Carlton could do with a Stephen Hawking-style game plan at the moment. When it comes to time and space it seems the Blues have adopted their own version of Chaos Theory.

Maybe it’s time for Mick Malthouse to grow his hair out and trade the clipboard for a slide rule. A little E=mc2.

As that other great exponent of the game, Albert Einstein, once said (and I’m paraphrasing), “The laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, whether you’re moving the ball through the central corridor, or playing for the safety of the boundary.”

I was pondering this at the weekend, as I watched my youngest playing that other strange brand of football.

A soccer dad of just two winters, I admit I’m still bamboozled by the round-ball game.

I grew up with Aussie Rules. As a little tacker I kicked the frost off the Cross Keys Oval in Strathmore each Saturday morning, chasing the egg-shaped ball through the mud with 40 other footy-obsessed 10 year-olds. Saturday afternoons in my teens were spent wrapped in a duffle jacket and beanie at the MCG.

It’s a game that’s in my blood. I understand forward pressure and numbers behind the ball. I can spot an incorrect disposal or a high tackle in a heartbeat.

Where footy is akin to breathing, soccer still feels like a Zen riddle wrapped in a pass-the-parcel. Just when I think I’m close to getting a handle on things, the whistle blows, a penalty is awarded, and my grasp on the game vanishes like dust.

Recently, I turned to my old mate Google and watched a YouTube clip called “the offside rule explained in three minutes”. Then I watched it again.

History says that soccer as we know it didn’t evolve until the mid-19th century. So why does the offside rule put me in mind of an ancient order of monks, drawing diagrams in illuminated manuscripts, writing lengthy descriptions in Latin as some kind of Medieval joke?

As I said to an equally bewildered parent on the weekend, if it takes three minutes to explain a rule, maybe it belongs in Dungeons and Dragons.

All that aside, I do see the beauty in the game. If footy is about being “centimetre perfect” (to quote the high priest of AFL vernacular, Dennis Cometti) then soccer reduces that margin to fractions of millimetres.

It’s a game of moments, when the stars align and space and time interweave into that perfect continuum. The shirts come off and crowds explode to violence. Sport’s equivalent of the big bang.

For me it’ll never replace a Cyril Rioli goal on the siren, but I’m growing to love my Sunday mornings.