THE most interesting aspect of Saturday night's match at the MCG was the response of the two coaches to the inevitable inquisition that followed. It was almost as though Alastair Clarkson and Ross Lyon didn't get the line of questioning. So consumed were they in the intensity of the chess game that they didn't understand that everyone else found it boring.

As boring as watching, well, a game of chess. Don't get me wrong, I actually like chess. It's one of the greatest games known to man. I'm a very slow, careful player. It drives opponents mad.

If there were spectators, it would … don't worry, it's irrelevant.

This is the problem. Chess is not a great spectator sport. There's even argument as to whether it's a sport at all. And here in Australia, it's somehow not quite of our culture. But on Saturday night, just over 36,000 people went to the MCG expecting to see football and got chess.

It was like one of those themed chess boards: the pieces carved out like footballers and painted in the colours of Hawthorn and St Kilda.

Clarkson and Lyon had their pawns regularly making forays two-thirds the length of the board, only to be picked off by predators that were defending the big tall pieces at either end.

When the men and women of the media asked the coaches why we got chess and not footy, they didn't understand the fuss. They'd been playing their game with such fierce concentration that they didn't recognise what a crashing bore it had been. Such is the nature of their jobs.

To mix the sporting metaphor, this is reminiscent of the mindset in interstate cricket in the early 1980s. Captains would do anything to avoid defeat. Even when a game was balanced in their favour, the first priority would be to ensure that the possibility of a loss didn't enter the equation.

At times, captains were questioned about this attitude and were quick to remind their interrogators that they didn't really understand the game: that you never give a sucker an even break.

One day, it was pointed out to these sages that if they expected people to be interested, they had to see themselves, at least to some extent, as entertainers. They re-thought their ways and discovered that they could actually gain better results by employing a positive approach to the game. Australian cricket has prospered ever since.

The culture of football, of course, is different. The winning or losing of every game feels, to tens of thousands of fans, like all that matters in the world for two-and-a-half hours every week.

The responsibility of coaching the teams that compete in that environment must be daunting. Perhaps at times, though, it is blinding.

The fans also want to see joyful football from uninhibited footballers, not inhibited football from the joyless. Too often these days we get the latter.

Neither the Saints and the Hawks, nor their coaches, are alone in this. Football is steadily being turned into a game for coaches that the paying public can only hope to understand.

St Kilda's recent statistics tell the story well: across the 2004 and 2005 seasons, it was the most free-scoring team in the AFL. It had a brilliant, attacking midfield, plus Fraser Gehrig, Nick Riewoldt, Stephen Milne, Justin Koschitzke and others up front.

The Saints played to their strength. This year, still with the same array of target forwards, they are outscoring only one team.

As every chess player knows, if all you ever do is defend your King, you're eventually going to be worn down anyway. That's precisely what happened to Ross Lyon's outfit on Saturday night.