Suspicious minds might think the AFL planned to sabotage 100-year celebrations for rugby league, writes Philip Derriman.
It's a big year for sporting anniversaries. There are at least three centenaries to celebrate: the foundation of rugby league in Australia; Don Bradman's birth; and the world heavyweight title fight in Sydney between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns.
There is also the 150th anniversary of the birth of Australian football and, some days ago, the AFL began running a TV commercial in Sydney celebrating the event.
That's when the anniversary market suddenly started to seem a little cluttered.
Immediately, there was a suspicion within the rugby league fraternity that the AFL ad was a spoiling tactic by a code that has lately emerged as a possible rival for league, particularly in areas of western Sydney that league has always considered its own.
As one senior figure in the league hierarchy put it yesterday: "We can't say for sure, but you'd have to think they're trying to rain on our parade."
League is running its own anniversary TV commercial, of course, which most viewers seem to think is extremely well done if not bordering on brilliant.
Legends of long ago appear on the screen in action scenes with the players of the present or recent past.
Reg Gasnier is seen passing to Mark Gasnier, for instance.
The AFL commercial features the actor Bill Hunter, who presents events in Australia over the past 150 years in terms of what was happening at the time in Australian football.
It's a clever ad, too, but it doesn't have the same emotive appeal as league's.
So if there's a battle between the league and AFL ads - which some people on the league side tend to imagine - then the league ad probably wins the day.
But the more interesting question is whether, by running the 150th anniversary ad, the AFL is really trying to steal some of league's thunder in its centenary year.
Why do league people suspect the AFL? Because, over the years, nobody has ever made much of the 1858 match between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College that is supposed to have been the first game of Australian football. Or so league people say.
Now, just as league is starting to pop the cork on its centenary, the AFL suddenly drags an anniversary out of nowhere that it feels compelled to celebrate.
The controversy is bubbling away on several fronts.
Having dug into the original rules of all the codes, league historian Sean Fagan maintains that the 1858 match in Melbourne, held over three days, was probably a rugby match. If true, this would take most of the wind from the AFL's 150th sails.
Fagan also points out that the music accompanying the AFL commercial was composed by England's Edward Elgar, who, among other things, wrote the Pomp and Circumstance March from which England's unofficial anthem, Land of Hope and Glory, takes its melody.
"How ironic that the AFL's 150 years ad unwittingly gives a nod to their true origins," Fagan said.
So what does the AFL say in response? A spokesman expressed surprise at league's suspicions about its motives.
He said the AFL began planning the code's 150th anniversary celebrations 3½ years ago, at the same time it commissioned the Australian football history that has just been published.
At that time, the spokesman said, the AFL was not even aware that 2008 would also be the centenary year of rugby league.
"We hope the NRL has an outstanding anniversary year," the AFL spokesman said.
He sure sounded like he meant it, too.
