THE last days of September each year have been known to inspire writing. Historian and Carlton supporter, Manning Clark, penned an essay on the morning of the 1981 grand final, expressing his feelings about the event and the passions it invariably aroused within him.

"Anguish or ecstasy or despair," he wrote, "I propose to do it again. Like my fellow-barrackers, I am an incurable sufferer from the strange infirmity of grand final day."

So am I, and I have enjoyed a working life that has made "doing it", annually, possible. Today, along with 90-odd thousand lucky ones, I will again make the great pilgrimage.

After a week in which so much has been said and written about those who can't get a ticket, or those who missed Geelong's preliminary final, the sense of privilege is strong.

While it clearly is a consolation prize for supporters who have followed their team through hell and high water for as long as 44 years, at least there is television. More than four million Australians will experience the grand final that way this afternoon.

The crowd at the MCG will represent a little over 2 per cent of the total national audience. On the 30th anniversary of the first live telecast within Victoria of the big game, the importance of TV coverage to the public is worth noting.

Yet TV's role in football is rarely other than a target for derision. It even has an extended moniker designed to make the point. Like "Triple-Brownlow-Medallist-Bobby-Skilton", but with the opposite sentiment, it is "The-Great-God-Television".

If there is a choice between seeing it as an insatiable monster devouring all in its path, or as the medium through which almost 98 per cent of those who wish to watch the grand final can, the former is overwhelmingly the more popular option.

This is not to say that television is without sin. As a member of the crowd last Friday night, I was annoyed at the frequency of delays before the umpires could re-start play after goals. Television's problem is that if a commercial break occurs after a goal, this is its only chance to replay the goal.

It will happen again today, hopefully not as much, and it's an issue the AFL should monitor closely. Despite the imbalance of numbers — TV viewers to spectators — the autonomy of the event and its audience must be protected.

Television does, and will continue to, make requests of the AFL in the interests of enhancing its coverage. It is to judge it unfairly, though, to see this simply as self-serving.

Although there are three television networks currently covering the AFL, and inevitably each will look for ways of advancing its own performance, such advancement is also about improving the result for the vast majority who rely on TV for their football viewing.

An issue demonstrating a preparedness by television to look for the best for the football viewer is the use of the time-clock.

Network Ten, for which I work, chooses to revert to the traditional "count-up" clock with five minutes left in any game. It has been much-pilloried for sticking to its guns. The critics ask why it would reject what is available.

John Harms, in The Age this week, unintentionally summed it up. Writing vibrantly of his experience as a Geelong supporter at the Friday night preliminary final, he described the last minutes thus: "We lead by 11. As I'm mouthing the words, 'We couldn't lose from here', Medhurst steers one through. 'No, surely not.' Like another prayer. 'Please, no.' This would be too much. The clock gets beyond 32 minutes. Hands over mouths. Screaming. Hearts pounding. Siren. The ground erupts."

Is this not the quintessential football experience: the music of the siren? Or the death-knell. Who would want to change that? Why does the AFL, in giving television access to actual time, encourage one experience for those at the ground and another for television viewers?

All but the converted will hope today's game is similarly thrilling. As Manning Clark wrote in 1981: "It is possible that the scores will be level as the game enters the time-on period in the last quarter. Then none of the wisdom of the ages will help."