- Mar 1, 2014
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- AFL Club
- Port Adelaide
BONUS POINTS
With 4 points per win, the AFL tournament is ripe for some kind of Bonus Point. This is my suggestion:
I'm not into any bonus point system GP, as I believe it could be exploited, particularly when a team has nothing to play for late in the season, their oppo could run amok and rack up bonus points at will.
Different game and different rules of course but the cricket authorities here virtually stuffed the Sheffield Shield (state cricket comp) which had been going for well over 100 years before they began to change it with various bonus point systems, eg one of the first changes was an extra bonus point for bowling a team out (ie 10 wickets) in the first innings, so the batting captains stymied that virtually from day one by declaring at 9 down, regardless of the score.
There were batting bonus points as well, so once the batting team was looking like scoring extra bonus points the bowling captain would set extremely negative fields and instruct their bowlers to bowl wide of the stumps with multiple fieldsmen on the boundary on both sides of the wicket which didn't exactly result in an entertaining game.
I don't know a lot about the current bonus point system except to say there are now too many contrived results, I have seen scores in recent seasons where a team can dominate 3 of the 4 days of a Shield match and finish up with just above 3 points in total for the game, and the oppo (as long as they can hang on for a draw) can get close to 2.
Under the old system even if the end result was a draw the team which dominated the match would have got a minimum of 4 points, and the oppo zero.
They used to get good crowds at Shield games for decades as well, but now many of them appear to be played in front of no more than friends and family.
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