An interesting and intelligent insight into the draft system from a former player's perspective - Pull the strings

Great reading, thanks WJ. Tim Boyle has quickly become the ex-footballer who you HAVE to read, his insights being honest, unique, and beautifully written.

Love Tim Boyle's writing. We are so lucky as a sport to have such great sports writers.

Love Tim Boyle's writing. We are so lucky as a sport to have such great sports writers.

Some great, some incredibly poor. It's amazing that the likes of the Herald Sun crew + Caro can get a gig when there's great writers like Boyle, Flanagan and Quayle going around.

I loved his allusion to him and his mate watching "The Big Labowski" after he heard he was drafted. Boyle is the Dude!!

• The Big Lebowski: What makes a man? Is it doing the right thing?
• The Dude: Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

• The Dude: Yeah,well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Edited November 24, 201311 yr by PaulRB

Ok maybe I'm not at the intellectual level to understand this article but to me it's just a load of ramblings searching for a Greg Baum esque theme but landing nowhere.

Boyle strikes me as a player who spent too much of his career thinking, analysing and generally having his mind warped by bad injuries and now has a strange pseudo intellectual view of AFL that he likes to dish out in a stream of random memories and metaphors. I can't for the life of me work out what the Kevin Sheedy moment has to do with the general point of this article which is that draftees start out living the dream and then eventually overvalue a career in which they can't even articulate where what or why things happened, be they successful or not.

Love Tim Boyle's writing. We are so lucky as a sport to have such great sports writers.

Great? Que?

Very readable does not great make.

Great? Que?

Very readable does not great make.

my point is that the AFL ...(in my opinion) seems to produce writers with a more poetic sense than many other sports. I find that compared to the blokesy nature of NRL or the analytical nature of Soccer, reflective AFL writers bring a different angle to the sport that other codes never reach. No....true; AD ; not all of them achieve this and true; maybe great is a strong word but its quicker to write than "really quite good". I hope this explains and if it doesn't I am sure you can work it out.

In my view, the most readable football writers in Australia are Peter Fitzsimons (Rugby) and Bob Murphy (AFL) although neither of them write much about their code's mechanics per se; more about the things that surround it. I like Martin Flanagan very much, but find some of his articles a bit twee.

Leigh Matthews is the best AFL football-centric voice in the media. In the main most callers are ok - vanilla but ok.

And I cannot stand Dwayne Russell, Brian Taylor, Dermie and David King ( arrrgh) or anyone else who tries to use a telestrator during the half time break. Complete [censored] that is.