The Judge – Round 10 – Corruption

There has been much talk this season about Natas trying to break the all-time record of 22 wins in a row. And it is often stated that the ultimate display of dominance from a team is to win the “Triple Crown” – being the League Premiership, the Champions League and the AFR Cup. Leaving aside the Group Stages of the Champions League, to win the Triple Crown there are at least 10 knock out games that a team has to win (two in the League finals, two in the Champions League and four in the AFR Cup). It is expected that for a team to win those 22 and 10 games respectively that a team must be dominant and unrivalled. But perhaps these days it is more important that they must be lucky…

The team that holds the record for consecutive wins is the Dingoes in 2008-2009. And the only team to win the Triple Crown is also the Dingoes in 2011. The manager of the Dingoes then and now is Steve Watson. Or as I like to call him – Corrupty McCorrupt Face.

Another sport that the Judge likes to follow is pole vaulting. Sergey Bubka is the former world record holder in the men’s pole vault. Following his retirement he joined the official international athletics federation – the world body that sets the rules for athletics. While he was there he oversaw changes in the rules to pole vault. The pegs that the bar sat on were shortened – making it easier to knock off, and the amount of time athletes had for each jump was reduced – meaning competitors could not wait for ideal conditions and were more fatigued. The “unintentional” affect of these rule changes overseen by Mr Bubka was that it was now harder for other people to break Bubka’s world record. And that is what we are facing in the AFR as well. The holder of these records Mr Watson has promoted and implimented rule changes that make it more difficult to break the records he holds.

Since 2011 at some point the value of a tackle has risen from 1.5 to 2. But more relevantly the value of a goal rose from 3 to 6 points prior to the 2021 season. It is not unusual for even the best forwards in our competition to have wild variations in the number of goals they kick, and due to the increase in the value of a goal there are now wilder variations in the scores of AFR teams. Last year in round 3 Josh Bruce kicked 10 goals. His average number of goals for the other 19 games he played that year was 2. Those 8 extra goals equate to 48 extra points for his AFR team for that round. Or putting it this way – a dominate and unrivalled AFR team could have played Josh Bruce’s team 20 times that year and no matter how good they were I bet they would have lost that one time. The effect of these rule changes is that a generally bad team might randomly have an otherwise ordinary forward kick a lot of goals in a game and therefore have wild and unpredictable fluctuations in their score. And it is luck, not skill that you need to avoid these unexpected and unforeseeable high scores.

Natas run of 19 consecutive victories came to an end at the hands of the Scorpions in round 9 this year. Out of 8 previous games the Scorpions had only once scored above 137.5 while Natas had never scored below 160. And yet in round 9 the Scorpions pit forward a total of 189. Not only their best score of the year but in all likelihood their second highest score ever. Natas lost that game and their streak was ended due to an unexpected and enormous fluctuation in their opponents score. Natas was unlucky.

But perhaps the piece of information that most shows how much more difficult it is now to break those records than it was for Mr Corruption to set them, is that during the Dingoes Triple Crown in 2011 in the second round of the AFR Cup they beat the Charges 131 to 128.5. That is a margin of less than 3 points. And looking back to 2011 AFL round 6 the Dingoes forward line that year was Travis Cloke and Drew Petrie. That round they kicked 1 goal and 1 goal 3 respectively. The Charges forwards that year were Josh Kennedy and James Podsiadly. In that battle Kennedy kicked 2 goals, however Podsiadly didn’t play that game. Their back up forward Schultz didn’t play that round either. But a young Jack Darling did. And he kicked 3 goals. If the rule change to the scoring introduced a few years ago had been in place in 2011, the Dingoes would not have won that game by 2.5. Instead with the increased scores for goals it would have been the Charges who won by 12.5. Under today’s rules, the rules that Steve Watson advocated for, the rules that make it more difficult for teams to remain undefeated, the Dingoes would not have won the Triple Crown.

Judges verdict – Corruption at the Highest Levels of AFR!!

*note – the changes in rules would have made no difference to that games that Natas lost this year in the Premiership and the AFR Cup