It has occasionally been suggested that one of the linchpins of comedy is timing.
Football commentary provides some evidence to support this. Not that there was anything inherently wrong last week, ahead of Adelaide v West Coast, when Anthony Hudson suggested on Fox Footy channel that the match was a "dress rehearsal for the finals".
What it took to make that seem slightly hilarious was that the comment aired in close proximity to a fusillade of station promos featuring players of all finals clubs emphatically asserting that home-and-away games are absolutely nothing like finals football.
In fairness, Hudson's timing was pitch-perfect and comedy-free at the end of the first quarter, with the Crows 50 points to the good, when he exclaimed in tones somewhere between awe and hyperventilation: "What an unbelievable display! The Crows have demolished the Eagles in 30 minutes of incredible football".
So many of our commentary chums seem to strive for the epigrammatic - that unfortunate mindset of trying to encapsulate the moment as a colourful print media lead for tomorrow's paper. Some of us may know this as the Mark Nicholas Fallacy. The problem there is that talking is a non-print medium, so it usually comes out as flowery, overcooked dog-water.
Whereas, Hudson hit the moment just right, without trying for any alliteration, wordplay or Walkley Award consideration of any kind. There's probably a lesson somewhere in that.
Of course, as has been made abundantly clear, the idea is not to learn lessons in football. Instead you just drop the substitute rule a year or two past the use-by date, and then pretend it was some kind of essential innovative experiment dedicated to the advancement of football sciences, as opposed to a stunningly pointless balls-up from go to whoa.
And while we're on the tangent, it's that the substitute rule never managed the one thing it was specifically implemented to do — lowering the number of interchanges — which remains the outstanding non-achievement of this remarkable work of crackpottery.
Put it this way, in the annals of successful footy rules innovation, nobody is ever going to mistake this one for the out-on-the-full rule. But to return to the inextricable pairing of comedy and timing, we don't have to go any further than the aforementioned round 22 match, Crows v Eagles.
Mark Ricciuto: "Gee, they're good at reading the play, the Eagles defence - they just watch the ball instead of the man." An unexceptionable observation under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, the circumstances at the time were that the Eagles were four goals down, and as he finished the sentence, Adelaide made it five.
However, the major analytical highlight of the penultimate round was not a matter of timing so much as advanced diagnostic science.
Jon Ralph, Fox Footy: "Deledio said he only came to when the trainers arrived, which indicates that he lost consciousness."
If they ever make an updated version of the medical investigation drama series Quincy ME, clearly television already has its new Jack Klugman.
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