Midweek season opener dilutes sense of occasion

But then I'm a man in my late 50s, reared on the concept of six matches played at six different grounds, all starting at 2.10pm on a Saturday afternoon.

I no longer kid myself that it isn't all that long ago. It is. Indeed, this year marks 40 years since South Melbourne moved to Sydney, Sunday games became commonplace, and the VFL took its first tentative steps towards becoming an AFL.

Yet there are special memories from that time which, had the proprietors of the game paid just a little more attention to preserving our cultural heritage, the enthusiastic kids of today could still be experiencing, and which, importantly, might have instilled in them the same sort of quasi-religious fervour for the sport many of us had all those years ago.

No, I'm not for a moment suggesting that the start time of just one of more than 200 games on the AFL calendar each year could prove pivotal to Australian football's survival as a popular sport.

But a lot of little things, in fact, do often add up. And somehow diluting the sense of occasion surrounding the opening of a new AFL season feels like one of them.

I was all for the scheduling of a grand final rematch between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs as the first game of the new 2022 season. But on a Wednesday night? Seriously? With what used to be the first game of each new season retaining that slot on the Thursday night? Another game on Friday night? Then the weekend slab of games? That's five straight days of football to play nine games.

The next five rounds after this opener will all be spread across at least four playing days, and one of them five. Too much in my view. Even after a six-month layoff over summer. And if people start suffering football "fatigue" come the latter part of the season, perhaps this gluttonous opening to each new season is a potential explanation.

Obviously, television coverage now plays the most important part in fixture scheduling, hence the elevation over the last couple of decades of "Friday Night Football" to such lofty heights. But in recent years, we've seen that Thursdays, in a TV sense, can also be highly successful.

And this year, despite wanting to get the Dees and Dogs on first, the AFL didn't have the you-know-whats to give them what had been the slot for the to-date pretty uneventful Richmond-Carlton games.

So has that given us three prime TV time "blockbusters" in a row to open the new season? Or just made that whole opening feel a little rushed, a little overly-manufactured and, consequently, a little less special.

Of course, this is hardly just an AFL problem. The "killing the goose that laid the golden egg" issue could be applied to tennis, to golf, and certainly to cricket, which now has to house three different formats within its schedule limitations, and has created all sorts of issues for itself in doing so.

Tennis and golf, especially, feel these days like they're played virtually around the clock. No sooner has a player won one of the majors that they're sprinting off to another corner of the globe to contest some little-known, far less important title elsewhere. There never seems any time to celebrate or reflect upon the important moments. The AFL grand final (given the six-month sabbatical which follows it) is one of the few times there's space left for anyone to pore over, analyse in detail, even just re-live one of the biggest moments football has to offer. And they are also the moments the impressionable remember, and which help forge their supporting devotion.

I still smile at the memory of my teenage self catching the tram or train to the first game of a new football season, walking up the street to the venue with your army of fellow travellers, eagerly snapping up a "Footy Record" and diving straight for the match page to see exactly what numbers the "new boys" in your team would be wearing.

Of course, all that information is out there well before the start of a season now, Practice games are televised.

There's just as much written in mainstream media about "Fantasy Football" now before a new season starts as there is the actual competition.

There's a glut of football media full of former stars reliving their glory days or revelling in each other's celebritydom as much as they're discussing which team will win a game and why.

It's what happens the more what was once just a sport becomes an industry with multiple purposes.

Personally, I preferred the days when the AFL essentially had just one purpose - running a football competition.

And, more specifically, when the first game of a new season on a crisp Saturday afternoon really did feel like a big deal, not just the start of an endless procession of games crammed into even the unlikeliest start times available.