The AFL is committed to tinkering constantly with the rules. Tinkering, tinkering, always tinkering away like merry elves in a cobbler’s store. 

Except in this case, when the cobblers learn about it they are not delighted.

For next season, we’ve really gone all out. We’re like someone who’s always shoplifted but then suddenly goes and robs a bank. We’ve never felt this alive!

These rules are really just common sense and will help simplify our great game. Here they are:

• If a kick originates from within your defensive fifty, and hits the ground and bounces to the left, an opponent can yell ‘is love just a chemical reaction?’ and will receive a free kick, but only in the first and third quarter in games played in the third week of a month. The free kick can be reversed if the player who kicked the ball responds ‘love is a higher state of human consciousness that transcends the bounds of our physical restraints on this world’.
• At centre bounces, each team must have seven players who are Geminis, four Aries and two Sagittarians. All Leos must start on the bench. 
• At every ruck contest, each team must nominate a player to list their second, third, fourth and fifth favourite movies with the assumption that The Shawshank Redemption is every AFL players’ favourite movie. If a player’s favourite movie isn’t The Shawshank Redemption, they will be no longer eligible to play AFL. At the end of the season, whoever has the best top five as voted by the Real Estate Institute, will win the Brownlow.
• The ‘hands in the back’ rule has been changed so that it causes the most inconsistent decisions imaginable. It’s going to drive everyone crazy and will generate heaps of content for our media partners.
• ‘Razor’ Ray Chamberlain has his own set of rules, and even we don’t know what they are.
• The Bachelor must select a winner at the end of every season.
• Runners will only be able to enter the field of play on their birthday and the major holy days of Zoroastrianism.
• A fifty-meter penalty will now be called a ‘roughly fifty meters depending on the umpire, their mood and their ability to judge distance which varies wildly, I mean some of them are so obviously guessing it ridiculous’.  
• We’ve made some more changes to ruck contests, but they’re so confusing even we don’t understand them. We wrote them down, but when we went back and read our notes, we couldn’t make a lot of sense of them. We decided to just put them in the back of the board paper that went to the Commission and hoped no one would read them or if they did, would think they would look stupid to say they didn’t understand them. 

These rules are just minor tweaks, and we’re confident they’ll be welcomed with open arms.

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