Mark Duffield - The Editorial (05.08.2026)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Mark Duffield** (1:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the SENWA radio studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium. It is a Wednesday morning in Perth, and we're here thanks to Beaumont Homes. Award-winning design, built to be loved forever. Mostly cloudy in Perth today. The chance of a shower atop of 20 degrees made in WA for WA. This is Mornings with Mark Duffield on SENWA.
So if Hollywood had The Notebook, which is the tale of an elderly man's ongoing and unconditional love for his Alzheimer's-suffering wife, the AFL now has The Memo, the tale of Greg Swan's none-too-subtle reminder to AFL coaches not to rest players en masse in the lead-in to the league's first ever wild card round, lest they face potential penalties running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. The problem for this AFL administration is unintended consequences. Every time it comes up with a bright idea, which thinks will boost the game's standing, its exposure, and its metrics, it creates a set of unintended consequences it didn't see coming.
So take opening round, for example.
It was a good idea. It wanted its teams in its frontier northern states to get some clear air to launch their seasons. Now, whether it did the teams in the northern states any good or not, it certainly stirred up a ruckus amongst the clubs who weren't involved, not least of whom were Fremantle, who in their first match of the year ran out of legs against Geelong, who were playing their second match of the year. That was one of only two matches the Dockers have lost so far this year. The problem for the AFL is if teams clinched their wild card rounds birth ahead of round 24, they might rest a bunch of players from their final home and away games, thus cancelling out one of the key advantages top six teams will enjoy over them in the finals. And in some circumstances, it could be argued that the lower ranked team may even enjoy an advantage of preparation over the higher ranked team. Now you go back to Ross Lyon resting the bulk of his Fremantle team for them final home and away match against St Kilda in 2013 to save them two trips to Victoria in as many weeks, the second trip of which would have been a qualifying final. Of course, Ross the boss's mass rest nearly had an unintensified consequence at an entirely different level. He had ordered the rest operating under the assumption that Geelong would beat Brisbane at the Cattery in their final game, which would have eliminated any chance of Fremantle overtaking them on the ladder and securing their own home qualifying final.
Now, the Cats did beat the Lions by a solitary point. So in trying to give his team their best chance of beating the Cats in Victoria, Lion very nearly cost them the chance of playing the game at home. As it turned out, the rest worked wonders for the Dockers, who went to Geelong in the first week of the finals and beat the Cats to set up their first and only grand final appearance in the AFL. A few years later, after the Dockers had mass rested again and North Melbourne's Brad Scott had copied the tactic, the league moved to remove the incentive to rest players en masse by inserting the pre-finals buy. Now, many of us reckon that is in the wrong place and should be replaced by a pre-grand final buy to prevent a player missing the big game with concussion, which, let's face it, will happen sooner or later. But of course, with the advent of the wild card round, the incentive to rest could well exist again for the small number of teams in contention. Swans Memo raised eyebrows and hackles amongst AFL coaches who defended their own right to prepare their own team to maximise the chances of AFL final success.