The AFL should do us all a favour and kill off the lame duck that is the NAB Challenge once and for all.

No one cares about it, and no one remembers it.

Why should the league expect players, whose careers at the top level are short enough, to risk injury in a game that means nothing?

• Young Bulldog Tom Liberatore to miss entire season
• Eagle Eric Mackenzie has ruptured ACL
• Why pre-season injuries are soul destroying

Defender Eric Mackenzie was an important cog of the Eagles’ backline but will now miss the entire season. Photo: Getty

On Friday night, the West Coast Eagles lost their club champion and best defender Eric Mackenzie to a serious knee injury.

Less than 24 hours later, the Western Bulldogs lost their reigning best-and-fairest, brilliant young on-baller Tom Liberatore.

Like Mackenzie, he was the victim of a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament.

Both Liberatore and Mackenzie will miss the entire 2015 season.

Will fans of either club remember that they both enjoyed wins in their respective pre-season games?

Or will they just feel the bile rise in their throats at the fact that they have lost their most important player for the coming season?

Liberatore is the heart and soul of the Dogs’ engine room, while in Mackenzie the Eagles had probably the best one-on-one key defender in the AFL, despite what All Australian selectors will have you believe.

I can accept losing players in the regular season. At least then they would know that their injury was for a good cause, that they sacrificed themselves for the only currency that matters – premiership points.

Former St Kilda coach Grant Thomas feels the same way.

Why clubs risk their greatest assets (players) in gimmicky games solely for AFL promotion is baffling. Plus they don’t get paid for it!

— Grant Thomas (@Thomo_Grant) February 28, 2015

And another question, why would a naming rights sponsor want to see their brand associated with a product so insipid, so disposable, so blatantly unnecessary as the AFL’s pre-season competition?

Remember that time Wayne Carey tore it up in an Ansett Cup match?

What about the time Gary Ablett Jr won a Wizard Home Loans Cup match off his own boot?

No? Funny how games with no meaning don’t tend to linger long in the memory banks.

The NAB Challenge is the latest incarnation of an association that goes back to 2006, when the first ‘NAB Cup’ was played.

It’s been used as a marketing tool, a vehicle to take the game to far-flung towns.

All very well and good, but the AFL should pay attention to how reinvigorated everyone has become about one-day cricket since the start of the World Cup.

The best marketing tool is to have the games with meaning. And to have the very best talent fit and firing for the real stuff.

Maybe next year every club should bring in top-up players for the blight that is the NAB Challenge, and then they can all hit round one with a full complement of talent.