can. I don't think anyone likes to see sides give up on the season. Circumstances are different for every club."

[injuryupdate]

The draft is probably not completely responsible for this one, however you'd like to think that no specific AFL rule gives any incentive towards tanking.

See thread on NBA draft lottery elsewhere in this Forum - there are specific studies which have shown that winning percentage in bottom teams in the NBA has inversely correlated with draft bonuses for losing.

[Dunlop65]

Melbourne has taken a leaf out of Collingwood's book from a few years back and has begun to book players in for surgeries.

The 4 players ruled out are Adem Yze (hernia), Jared Rivers (OP), Clint Bartram (knee) & Matthew Whelan (ankle).

Yze's hernia has already been covered on these boards.

Clint Bartram had further surgery on his troublesome knee last week.

Jared Rivers pulled up sore again after training last week. They'll rest him for the remaining of the season whilst exploring surgical options.

With Whelan to miss the next month with a calf strain, Melbourne has decided to give him a head-start at pre-season by booking him in for a clean-up operation on his ankle now.

[injuryupdate]

This is happening at so many clubs they really have to look at it. It makes the fixtures during the second half of the year a bit of a farce. Collingwood were the most blantant exponents, but really every club does it.

Can anyone tell me that Fevola's so-called bad behaviour was more worthy of a club suspension than Didak's? Has nothing to do with behaviour but everything to do with club's ladder position.

What this basically means is that all clubs in contention for the Eight are going to get an armchair ride in games against Richmond, Melbourne, Carlton & Brisbane between now and the end of the year. These 4 clubs are now fighting for the bestt draft positions at the end of the year. For a team like Sydney, which plays all 4 in the last 9 rounds, it is the red carpet back into the top 8.

The sooner the AFL brings in a draft lottery (as NBA was forced to when this happened in basketball year after year) the better.

[injuryupdate]

In fact I'll merge this thread with others from the past on the same topic, as this one comes up same time every year.

[injuryupdate]

Interesting further info about tanking from the past:

I tried to get a link to an article written in The Age (by Dwayne Russell I think in 2003) accusing Fremantle of tanking in round 22 of 1999 in order to get a top draft pick to claim Paul Haselby. This was as brutal an accusation as has ever been made, but I can't find the link (perhaps taken down for legal reasons). These articles relate to the same topic:

http://www.australianrules.com.au/2003stories/round221999.html

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/04/1054700275954.html

[injuryupdate]

Original article:

Sport - `Hasleby game' - to the loser goes the spoils.
By Dwayne Russell.
4 June 2003
The Age


Would an AFL club really throw a game to gain better draft picks? Given the AFL rules, it is a question that's often been asked. Dwayne Russell looks at the temptations that faced Fremantle four years ago.

It is round 22, 1999 and Fremantle has won just five games for the season. It faced Geelong at Kardinia Park in its final game and, under AFL rules, teams that win five games or fewer for the season, get a priority draft pick.

Damian Drum, in his first year as Dockers coach, knew if his team won, he would not get the chance to recruit Paul Hasleby.

The Dockers were a floundering team that needed high-class talent. Hasleby was a young local East Fremantle star. He was the perfect fit. The Dockers wanted him, and yet they probably needed key position player Matthew Pavlich more desperately than they needed another running midfielder.

Therein lies the double sting.

If the Dockers lost to Geelong, they would secure both Hasleby and Pavlich with picks No. 2 and No. 4 in the draft. But if they won, they would move above Melbourne on the ladder and could miss out on both the gun kids. Collingwood had already won the wooden spoon and had decided to take Josh Fraser with its priority pick.

The Dockers began the game badly. Special comments man Paul Couch; a former teammate and friend of Drum, who was calling the game for Channel 7, said Fremantle was applying "no pressure, very little tackles, or chasing, or doing the hard work which you really need to do in a game of football to win".

With Geelong leading one goal to nil, boundary rider Richard Osborne noted "how refreshing in this day and age where coaches are just obsessed with flooding the backline, seeing (Geelong's) Barry Stoneham one-out in the forward line".

Commentator Peter McKenna followed that remark with the observation that there were "some bad signs for the Dockers, I know it's early, but there was a mark taken by Rahilly before; uncontested; and I thought the Dockers players could have easily, with a bit of effort, got to it and spoiled it."

What followed in the lead-up to half-time was not in the conspiracy theorists' script, nor was it in the plan for anyone with dreams of drafting Hasleby.

The Dockers started playing inspired football. Watching their attack on the ball they appeared intent solely on winning. Some looked as though they were playing for a spot on next year's list, and by half-time the Dockers led by nine points.

