I can still remember the exact moment. Everything on that particular day was the same, but then, in a moment, everything was very, very different.
Behind-the-goals footage had arrived in our team review at the Bulldogs. I was sat near the back of the main meeting room at Whitten Oval. Rodney Eade was our coach, and he stood at the front of the room. As our eyes adjusted to the new perspective, we squinted to find Rocket’s red laser beam pointing out my teammates and me, spread out all over the field like misbehaving ants.
A view from behind the goals during last year’s AFL grand final. The Swans’ conducted a brutal team review of the huge loss.Credit: AFL Photos
Our bums shifted in our seats, our elbows nudged the teammate next to us, faint whispers and muffled laughter drifted around the room. Yep, an unmistakable mist of incredulity had arrived.
Suddenly, there was nowhere to hide. In all the years before this, the team review had one, maybe two camera angles at the coaches’ disposal to go through the positives and negatives of our performance, variations on the side-on, broadcast perspective that you’d all be familiar with.
In 2025, it seems bizarre to reflect on this, but there were times before behind-the-goals footage was available, times that a player could be sternly questioned by a coach in front of his teammates and he might just limply answer, “I can’t remember that” and there was not much that could be done about it, without the visual evidence.
Ah, those were the days. Once the footage became available for all clubs coaches after every game, a player’s memory was made virtually redundant.
Former Western Bulldogs coach Rodney Eade addresses Ryan Griffen in 2010, the time in which behind-the-goals footage became available to clubs.Credit: Sebastian Costanzo
A coach could ask us straight out, “That’s you, why are you there? Where should you be?” A new era of footy had been ushered in. Players would be in their coaches’ spotlight for the full four quarters, and we’d never return.
The camera angle was really just an offshoot of the AFL tribunal system. As a way to combat off-the-ball incidents, the AFL rightly needed vision of the umpires’ blind spots. Having seen these offerings during a tribunal hearing, clubs around this time (2009-10), became inquisitive about its availability.
Interestingly, someone who worked at the AFL during this time told me that it was very much a staggered start. The footage was either of a poor quality or in some cases, not available (for games at infrequent locations like Tasmania or Cairns).
Before the clubs got their hands on the precious camera angle, a collaboration between the broadcasters and the venues themselves had to be agreed upon and the cost (roughly $1000 a game) would then be passed on to the clubs.
That figure might not sound much these days, but I can assure you for the football clubs who were almost broke at the time, there would have been quite the internal struggle for the budget to be given over to a coaching tool that, at the time, could have been viewed as a luxury.
“Scoring sells memberships, defence wins premierships,” is a pretty crude but catchy way to summarise a coaching philosophy, but it does go some way to capturing the spirit of coaching AFL from this time in the mid-2000s.
A coaching tool like this one, a clear(ish) view of the entire field and all 36 players – so that you could marshall your players in defensive formations, to trap another team in their defensive quarter – remains a foundation of AFL game plans.
The behind-the-goals angle is far and away the most used camera angle used by the coaches of the 18 clubs, and its sprawling influence on the game since it was introduced some 20 years ago continues to strangle free-flowing play, but win games of footy.
Are we, as footy fans better off for it, though?
When you think of the time and energy that has been spent over that period on the aesthetic of the game, I do wonder how footy would look if access to this camera angle was never granted in the first place. From the interchange cap, to the 6-6-6 rule, the stand rule, among many, many others. Maybe all of that could have been avoided if we’d just turned the cameras off, so to speak.
Coaches will argue that this advancement in the game was inevitable and part of the natural evolution of the game. And in a sense, it’s hard to push back on that sentiment. Increased player accountability is a hard thing to argue against at the elite level.
And yet, I still wonder whether more consideration could have been given. The game, perhaps like my younger self, didn’t really consider how such a seemingly small thing could have such a seismic effect on footy.
The eyes of the football world get sharper every year and one might argue, every week.
The game is played, the results come in, and we all pore over slow motion replays of reports, highlights, injuries and mistakes.
Those camera angles get closer and closer to the chaotic reality of a player’s on-field experience, while at the same time the coaches and by extension the players also have an eye in the sky, getting further away but with no less judgment.
It’s enough to make a player dizzy.
Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.
