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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has apologized for the mistakes leading up to the attacks on the Christchurch Mosque and stated that accountability will be in place
Any player selected during the AFL draft on Wednesday night will be compared to a current or past champion as if their name only had to be spoken for their destiny to be fulfilled.
The club with selection 47 will find it hard to believe that a young midfielder « slipped through to us » who put him in the top five, and another happy scout will explain that he is the seeds of a bumper premiership – has sown the crop.
The media schoolmasters will then mark the performance of each club from A to E, regardless of the fact that such a crystal ball is comparable to declaring a Cox plate winner at a yearling sale.
These are the AFL Draft Night clichés where hope and despair always trump reason and logic.
The self-deception and myth-making should be swallowed this time with an even larger grain of salt. The clubs will convene 18-year-old Victorian students this year due to COVID-19 restrictions.
If there is additional uncertainty, it will be like swirling around blindfolded in a darts tournament to make them dizzy and sightless.
The idea that AFL design is more of a lottery than an exact science is an abomination for the self-proclaimed design experts and message board experts who have joined the design industry, or for those fans who just believe want some great tips there will transform their below par team.
That wishful thinking is anchored in the AFL’s usually hard selling of an event that helps achieve the league’s goal of dominating the media news cycle even in the once-merciful football-free months.
Even the language of the draft is calibrated to enforce the idea that the game’s yard is a finely calculated means of distributing talent, not a largely speculative means of distributing the apparently most talented youth and a group of evolving players and physically gifted athletes among the 18 clubs.
When a player with a late degree enters first-team selection, the initial oversight is portrayed as a sign of a shrewd judgment by a shrewd recruiting manager, not a failure of well-resourced clubs or the system itself to identify that talent sooner.
Similarly, identifying by design players who slip through the cracks becomes a heartwarming story of perseverance rather than an overt warning that introducing a ridiculously early minimum age (18) for a design system that is on US sports based, means a lot of the game’s talent isn’t fully formed before it’s selected.
This tender age of conscripts is the AFL’s biggest failure, and coupled with the questionable establishment of a free agency, a large part of the reason the AFL’s recruitment and transfer system fails to perform its most basic function – which is the divide between the representatives significantly decreased teams with the best and worst performers.
There are endless studies in U.S. football showing that after three or four years of strenuous college play, the number one high school quarterback is rarely the highest-rated player in his position.
However, on Wednesday night, since the AFL does not have an intermediate college level, it will be sending the local equivalent of these high school quarterbacks directly to the AFL clubs.
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To some, last year’s number one standout first three games, Matthew Rowell for the Gold Coast Suns, validate the design’s ability to identify « elite » talent and even seem to fuel the fall of those who believe that there are players under the age of 18 who could play at the highest level.
However, it is unknown and seldom publicly researched how a development system is organized in such a way that players are only 18 years old before the decisive judgment – at different carnivals and « combinations » in which the players perform differently in terms of speed and performance Strength for the recruiter and then doing the design yourself – perverts and even dilutes the talent pool.
When players are forced to climax during high school, talent identification starts even earlier now, as elite training academies and early-age competitions sharpen a pyramid that opens at a convenient but seemingly premature sweet spot by the age of 18 Years has reached its peak.
The players who turned out for the mandatory pre-draft interviews are, for the most part, fitter, rounder, and more media-aware, and possibly closer to the seniors pick than players of earlier eras who may still have battled for a spot in the old days 19 years.
But how many potential AFL standard players dropped out because they were not physically or emotionally mature enough to meet the now almost ridiculously high standards demanded by even the most recent draft aspirants?
Like many of those who missed the elite teams, they will do the hard work it takes to catch up in suburban or country competitions where the chances of getting the attention of an AFL club are now relatively slim are?
And – how relevant – how many of those who go through the developmental meat grinder will suffer from the kind of anxiety that can arise when subjected to intense public judgment based on your ranking draft and potential, not necessarily because of your skills?
Amid the big smiles of the « young champions » and the hope that enthusiastic recruiters have for their eager fans, few of these questions are asked on Wednesday evening.
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Essendon Football Club, Australian Football League Draft, Collingwood Football Club, Western Bulldogs, Sydney Swans, Gold Coast Football Club
World News – AU – Hope and despair are always important as reason and logic on AFL Draft Night
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