When contacted about the game yesterday, Drum admitted he faced "a very, very dangerous situation", in that everything that happened that afternoon was going to be the subject of close scrutiny.

His initial disappointment at having to revisit the subject yesterday was palpable for two reasons. Drum is now a politician and honesty and integrity are the cornerstones of his life.

But Drum also knows what happened in the second half of that match warranted scrutiny. The Cats kicked the last 11 goals of the game to blow Fremantle away and win by 51 points.

Geelong had loose players everywhere during the onslaught, and the Dockers missed easy shots at goal. But loose men and missed goals happen every week.

Tony Modra, Stephen O'Reilly, Dale Kickett, Peter Mann and Clem Michael were all out of that match with injury.

Drum played a young line-up. Seven of his team had played less than 15 games.

One person who was in the Fremantle coach's box that day, refused to comment. But that refusal, the fact he referred to it as "the Hasleby game" and a third viewing of Geelong's 11-goal-in-a-row finish, does make a person wonder.

I asked Drum if he ever coached to lose. "No and no; just no," he said.

But Drum openly admitted that the system made deliberately trying to lose that game to secure draft choices a very tempting carrot. So tempting that Fremantle president Ross McLean called him in the lead-up to the match to make sure that Drum did not throw it.

"He just wanted to know that even though it was very, very tempting to secure a local East Fremantle player, who everybody could see was going to be a great player for 10 years, that we needed to go out and give it our best shot," Drum said. "We had to coach to win. The players are competitive animals. It's just our job and our competitive nature that we just have no choice."

Gerard McNeil, the former Fremantle football manager said there was no suggestion of the players not giving their best.

"We knew the scenarios, if I can recall; what would happen if we won or lost. In terms of recruiting, I'm not saying there weren't people around the club who (wouldn't have) thought that (losing) would have been a good idea, but in terms of coaching or players' attitudes or the rest of it, that wouldn't have been the case."

That sentiment was echoed by Chris Bond, the 1999 captain who missed the final round because of injury. "The club that I was involved in, and I was captain of Fremantle in '99, there was no suggestion that I heard that people were going to do that (intentionally lose the game)."

Drum did concede that as soon as the siren sounded, he knew it was a good result for his club. "Immediately after the game you realised that the club now found itself in a strong position," Drum said.

He also added that no coach should face that situation again. "The rules need to be changed. When you look at the talent that's now coming through each year, I think it's wrong," he said.

In light of former Hawthorn coach Ken Judge's recent allegations that club director Don Scott suggested to him that losing was good for draft advantage, the pressure is on the AFL to revisit the can of worms its system opens every year.

If outgoing AFL chief Wayne Jackson is in any doubt how bad it can look, he should get the video and watch the last half of the match. Just call Fremantle, and ask for the "Hasleby game".

[injuryupdate]

Insight - Leaders - AFL rule raises too many questions.

7 June 2003
The Age

EDITORIAL OPINION

No team should know that it has to lose a game to win a priority draft pick.

For a football competition often described as a "socialist" system by key participants, the AFL has been remarkably successful, not to mention lucrative. Two "socialist" elements, the salary cap and the player draft, have been central to this success. The Age has long endorsed the principle that the greater good of the competition is served by a system that balances the tendency for the strong to grow stronger, on and off the field, and the weak weaker. The AFL is now a truly national competition in which periods of dominance have become refreshingly cyclical. The rules, though, are not set in stone - for instance, manipulation of the pre-season draft led to a ballot for the bottom teams. A recent debate raises the need for further revision. Specifically, the rule that teams with no more than five wins qualify for a priority pick in the national draft has the unavoidable potential to create doubt about some results. Hawthorn has rejected former coach Ken Judge's claim that it was suggested to him the team should lose games late in 1998 to qualify for the draft pick (the Hawks won their last five). Central figures in Fremantle's last game of 1999 have denied the priority pick was a factor in the Dockers' dramatic capitulation to Geelong. That defeat enabled Fremantle to draft two future stars, Matthew Pavlich and Paul Hasleby. The coach of the time, Damian Drum, recalls being told he must coach to win, but concedes everyone knew there was victory in this defeat. He says, and we agree, that no team should be put in that position.

