AFL fixture nightmare self induced and needs to be corrected, starting with Friday double-headers

The West Australian’s Sports Editor Jackson Barrett takes a look at the big stories of each round in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. THE GOOD: HARLEY REID That wasn’t Harley Reid’s best game in a West Coast jumper. Only his seek-and-destroy fend-off on Scott Pendlebury at the second contest of the game will take residency in his highlight reels. But the Eagles can take as much confidence from Saturday’s loss to Collingwood as they did from last week’s win over Greater Western Sydney. Harley showed that he cares deeply. He is doing the hard yards with his mates at the Eagles now and it was clear he felt they were being treated like a sideshow in the Pendlebury-fest at the MCG. He wasn’t happy about it and he wanted to make a statement. The growth in the young gun’s game is that he is taking on the big moments. Sometimes it’s just winning the clearance that has to be won, or willing the ball into his hands at crucial times, or putting a hand in a chest when he thinks West Coast are at risk of being bullied. Collingwood’s response to Tylar Young’s involvement in the Jamie Elliott injury was hot-headed and stupid. Reid was right there to make sure Pendlebury and the other key provocateurs knew about it. His 20 touches, five tackles and four clearances were fine. Some of them were pretty good, others weren’t perfect, but he was up for the fight. In West Coast’s constant fight for his heart, that’s something they can take confidence in. Don’t get me started on a primetime Thursday night game played at Launceston, where we can’t even get a camera in line with the centre circle because the whole joint is a construction site. THE BAD: THE FIXTURE … AGAIN It feels as if there is a frustration with the fixture every single week at the moment — and a lot of it can be put down to the Friday night double-headers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s clearly not an easy job. Footy’s biggest game of Tetris. But there just seems to be little issues all the time. This week, the nationally-broadcast Friday night game was not the high-flying and flag-favourite Dockers’ against the Saints in front of a packed Optus Stadium. It was 17th v 18th at the MCG. And the end result is that when people want to be sitting down and tucking into a full slate of games on a Sunday, there is only two of them. What makes that even worse is that this week, the two Sunday games overlap. There is (conservatively) seven hours you could reasonably play games in on a Sunday. Between 10am and 5pm AWST. From siren to siren a game takes roughly two hours and 45 minutes. There is no good reason GWS’ win over Brisbane should have overlapped by a full quarter with Western Bulldogs’ win over Melbourne. Games hiding behind each other is not good for anyone — except maybe Essendon, because no one over here watched their stinker on Friday night. THE UGLY: 23 GOLD NUMBERS The Pendlebury circus all got a bit much during the week. It’s a milestone worth celebrating in a big way for a wonderful player and a great servant of a powerful club. He is one of the greatest Magpies of all time and one of the top players of his generation. But Collingwood got it all wrong by fatiguing the public by the time we got to the occasion. Beyond Collingwood fans, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who was looking forward to more fanfare by the time Saturday afternoon came around. The Magpies’ official Instagram account made 71 posts about Pendlebury and his milestone in the past seven days. Yep, that’s more than 10 a day. My view is that the gold No.10 was a nice touch. Relatively subtle, meaningful and something that if (not when) the record gets broken again, can be inherited by the next player. But the Magpies all running out in them was nauseating. It took all the meaning out of them. It was a staged, WWE-esque surprise entrance that just felt a bit yuck and pointless. Why does Charlie West need to wear one in his third game? Broadcast teams got sucked into the hype on the day and it all became too much. If it had been better managed by the Magpies and hadn’t become a point of such great contention across the past month, perhaps the footy world might have embraced it all a bit more.