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When Greg Swann was appointed executive general manager of football performance at the AFL, many saw him as the man to cure all the sport’s ills. He was one of those footy people known primarily by his nickname, a man who projected an air of knockabout affability, a man renowned for getting things done. He would apply “the pub test” to many of football’s most pressing issues: the draft, the rules, the umpiring, the AFL review centre (ARC). “Swanny”, we were assured, was the man who would make footy’s trains run on time.

One of the first things Swann’s predecessor, Laura Kane, did in the role was embark on an overseas study tour. Certain sports, she found, lent themselves to technological intervention. The geometry of tennis and baseball made it far easier to implement. She fast-tracked the trial of ball-tracking technology. But Australian football, she stressed, was an incredibly difficult sport to properly utilise technology. The shape of the grounds, the oval ball, the way goals often come down to the length of a player’s fingernail, all made it tough to land on a definitive decision.

Swann would no doubt concur after a rancorous round seven blighted by interminable delays, rewinds, inconsistencies and hair splitting. Combined with other areas that fall under his remit – the tribunal, holding the ball interpretation and changes to father-son and academy bidding – the disillusionment with the way the sport is being run has reached boiling point.

I’ll park the issues of umpiring, drafting and the tribunal for the time being, and zero in on the ARC. The frustration, I suspect, is threefold. The first concern – and maybe this is just me – is the way technology generally is constantly interrupting us, and rarely in a way that is psychologically enriching. During the St Kilda and West Coast game, I had a request for two-factor authentication, a missed call from Romania, birthday wishes from a pilates studio and a news alert about an attempted presidential assassination. Technology’s imposition on the game specifically, especially when it’s not up to scratch – and especially when it involves rewinding and nulling a section of play – only adds more layers of aggravation.

The second issue relates to the league and the way they are constantly changing laws, interpretations and parameters on the run. This isn’t just related to matters of fingernails and millimetres. It extends to how they prosecute homophobic slurs, how clubs bid on draftees, and how basic laws of the game are explained, trained and implemented. There is no clarity or consistency on any of these. They change from season to season, and sometimes from week to week. In the case of the ARC, the parameters in round eight will be completely different to those of round seven. Swann announced on Monday the ARC will no longer intervene in scores unless the goal umpire asks for a review, but will still review all goals while the ball is being taken back to the middle. The scope to recall Ben Keays’ goal for Adelaide against Sydney in 2023 for instance – exactly the kind of scenario where ARC intervention is warranted and workable – has now been rescinded.

The third and final frustration pertains to the nature of the sport itself, and the futility of striving for technological perfection. In football – and this is something that’s pushed by the dozens of TV panel shows – there is often an assumption that every flaw can be fixed and that every problem can be solved. But Australian rules football is an inherently chaotic and fast-moving sport. A sport that operates in the grey zone, a sport that in speed, shape and form is fundamentally unsuited to rewinding and reviewing.

David Barham, a TV producer responsible for significant innovations in cricket and football coverage, wrote a piece in the Age last week prosecuting this precise argument. Our slavish devotion to technology, he wrote, undermines the umpires and is subject to too much distortion to be of any real use. “What can be solved, should be solved,” he argued, which in footy is limited to balls ricocheting off the post and whether or not a ball has crossed the goalline.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought endeavours to calculate the meaning of life. The pan-dimensional beings behind it are confronted by a pair of protesting philosophers. “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty,” they shout. The growing deference to technology, not just in Australian football but in all sports, seems predicated on the erasure of all doubt and uncertainty. In doing so, it only creates more of it.