With eight teams bunched in the middle of the AFL ladder - sixth-placed Fremantle and 13th-placed Richmond being separated by just two-and-a-half games - the focus will inevitably fall again on the flawed and compromised nature of the league's fixture.

Because two of those eight teams - Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs - play the Gold Coast Suns twice this season, while the other six - Freo, Sydney, Essendon, North Melbourne, St Kilda and Richmond - come up against the league new boys just once.

Given that the new Queensland outfit is full of 19- and 20-year-old striplings finding their way in the big-time, it has unsurprisingly provided minimal resistance in most of their 13 games (although Port Adelaide and Brisbane would beg to differ). And that was always going to be the case in their debut season.

But what that effectively means is Melbourne and the Bulldogs have got a one-game advantage over the rest of their six rivals for a finals berth this season. (Melbourne beat the Suns by 90 points in Rd 4, and will play them again in Round 23, at the MCG; the Bullies have an aggregate winning margin of 93 points in their two meetings.)

The Dees and Dogs, in fact, happen to have won the jackpot this season, because they only play Collingwood once as well. So in the great lottery that is the AFL season fixture, they have won on both counts.

Bearing all that in mind, imagine the outcry in eight weeks' time when Melbourne, say, finishes the season in eighth place on 12 wins, and Essendon just outside the eight on 11 (and the Bombers have a superior percentage, which they do at the moment). Bomber fans - not usually shy, retiring types - will storm the barricades at AFL HQ and demand blood.

And it'd be hard not to sympathise with them, or any club that missed out on September action, because of these rank inequities in the draw.

For all of the success the AFL has had with its racial vilification rules, drug-testing regime, attendance records, TV ratings and billion-dollar broadcast rights deal, the one major flaw - the great elephant in the room - is the compromised and imperfect fixture.

There's no getting away from it. While each team is not playing its rivals the same number of times during a season - be it once or twice - then the system is unjust. Some teams will always fare better with the draw than others. 

And next season the problem could become more acute still, with 18 teams and either 22 or 24 rounds. (The AFL is due to release its 2012 season structure any time now). GWS will presumably be a pushover most weeks in its debut season - and Gold Coast will still be finding its feet - so those established teams who win the 2012 fixture lottery and get to play GWS and GC twice (ie four games in total) will have a huge advantage over those teams that don't. 

The AFL finds itself in this bind because 32 home-and-away rounds (16 x 2), plus a finals series, is too onerous for the players, and would mean a season that overlapped with cricket and racing, while 16 rounds does not provide for enough football to satisfy the broadcast rights holders - not if you want to extract $1.18 billion from them anyway.

So they find themselves in this twilight zone where the 17 clubs play each other once (16 rounds) and a random selection of six of those opposition clubs twice (making 22 rounds in total).

Few elite codes in the world would tolerate the obvious unfairness in that arrangement. The NRL has 16 teams and 26 rounds, so they're no better, but the NBA, NFL, English Premier League, Finland's Pesapallo (Division One) and any other league you'd care to name tries to abide by that one elementary rule: each club plays its rivals the same number of times.

Until the AFL can say that, then its claims about running an elite competition and world's best practice are little more than hollow boasts.