I don’t know whether you noticed, but the AFL this week have brought in new rules relating to the way that players are interchanged – or the way they come on and off the ground during a game.
Teams are going to have to be very careful with the way they register their players coming on and off the ground in an orderly manner.
If you muck up, basically the emergency umpire will run out and give a free kick to the opposition in an attacking position.
It got me to thinking just how much the game changes every generation.
In the past, if you thought the opposition accidentally had an extra player on the ground, your captain would ask the umpires to stop the game. Both teams then had to line up in the middle of the ground while the field umpire did a head count.
If the opposition did have 19 men on the ground, they had their score wiped.
That actually has happened in some high level competitions right around the country over the years.
It should never have been a problem prior to the mid-1970s, because before that there was no such thing as an interchange.
Teams had 20 players (and before that 19 players), and when someone came off the ground, they had to stay off.
So it was a bit ordinary if you were 20th man most weeks because you didn’t get much game time.
That also meant that if someone was injured in the warm-up or had to pull out at the last minute for some reason, some bloke who had just played a full game of reserves got a call up to sit on the bench in the seniors.
If you look at the markings on the ground now, there are 50 metre arcs, centre squares and lines across the two centre circles.
Watch the old grand final tapes from the 1960s and you won’t see any of that.
The centre square didn’t come in until the 1970s and was designed as a way of stopping play getting clogged up around the ball-ups.
The line across the centre was introduced sometime around the 1990s because shorter, stronger ruckman would rather wrestle with a taller opponent than get jumped on by him. The League thought that was ugly.
The ‘outer’ centre circle was only introduced a few years ago to limit the run-up that ruckman can take.
In the ‘old days’ they used to come in off the Brett Lee or Dennis Lillee run-up and smash into each other, which produced a lot of knee injuries.
These changes are just the ones that I can think off of the top of my head. I wonder what rule changes will have been made in another five years’ time?
Until next week…thanks for reading,
- Jed
