While it’s possible for a commentator to call their own team, should they?

It’s a perilous tightrope which is always awkward for the commentator and the listener.

Special observes by Garry Lyon for a Melbourne game, Eddie McGuire for Collingwood, Mark Ricciuto for the Crow games and James Brayshaw for the Kangaroos. It’s banal these days to hear a mythology or chairman of a football unit commentating. Until recent years, there was a separation of functions.

30 or so years ago, if you had a formal character in a squad, it was very unlikely you would commentate at all, let alone your own team. Then ten or so years ago, more big club power brokers started going commentating gigs, and the uneasy relationship proliferated. Now the slippery slope has got to the point where it seems deliberate for the broadcaster to pick a club myth to do commentating for their own team.

They try their best to stay neutral, striving with the privilege words to use to conceal their loyalties, clearing respectful criticisms about the positive elements of the opponent’s performance and apparently exploiting their strong knowledge of the game to give valuable insights in a neutral form.

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So, the self-evident question is- does it truly matter? Perhaps this a great way to hear from the best memories in the game as the theatre of the game plays out.

The answer to this on the surface would be that it doesn’t matter.

However, another perspective on this question might be quite illustrative of a much bigger problem permeating the AFL institution.

The first part of the concern is that during activities, there was still instants where the commentator’s love spill over, perhaps subconsciously. Lyon’s call of the Crows handball toward the boundary line in the dying minutes of the Melbourne versus Adelaide game might be a case in point. Ricciuto’s observation from the sideline of that activity that Taylor Walker and Darcy Fogarty didn’t have much to worry about after being reported might be another.

There is an issue when golf-club power brokers are having such a direct affect on the way that key incidents are communicated to the live public. Sure, they are entitled to their beliefs on these incidents, but not in the moment that it comes, where the commentator’s response is so pivotal to how the media last-minute reports on it. These reporters are conflicted in their roles, and that matters.

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Secondly, and probably more importantly, these relations further centres the ability held by a small few in video games. There is an inherent arrogance to think you can commentate for a game that you might be the president or enormous power broker for. This arrangement transmits the message that these figures are bigger than video games. So big-hearted that they don’t need to worry about their self-evident conflict in the best interests.

We all just seem to tolerate it. It flies in the face of the concept that Australian football is the people’s game and it contradicts the capabilities needed for a variety of voices to feed into how our recreation controls. This pluralism is what represents prisons strong. Without numerous enunciates, you get decisions procreated for the benefit of the few, rather than the majority.

As an example, how is it possible that a grand finalist might have only played at the MCG formerly in the adolescent rounds, whereas Collingwood, Melbourne, Hawthorn and Richmond play there between ten and 14 periods a year? Why is this huge inequality at least partially addressed? Additionally, how is Eddie McGuire able to play puppeteer to Gillon McLachlan on the Port prison bar guernsey issue, even though he’s not formally connected to Collingwood any longer?

There is a reason why Aristotle, the Romans and the forefathers of modern democracies embedded the notion of break-up of abilities as a key element of a democracy.

As US political philosopher James Madison wrote in 1788,” the accumulation of all powers, legislative, manager, and judiciary, in the same handwritings, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether inherited, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be enunciated the most interpretation of tyranny .”

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