AS someone who has been twiddling my thumbs waiting for footy to return, I consumed Thursday night’s Collingwood versus Richmond opener in the same way somebody lost in the desert would gladly drink dirty water.

It wasn’t necessarily pretty, but it was arguably the two best teams in the AFL going head-to-head, and my main concern – a lack of a raucous crowd dampening the competitive spirit – was eliminated in the first five minutes.

Both teams were playing at 100 per cent intensity, and the back-and-forth contest went right down to the final seconds, ending in a 36-36 draw after minutes on end of desperate defending at both ends.

I was genuinely blown away to head to Twitter and Facebook after the game to see the public consensus of the game was negative. But maybe it shouldn’t have been.

For years the AFL has preached to the public that the game needs constant amendments to increase its entertainment value, and for some reason, the league decided its narrative would be ‘more points = good’.

As coaching in the AFL took massive strides forward in the early 2000s, and defensive philosophies like “zone” concepts became not just commonplace, but ubiquitous amongst professional and semi-professional clubs, scoring naturally began to fall.

First, it was the death of the 100-goal season as key power forwards no longer had to just beat their direct matchup to kick 10 in a day, with clubs eventually realising it would take the efforts of an entire team to stop players like Buddy Frankin winning games off his own boot.

Then came the tackling and pressure development, where the value of a small forward became more about the ability to hurry and harass opposition players than kick goals themselves.

But during this entire defensive revolution, the league continued to tell fans that low-scoring games are the product of a broken game that needs to be fixed.

Due to this, the AFL backed itself into a very specific corner when it announced the 2020 season will be played with shorter quarters – 16 minutes instead of 20 – in the interest of player welfare, which was a commendable decision.

However, the AFL had already acknowledged studies that showed scoring increased later in quarters (when fatigue is at its highest) when it introduced the interchange cap in 2014. It was designed to limit the amount of rotations a team could make, thus increasing fatigue and hindering the ability for teams to pressure at maximum effectiveness late in games.

So now, with shorter quarters, decreased fatigue, advancing defensive strategies, and months of rust to knock off, the AFL has found itself in the perfect storm for low-scoring football games. And most ironically, its own decade-long campaign to discount the entertainment value of an old-fashioned footy slugfest, with more blood lips than goals, has come back to bite it.

If people watching footy for the first time in months decide that Richmond and Collingwood, boasting seven members of last year’s 40-man All-Australian squad, playing to their first draw since 1917, is a rubbish spectacle, then it’s time to review exactly how the game is being marketed.