Earlier in the season the Swans got
their collective noses out of joint when AFL chief executive Andrew
Demetriou publicly stated his concern over the Swans early season style
of play that for most footy fans was about as boring as watching paint
dry.

Demetriou dared to say what most of us were thinking when
he agreed the Swans were playing a “not particularly attractive” brand
of football. But he subsequently apologised to the club, which felt it
was already a hard enough road to travel to convert the heathens of
Sydney if not NSW to the AFL cause, without having its own boss talking
down the product.

So much for honesty and commonsense – but then
the Swans have always been super sensitive to anything remotely
critical of the way they do things in Australia’s most fickle sporting
fishbowl. It would seem the club would rather bury its head in denial
than face the fact that they were either winning or losing ugly.

So
today’s postponed conference think tank after the fallout from the
Demetriou diss, provides the league and the Swans with the opportunity
to not only get a few things off their chest, but to figure out how
both can turn around not only a team that needs to win games that are
worth watching, but how the AFL can make much greater inroads into the
sporting psyche and loyalties of the Sydney public.

When, as Caroline Wilson points out in today’s Age, the Swans’ live telecast on Saturday night was “outrated at times in Sydney by a repeat of the SBS Japanese cooking show, The Iron Chef.”
While there is no ready recipe for fixing what ails the Swans and AFL
on and off the field in NSW, at least coach Paul Roos needs to accept
he has to radically change his team’s methods this weekend when it is
to be hoped its brand of football is actually more exciting than a
cooking show!