TRUE BLUEY -- AFL with Guy McKenna
Article Courtesy of Gold Coast Bulletin
SHOULD matches be shortened and is the game too fast?
There is always going to be a lot of debate about this and St Kilda coach Ross Lyon this week floated the option of shortening the game to a soccer-style 90 minutes.
We at the Gold Coast Football Club wouldn't mind shorter games.
That's because if we stopped the game at three quarter-time the past couple of weeks we would have been thereabouts!
You see rugby league and rugby union with 80 minutes and soccer with 90-minute matches.
We play 120 minutes and that's a lot of demand on the body.
The debate on shortening the game will continue to rage on for some time yet.
And so will the debate on how fast do we want the game to become.
We had Andrew McKay from the AFL rules committee say recently that they want to speed the game up even more. But that comes at a cost.
I look at the hamstring injuries that have happened recently to the likes of St Kilda's Nick Riewoldt and West Coast's Daniel Kerr.
Look at their history and Kerr has had a few hamstring injuries and I know Riewoldt has as well.
Everyone has talked about Riewoldt's pre-match warm-up and how much that could have contributed to his injury as well.
He is out there an hour and a half before the match doing his sprints.
I look at my players' warm-up before a game closely. I say to my coaches now 'If I did a warm-up like this player, I don't think I would get through the game'.
With Riewoldt and Kerr, they are both getting on in their careers so you can imagine the kilometres that have gone through their legs.
If you want to speed the game up even further, I just don't know how clubs will be able to prevent injuries.
I think the game now has a good balance in that regard.
This week, the Gold Coast travels to Melbourne for our first away trip of the VFL season.
Travel bonds teams because you are on the plane and on the bus together -- it is actually more of a positive than a negative.
The negative is the travel itself and it can't be a level playing field because Werribee on Saturday would not have spent two hours on a plane and 40 minutes on a bus.
That's the disadvantage but through recovery and rehydrating, you have to be able to make those things up.
The players will get a treat on Sunday as we are taking the group to the MCG for the traditional Anzac Day clash between Collingwood and Essendon.
It is a great opportunity for the boys to soak up the day and the pressure of football which comes when there are 90,000 packed into a stadium.
Hopefully we can stay a little longer this time.
We went to the corresponding game last year and left at the 20-minute mark when the Pies were up by 13 points.
What followed was one of the greatest comebacks of the season when the Bombers pinched the match at the death.
