Gran’s not happy about the AFL killing the centre bounce. She says it stood for something grander

This week we discovered from our postie Bron that the AFL is scrapping the centre bounce. You’ll have to forgive me for what follows because, quite frankly, I suspect we’ve all gone into mourning.

When Bron stood at the door and told us, Our Footy Grandma looked up from where she was knitting her first-ever Tassie Devils tea cosy and actually cried out. Like some kind of curlew. It was a horrible sound. Grandma’s brought us up with always strict instructions to “watch the game not the umpiring”, but this one caught even her unawares. No bounce! Come off it! she said to Bron. I wasn’t born yesterday.

By party-pie time the next day, Our Footy Cousin, who’s a real tech-head, had set up his own YouTube channel, The Great Centre Bounces Of History, and Grandma was glued to it. There was umpire Don Jolley coming in at an elegant slant on the Glenferrie Oval, so nimble, almost dancing to the circle in his whites. With one now infamous corkscrew twist of his body, the ball was smacked into the earth and squirted off to the south-east. The game had begun and the crowd would be chasing after it for the rest of the afternoon.

Grandma said to us: “Look how the rucks and rovers needed to be on their toes.” Yes, you could see even on the screen that their eyes locked onto that ball hitting the turf like a Casterton kelpie watching the Australian Open. And next up there was Bill Deller, his shorts a tad shorter, his hair a bit neater, his technique a little less spontaneous; but down the ball went to start the game and up it flew, straight into the colour TV era. What a YouTube channel! I can recommend it.

Over the party pies Grandma started telling us about the time before screen footage, the days of the “Original Rules”, when the very notion of “the bounce” was nothing other than a canny vernacular metaphor for the unpredictability and randomness of life. After all, Grandma asked us, who bloody knew what exact direction the ball would fly off in? It was the same as asking who knew when war would be declared, or when peace would resume?

Everyone did know, however, that reading the bounce of the ball was fundamental to the art of the local game. It’s what set gods apart from mere storytellers. Indeed, the question always asked with such anticipation in the stands at the start of every match could quite easily be translated as: who will best adapt to the irregular oval-shaped nature of our existence today?

Truth is, Grandma reckons, in the beginning the ball would not be bounced with any pretension to straightness. No fear! Built in to the whole concept of the centre bounce was the far more cosmologically profound idea of randomness. In other words, this was the Big Bang of the sport, a motif for the nature of existence that was enmeshed into the very tempo of the game. Yes, it was precisely because the direction of the ball could not be 100 per cent predicted that it made existential sense. And, by the way, it also made it fair for everyone. Unfair too. It was all just so exciting!

Who, after all, in this mortal life can predict the future? Our Footy Grandma knew a bloke at Mologa once who reckoned he could, but he got jailed for selling fluey heifers. So, no. There is precisely no one who can do it. That’s something the game itself has always known. Never forget, it’s a sentient being our game. An unpredictable, mercurial creature. Grandma reckons you wouldn’t want to mess with it. Nothing about it has ever been a fait accompli.

But now, she says gravely, no, now we’re in real trouble. In the intro to his YouTube channel, Our Footy Cousin looks straight down the camera and says, “the game’s now in danger of becoming a bettable algorithm”. Which is another way of saying it’s no longer the cherished exception to the rule.

So I do humbly, as the scribe for my footy family, dressed appropriately in scarf and beanie, put pen to paper here to beg in a somewhat unseemly fashion. I’ve passed Grandma her North Brunswick Bulls hanky and I’ve turned down the volume on The Great Centre Bounces Of History to get this right. I’ve got to be thinking straight if I’m gonna petition for retaining the profound and random beauty of the bounce.

How on earth, I ask you, can the game ever spring to life if the ground on which it is played is never properly awoken at the very outset! What magic or precious perennial myth can possibly come of that enfeebled and prosaic act of a beginning ball-up; what dynamic seed, what nourishing river of play, what specky, what goal, what smother?

With a PhD in the knockabout game, Our Footy Grandma is a scholar of impossible things. Of dreams and unlikely events, of mythological twists: the Scarlett toe-poke, the Stephen Milne moment, the Daicos dribble-goals. The triumphant, tragic, and intrinsically unpredictable nature of such moments is the secret ingredient in the meat pie of our game, the very umami, our great terroir. So surely, to align with the stars to which we all will return, it must all, always, begin at the beginning.

I beseech you, and I lower my eyes here, not to betray the unassailable torps of yesteryear but to hit up my target, to zero in on the art of the possible. Surely, each game should at the very least begin with one single symbolic awakening of the ground. A bounce. A dear ritual. An acceptance of our fate. With no recall.

Gregory Day is a former coach of the Moriac Apricots.

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