LOST amid the COVID-stained papers at AFL House is league boss Gillon McLachlan's review of competitions outside the national league - and his desire for a universal second-tier.
This would have meant any Australian football player living in Subiaco could take to the field in the WAFL working to the same rules as a VFL player residing in Dandenong in Victoria or Redcliffe in Queensland or Paddington in Sydney. He would also have the umpires reading the same rules for use in the NTFL for a Darwin-based player living at Fanny Bay.
And, of course, the same would apply to a player living in Blair Athol dreaming of developing an SANFL league career with ambitions to play for the Western Bulldogs in the AFL.
This is "Australia's Game".
Or so it should be. Today, Australian football fails to be a universally Australian game, as McLachlan had come to recognise before his diary was overloaded by a pandemic.
Australian football is much like our national railway grid. For more than 150 years, Australia's 32,000 kilometres of railway tracks have been thrown to ground on three gauges - narrow, standard and broad. It was not until 1966 that anyone could travel across Australia from the Pacific shores of Sydney to the Indian Ocean hitting up Perth's beaches without needing to change trains with rolling stock suited to the varying railway tracks across three States.
Today, a South Australian-based AFL footballer will have umpires in the SANFL and AFL work to differing rules and interpretations if his kick goes over a boundary line.
He must be a statue on the mark in the national league but can audition for the Australian ballet while standing the mark in the SANFL.
He could sit as a medical substitute in an AFL game at Adelaide Oval but nowhere else in South Australian football.
If he transferred to the new East Coast VFL he would need to abide by anti-density rules that apply nowhere else in Australian football.
Dare we compare how the holding-the-ball rule is interpreted league by league?
And this is billed as "Australia's Game".
Just as the nation has cost itself dearly with differing railway gauges, Australian football is creating unnecessary headaches by having varying rule books across many completions and more than one "Laws of the Game" committee. This is staggering for a sport that seeks a national identity.
The SANFL will argue - as each Australian colony did before federation in 1901 - that it has a right to act independently of the AFL and it is merely standing for integrity for a competition that has long beat its own drum.
But does this serve the greater good of the Australian game?
Port Adelaide football chief Chris Davies, a former SANFL football boss, has for several years challenged the growing disparity between the national competition and the South Australian State league.
"Unfortunately," Davies said last week when the SA Football Commission failed to endorse the AFL medical substitute, "this issue is a microcosm of what we are facing with the SANFL on an increasingly regular basis.
"The AFL introduces rules and regulations to the State leagues under its auspices, designed to assist in the development of the game and the talent within it, with the SANFL picking and choosing the parts of the rules and regulations that it will accept based on the position of the SANFL at the time."
Australian football needs leadership on this front today.
Remarkably, the commentary of a former Adelaide-based AFL coach - who endured his own battles with SANFL-based coaches in the early 1990s - has turned this critical debate into a divide-and-conquer theme about Port Adelaide and the SANFL.
Yet, Adelaide Football Club coach Matthew Nicks - who has major needs for fast development of his players across the SANFL-AFL lines - has fully endorsed Port Adelaide's stand for consistency in the rule book between all leagues.
This debate on building a national game with one set of rules is too important to be derailed by point scoring built on petty and stupid debates that simply hold back Australia's Game.
