While the AFL continues to street its rival codes in the slick, largely blemish-free, way it runs a 21st century sporting organisation, there is one thing - season after season - which prevents the indigenous code from becoming truly great, which stops the AFL being held up around the world as the very model of professionalism. And that is its 22-round home-and-away fixture.

The reason why the draw is such a blight on the game is simple: there are 16 teams, but only 22 weekends set aside for the regular season. That means each team plays its 15 rivals once, and seven of those 15 a second time, making a total of 22. The pitfalls and inequity of such an arrangement are obvious: some clubs will end up having a much easier draw than others. Some clubs will, thanks to their fixture, be kicking downhill and downwind for all four quarters; others will find themselves doing the hard yards heading the other way.

An extreme example of what could happen is this: a middle-ranking team with finals aspirations in 2010 - let's say Carlton - might be drawn to play twice seven teams that end up making the finals. Another middle-ranking team with finals aspirations next year - let's say Essendon - might end up playing the bottom seven teams as its ‘double-headers'. Essendon makes the finals, but Carlton doesn't - and who could seriously say the draw did not have a major impact on that outcome? The Blues' degree of difficulty over the 22-week season was infinitely higher.

Only if each team plays every other team the same number of times - once or twice - can the league say, hand on heart, it is fielding an uncompromised, unsullied competition.

Geelong has played Collingwood just once a season since 2003. That means Collingwood, over the past three seasons anyway, when Geelong has been virtually unbeatable, has picked up a game each year on many of its rivals.

There is an imbalance, too, in who gets to play where. St Kilda was drawn to play 15 games at its home ground, Etihad Stadium, last year but didn't set foot on the MCG turf till round 22. There are dozens of other anomalies, but too many to mention.

The 2010 fixture will be released to clubs on October 30. But, as usual, selective bits and pieces have been leaked to the media already. The Western Bulldogs appear to have done the right thing by a couple of their loyal servants at the Herald-Sun. The Age has been given less detail, but perhaps its contacts at the AFL are on holiday.

If what has been reported this morning is right, the AFL has abandoned its strategy of pitting the previous year's grand finalists against each other in round one. St Kilda and Geelong won't meet till round 13 - and that will be their only stoush for the season, an unusual move given the quality of their 2009 matches. But Geelong and Collingwood will play each other twice for the first time in six years.

The league does its best to even up the draw, and the playing field, but all it amounts to is window dressing. It can massage the fixture all it likes, pandering to TV networks one year, the non-Victorian sides another year and even occasionally the smaller, less popular clubs. It can bang on about the competition evening out over a period of time. It can bore us senseless with talk about ‘world's best practice'.

But, sorry boys, this square peg doesn't fit in that round hole. And until it does, we are following and supporting a flawed competition.