It’s Grand Final week and the Hawks rest eight. Eight! Including Buddy and Cyril. Fyfe has battled a shoulder injury all year, and yet now Freo sends him out to surgery. The Dees don’t appeal Sylvia’s patently excessive two week suspension, and the Crows don’t give Otten nearly enough attempts to recall what day it is and the names of his next of kin. It’s finals, Bicks! Players don’t get concussed in finals. It’s a controversial thing to say, but some AFL clubs don’t seem to think fantasy football is real.

And yet for 304,412 coaches, AFL Dreamteam is very real. It’s the game of luck and strategy that dominates our weekends, glues us to our phones and computers, and destroys our relationships. My wife was initially encouraging of me and my Maribyrnong Mustangs – ‘It’s great you’ve found a hobby,’ she fatefully said, way back in 2006 – but her appetite has now waned for Sunday night viewing spectaculars such as ‘Can Matthew Lobbe eke out a few late marks against Essendon?’ Nevertheless, despite the domestic hostility, despite the mocking tones of fantasy football nobodies such as Gerard Healy and Robert Walls (neither of whom could lace the boots of junk time greats such as Joel Bowden or Leigh Montagna), we continue on. Most of us have no choice. We’re addicted.

Every year, our Grand Finals fall during the last home and away round – the idea being that the full roster of AFL players are available for the last time. It’s meant to produce a fair contest. And yet increasingly, this is a long way from the reality. By round 24 (nee Round 22), clubs are either resting players for the finals, sending them off for surgery, retiring the old, rotating the young, or tanking for draft picks. As a result, our perfectly sculpted squads of 33, so primed and prolific just a fortnight earlier, end up looking like the Vikings have just ridden through.

Something has to be done. There needs to be awareness raised of the sort of damage the relentless pursuit of real AFL success is exacting on fantasy football. I think the best way to do this would be to introduce a ‘Fantasy Round’, in the style of marketing successes such as the Women’s and Indigenous Rounds. For the sake of uncompromised Grand Finals, the Fantasy Round should be in the last week of home and away, and its features should be:

(1) No resting of players

(2) No tagging common captain choices (Ablett, Swan, Boyd, Mitchell)

(3) Compulsory benching of taggers (I’m looking at you, Michael Doughty and Liam Picken)

(4) A competition wide edict against excessive handball (2 points); unless it’s a give and receive handball then kick situation (5 points)

(5) Stacked backlines with up to three loose men, so Sam Fisher types can chip catatonically back and forth (6 points per mark and kick)

(6) Tickertape at the bottom of the telecast that provides live points updates

(7) Halftime Dreamteam entertainment that honours the greats of the game (eg Bowden brothers chipping back and forth, Chad Cornes taking uncontested marks)

(8) The unveiling of a statue of Dean Cox roving his own hit out (4 points)

I can already hear the so-called football ‘purists’ moaning that the Fantasy Round will compromise the competition. They’ll say that we 304,412 coaches aren’t coaches at all. They’ll say that we’re nutters engaged in some borderline Rain Man-like pursuit that has nothing to do with the actual slap of skin on skin or the smell of eucalyptus oil or the roar of the fans on that first Saturday in October (nee last Saturday in September).

To those knockers I say this: I’m an excellent driver. I drive the Maribyrnong Mustangs with an astute and lingering eye. I opened up the Dreamteam site for the purposes of this article, and spent a productive 25 minutes musing on whether Cameron Pederson should take the field for the Mustangs this week in place of a clearly ailing Greg Broughton. I camp out on the AFL site. I gobble up news about injuries, suspensions, positional changes and selections. For the sake of the Mustangs, I’m ten times more engaged than I’ve ever been with AFL footy, and that includes the year I spent on Hawthorn’s list. This game is fun. The guys in our league, the CFL, have communal get-togethers at Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment so we can put faces to the names we sledge online. We even have a website, www.cfldreamteam.com that outlines club histories, head to head records, news of the week and club songs. Mine is ‘Kick Long, Sweet Maribyrnong’ to the tune of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. Freo should adopt it.

This weekend in the CFL Grand Final, the author of that website, Daff, takes his Hindsight Mayors into battle against Wayne’s The Millanes. Daff is the traditional power of our competition, a fantasy football tragic who has a virtual trophy cabinet stuffed full of silverware (really! Check the site), and Wayne is a newcomer. I’ll be watching the game to the last kick.

And so will my wife.