AFL football operations manager Andrew Demetriou insists the rule will remain. He shares the belief of players and club officials that no one would choose to lose. But a game need not be deliberately lost for the rule to harm the integrity of the contest. Football at the top level constantly tests players' resolve. Any thought in their minds that defeat might not be a bad thing could be self-fulfilling. A "youth policy" could ensure the same outcome. The other problem with the 1997 rule is simply that the rewards for finishing last or near-last in a single season now seem excessive - particularly when one compares the bottom teams' draft returns with those of clubs just above them. Of course, the trade-off for mediocrity can be costly in terms of sponsorship, membership and crowd revenue, but one bad season can deliver a decade-long return of two elite players. Many coaches now say the true status of clubs should be assessed over two seasons or more. Even Fremantle coach Chris Connolly agrees that priority picks should not be based on a single season or games won, despite having inherited a team whose half-dozen top-10 draft picks have helped it join the other interstate sides in filling the top six spots on the ladder. We shouldn't make judgements on half a season, of course, but much more of this and Victorians will be wondering about other AFL draft and salary-cap concessions.

[injuryupdate]

From RealFooty:

THE COACH'S VIEW
By EMMA QUAYLE
IF YOU were an AFL coach, and your boss said you would only keep your job if you lost the final five games of the season, how would you swing it?

The notion of tanking so offends AFL coaches that only two of the eight recent senior and assistant coaches contacted by The Sunday Age last week would buy into the idea. Even in fun, and under anonymity. But that adventurous pair gave us a few tips.

1. Send injured players for early surgery
"I think that's what you'd do first," said coach No. 1. "You'd look at your list and say, ‘OK, who needs surgery?' And that's a legitimate thing to do. The quicker you get their surgery done, the quicker they're back into training. There's no point playing them when the results don't matter."

2. Leaving players with minor injuries out
"If you think someone's 50-50, you'd leave them out," said coach No. 1. But coach No. 2 has another idea: "If someone's not quite fit enough, and you want to lose, you might actually play them," he said. "Of course, you're not going to put a player at risk. But if they're on their way back from injury, and lacking a bit of fitness, you might put them in, because they won't be quite back up with the pace of it."

3. Strategic use of the interchange bench
Coach No. 1: "If someone's racking up possessions, you might give them a rest at a critical time of the game." Coach No. 2: "If you've got someone shutting Chris Judd down, you might get them off for a while."

4. Strategic positioning of players
Coach No. 1 thinks this is legitimate too. "You can use it as an experiment, to see if guys can play in spots they haven't played much before, knowing full well that it's not going to give you the best outcome because they generally play better in other spots. But I think that's fair enough. If anyone questions you after the game you'd say, ‘Well, we've got to find out about our players'."

5. Play the kids
"I'd be doing that, and you benefit from that," said coach No. 2. "You have to make quick decisions on players these days, so I'd be looking at every kid on the list. You could play the guys you know aren't up to it, too. But the other side of that is that if you play all the fringe players, they'll be playing for their lives. They might go better than you think they will."

6. Fake injuries
"You could say to a player, ‘I'm going to sit you on the bench for the rest of the match, just say you've got a sore hamstring'," said coach No. 1. "But I would hate to do that. You just couldn't do it. Even though the players probably know you're trying to lose, it sends such a bad message."

7. Tell the players to miss goals, turn the ball over, and lose
"There's no way you could do that," said coach No. 1. "Players are competitive, and they know whether they're a chance to win a game or not, before it and certainly during it. I think you'd talk to them about process and say, ‘We're playing you at centre half-back, because we want to see if you can do it.' But you can't tell them not to kick straight. There are legitimate ways to try and manipulate a result, but you can't get up and tell them they're going too well."

[Chook Raffle]

Gerard Healy discussed the situation with Carlton before the Sunday game against melbourne, and basically said that a victory for Carlton would mean a few hours joy, but how would Brett Ratten feel on Monday morning? His view is that with the structure the way it is it would be irresponsible for Ratten to jeopardise the long term future of the club (going from 3 top 20 draft picks to 1 if they won the game) by winning. I think a ballot between the bottom four teams, or even a grading based on how many of the last 5 games of the year teams out of finals contention win could work, though there are obvious risks asscoiated with this.

[injuryupdate]

The plot thickens on tanking. Everyone was dubbing the Carlton round 22 game the Kluezner Cup, but was it (and Carlton's previous 6 games) the Judd six pack?

If Judd goes to Carlton (which seems likely given Carlton and Richmond are probably going to be the only teams with the salary cap space and draft picks to satisfy West Coast) would the AFL go to the well again to investigate Cartlton for deliberate tanking? Particularly if West Coast came out and said the deal was brewing weeks earlier and they insisted they would only deal with pick 1, 2 and 3 plus a good young player?

Interesting (now appearing LIKELY) situation, yet can anything be proven? And would the AFL soft pedal any investigation given they over-punished Carlton for salary cap breaches a few years ago?