TANK HEAVEN

It's the week of the bye and our sometime resident expert on all things trivial, Randy M.M. Savage, blew into the country yesterday and delivered an outline of his master's thesis at one of our tertiary institutions. Just to prove what a waste of time most academic studies are, we bring you his work ...

TANK HEAVEN by Randy M.M. Savage

An idiots guide to tanking

Tanking in Australian football does not exist on an official level having been deemed a nonsense on several occasions by AFL el supremo Andrew Vlad Demetriou who believes that it goes against the grain of the sport, that it's un-Australian and as welcome here as swine flu.

The reality however, is that the dreaded pig disease is not only here but exists in profusion in this country and so, many believe is tanking.

Indeed, it has been claimed that several exponents of the art of tanking have been carrying it out underground for some time. Brett Ratten and his Carlton side of 2007 are cited as the most obvious example but the Doggies, who dropped a couple of handy players from their team for their last game in 2004 allegedly because they were retiring anyway, are said to have gotten away with it as well. There have also been several other less well documented instances in recent years.

If the practice does exist (and the academic world remains keenly divided on the issue) then, at the very least, it must legal because nobody at official level has declared it to be illegal. The great ancient philosophers would of course argue that if something didn't exist in the first place, then it could never be declared illegal anyway. Therefore, the entire topic is valid for open discussion and this paper has been prepared to provide guidelines for an understanding of the tanking phenomenon and the measurement of its effect in practical terms.

Tanking in team sports occurs when a team intentionally loses a game to obtain a perceived future competitive advantage. In the context of the AFL, a club is best understood to be engaging in tanking when it seeks to gain a priority draft selection available for clubs which finish the season with no more than 16 premiership points. If a club achieves this for two years in a row (as Carlton did in 2006-7) the priority pick comes at the beginning of the first round of the draft. If it's a one off occurrence, it comes at the start of round two.

The significance of the Carlton tank of 2007 is that it achieved what is known as the "grand slam" of tanking – the spectacular feat of winning four games in the first half of the season and then losing all 11 in the second half to gain a first round priority pick. The Blues therefore established a benchmark for tanking and the beauty of their effort was that they did so without Vlad even raising one of his abundant eyebrows – an achievement which effectively took the heat off any club or coach that decided to practice the art of tanking. In effect, it now had the AFL's unofficial imprimatur.

Tanking has developed a greater importance in 2009 because of changes to the AFL draft rules in advance of the introduction of two new clubs from the Gold Coast and West Sydney regions which will give them the pick of the new players to be recruited in the coming few years.

I have established a guide to measuring the tank and I set out below the table entitled "Tankometer^TM 2009, Mark I".

The Tankometer^TM commences operation officially at the halfway mark of the AFL season and currently, there are five clubs left in the race for priority draft picks although, only West Coast and Melbourne are eligible for selections at the beginning of the first round. This is an important factor in understanding the contextual realities inherent in the operation of the Tankometer^TM 2009, Mark I.

North Melbourne is included in the Tankometer^TM at this stage because, with only 4 wins to date and the Shinboner spirit rapidly ebbing away, it remains a mathematical possibility of finishing with the requisite number of premiership points to merit a priority draft selection at the end of the year. The Kangaroos would have to lose all games to emulate the Blues of 2007 and even if they do, it will only be regarded as a "slam" and not a "grand slam" because the reward will be an early second round priority pick (although there's also a remote possibility that they could somehow also manage to snaffle a wooden spoon and possible first pick in what would truly be an unlikely and miraculous scenario for the Roos).

Both Western Australian teams are included and that of course gives added significance to the Derby in Round 17 when one of the teams will come perilously close to tanking extinction (although a win to either side in the interim would change that equation). With an extra first round pick at stake, I expect the wily Eagle coach John Worsfold to have the edge over Mark Harvey but the game will definitely be one of the significant games on the Tankometer^TM table.

Melbourne and Richmond are the poorest performed teams in the competition and a strong technical argument could be mounted to suggest that they could not possibly be accused of tanking because they're simply not good enough to win five games anyway. Only time will tell on that score.

So here is Tankometer^TM 2009, Mark I with games between Tankometer^TM teams being marked in red. The first of these is the Round 12 game between Richmond and West Coast at Etihad Stadium. The game might at least give debutant Tiger coach Jade Rawlings good cause to believe that "it's better to be dead than red!"