At least, if we’re going to go down that road this time, we can at least keep the concept on a smaller scale.
We’ve already discussed what the best possible Goulburn Valley League representative side could have looked like, as well as put teams against one another to underscore the competition’s quality if you ran north-south intra-league.
Here’s another vantage point, though, one that runs contrary to the above — what if the best Goulburn Valley representatives was simply the best team in the competition?
The bowls scene seems to have the right idea in the way things carry on after its district playing area seasons wrap up.
You have your regular season, your playoffs and then you determine your league champion for the year — but it certainly doesn’t end there.
Teams which win their playing area pennant then eventually go on to a district playoff against winners from their neighbouring regions, with the winner there deciding the overall representative of that governing body at a state carnival.
Now, obviously the default assumption is that ‘you can’t play football all year round’, although if that were entirely true, the Northern Territory Football League would likely be far less prestigious.
After all, the competition serves more as a vessel for state-league and country-level footballers to stay sharp through the warmer months than anything else.
It shouldn’t take a hair-frizzing stay in the Top End to provide decent stakes for people to play on beyond September, though.
What if, in the absence of a system of promotion and relegation with a clearly established hierarchy in the AFL Goulburn Murray realm, rather than merely a perceived one, there was still a way to increase the meaning behind winning a flag?
One such method would be to introduce a Champion of Champions system across Victoria, allowing premiership sides to go toe-to-toe within their geographical districts and eventually crowning an overall winner.
Maybe multiple overall winners from different regions of the state would be slightly easier to manage since you perhaps couldn’t play every weekend through to Christmas.
Nonetheless, why hasn’t football followed bowls’ lead?
How many times, by the way, would you have ever expected the above sentence to be written?
Are bowls and football the same sport physically?
No, obviously.
You won’t see midweek and weekend pennant competitions run parallel in the GVL; it’s clearly far too demanding.
This would certainly be a way to make premierships more prestigious and not necessarily just in the top division of our region.
Imagine the framework put into life like this: Echuca, two-time reigning premier, wins the flag again in 2024.
Now with the three-peat in hand, it advances to a divisional playoff with Congupna, which has secured the Murray Football League minor premiership with time to spare and stands as a heavy premiership favourite.
From there, the Murray Bombers could win through to an inter-regional meeting with, say, the Bendigo premier, which looks most likely being Sandhurst.
Alternatively, you could have the Goulburn Murray champions match up with the Ovens and Murray winners, given the history of interleague play there, and meet with the Bendigo champions in the next round.
All in all, there’s scope for all kinds of match-ups against the best in northern Victoria and, all going well, the best from down south as well; surely they don’t all need to go running off to cricket straight away.
As long as you can keep the format from dragging on until the festive break starts to loom in December, you can give clubs incentive — within reason, and heat permitting, of course — to whittle down to the state’s elite.
Before the pandemic, there was an interleague system where competitions would face off against one another on designated in-season weekends to eventually collide at the MCG once you were down to finals.
This column was not interested in making it an in-season tournament primarily because it would likely serve as a deterrent from clubs fielding their ideal sides; the odds of it being treated as an afterthought would surely rise.
Besides, although this idea would make the playing season much longer in practice, one must still respect the importance of bye weeks, especially around times like school holidays.
The inter-promotional element would certainly be attractive to neighbouring regions who want to prove supremacy, though, right?
Even just using Shepparton and Bendigo as an example: sometimes it feels like the two towns are united in boosting regional profiles, but other times it feels like they just really want to lock horns for northern Victorian sporting supremacy.
It’s about time we got a proper look at who is truly the best around without worrying about VFL commitments or interrupting people’s weeks off in the winter months in order to do it.
