Category: TWIF

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

Winter is here. The goals aren’t.

Last week saw eight games of footy and approximately eight goals across an entire round.

As winter falls on the football fields the goals tend to dry up, but not normally to this extent. No team scored more than 81 points in a game, a (non-COVID) record since decimal currency (probably).

But overall, the footy was…enjoyable? We had four games decided by less than two goals, and all bar one by four goals or less.

Already it is looking more like an anomaly rather than a long term trend, but it still warrants a little more attention than normal in coming weeks.

This week in football we have:

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Are the finalists set?

TWIF survey

According to the writers of This Week In Football (and Ricky Mangidis of the Shinboner and Len Phillips of the internet) it might not be far away.

Six teams were locked into the top eight the mid-year survey. Eleven teams were nominated across the 13 voters, with eight teams clearly ahead of three sides garnering some interest.

This aligns with how the computer models complied by Max Barry’s Squiggle see the season playing out from here. There seems to be a gap opening up between Fremantle in eighth and GWS in a projected ninth.

Some voters saw this uniformity as “pretty boring” but sometimes the boring option is the right one. But there’s still a fair amount of footy to play out.

Interesting, no voter nominated Sydney to make the finals despite their recent history of making late charges towards finals.

Contributors were also asked about the SPOONRACE, and it was even more straightforward, with twelve votes for West Coast and one for Richmond.

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Clang a gong, we are on

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

Last week over on CreditToDuBois I wrote about the three-year clangiversary of Hawthorn setting the record for most clangers in a match.

I wanted to provide a bit of a broader overview of the clanger. We have data on clangers going back to 1998. Ted Hopkins, who co-founded Champion Data, is the one who popularised what has since become an integral part of the footy lexicon.

I’d wager however that many of us (and even many broadcasters and journalists) don’t have more than a general sense of what a clanger is, so let’s bring out the virtual whiteboard.

Now, how many clangers happen per game?

If you look at just the numbers you’ll see a massive uptick in clangers since 1998. I don’t have a definitive answer on this, but I strongly suspect this is partly due to improvements in data capture and categorisation. Some of those actions above weren’t collected in the early days of Champion Data.

We can see that since 1998 the average clangers per game has tripled. If we move to the second slide we can see that free kicks have stayed relatively stable, while other sources of clangers have grown significantly.

From 2021 onwards we can see that the majority of clangers are disposals gone awry.

We know what a clanger is, and we know how often they occur, but we haven’t addressed the key question – do they matter?

Let’s look at the profiles of winning teams from 1998 onwards: 

We find that over the last 5 years, a lower clanger rate (clangers / disposals) is a meaningfully better win predictor than a positive disposal differential.

Having a lot of clangers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re performing poorly – some of the best players in the league frequently top the count. What matters is why you’re getting them – is it because you’re getting a lot of the ball, or is it because you’re being far less efficient with it than your opponent.

Before we get to our top (bottom?) list, let’s take a quick look at the clanger profiles of each team.

And finally, here’s the 20 worst clanger counts, clanger differentials, and clanger rate differentials

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Surprises all around

TWIF survey

The league may have separated into groups at the top and the bottom, but that doesn’t neccessarily mean it is who we thought it would have been at the start of the year.

This Week In Football contributors were asked which teams had surprised them the most this year, and which had disappointed.

Reflecting the evenness of the league and of pre-season expectations, a wide variety of teams were nominated.

The most surprising side according to the voters has been the top 4 aspirant Suns, with the rise of the Crows and re-rise of Collingwood also causing some surprise.

Reflecting that “surprising” doesn’t just mean unexpectedly rising up the ladder, Richmond also got a couple of nods.

“Richmond are way ahead of where I thought they’d be. In hindsight, you can probably point to them still having a useful experienced defensive core as a starting point, but 3 wins is probably 2 more than what I’d have thought their best case scenario would be to this point.”

The voter who chose the Dogs provided a solid explanation for the surprise:

“I thought they were going to find their depth wanting and battle to perform with a coach who was distracted by his contract issues and an interpersonal style that isn’t necessarily for everyone.”

A much stronger consensus emerged on the question of who has disappointed observers.

One voter provided a clear description of the disappointment.

“For knowing exactly what their flaws were but doubling down on largely the same ball movement patterns of the last few years.”

Roughly half went for the Blues, who after widespread expectations of taking a theoretically strong list to the next level, are floundering on the very limits of finals possibilities.

North Melbourne managed to disappoint a couple of respondents even against their own low expectations, while other likely September spectators like Sydney and Port Adelaide also got nods.

One can only assume Collingwood being disappointing was a nomination by someone hoping to see them fail.

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How is footy going, and what we’d change about it

TWIF survey

Turn on the radio and the panel shows and some weeks you’d be convinced FOOTBALL IS IN TROUBLE.

Well, maybe its time to shoot the messenger instead.

This Week In Football contributors were asked about the state of the game in the survey, in an open ended format. Despite the lack of direction, 12 of the 13 respondents either directly or indirectly mentioning that the game is in a good state or as good as it has been.

The thirteenth didn’t criticise the quality of the modern game, but said that the game wasn’t good enough to sustain the ever extending season.

The good current balance between attack and defence was raised by several writers, with one saying:

“There’s reasonable balance in attack and defence, the best players are shining through, and a nice amount of tactical and strategic variation.”

Another added:

“(The game is) in a decent sweet spot balancing ball use and contest work. The best teams can do both, and those who can only do one or the other get punished fairly regularly.”

A clear focus of some was on the off-field side of the game.

“The on-field product’s as good as it’s ever been but the off-field media slop is at a tipping point of sheer dogshit.”

There’s also a common concern amongst footy media, fanatics and insiders that the amount of footy might be hitting saturation levels.

There’s just way too much of it. Both from a media sense -which is pretty obvious and something you can block out – but even then 207 games is too many. Nine games a week is too many. It’s only one extra round but I reckon Gather Round has been a tipping point where the season becomes too long and games don’t matter as much as they should.

Umpiring, rule interpretation and the MRO also came under the hammer.

There are clearly some serious issues that need working out with the approach to MRO and umpiring consistency and interpretation though.

So if the game is in a generally good state, albeit with some concerns, what would our contributors fix?

Responses to this question were more specific to changes. A number of contributors suggested that the recent rule changes were a positive thing when talking about the state of the game, but others criticised their application.

There was some questioning of the equalisation off field as well, with Hawthorn on someone’s chopping block.

There was also a continued focus on needing to improve the understanding and decision making around tackling and prior opportunity.

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Who kicks it out on the full?

Lincoln Tracy | @lincolntracy

This is an excerpt of a longer piece I’ve written over on my blog, so please check out that version if you’re interested in this topic.

The out of bounds on the full rule was first introduced in 1969, where – as the name implies – a free kick is paid against any player who kicks the ball out of bounds on the full. Since then, football games at every level are met by groans from supporters when a player concedes this type of free kick, whether it be from a rushed kick out of the back line that just carries over the boundary on the wing, or a crucial shot at goal that gets absolutely sprayed off the boot.

But which player and team kicks it out on the full the most? And which games have seen the most balls end up in the crowd, instead of their intended location?

In the 328 AFL games that have been played since the start of the 2024 season, there have been 1903 free kicks for out on the full against 541 players. There have been 133 players with a single kick out on the full, 157 players who have kicked it out on the full at least five times, 15 players who have kicked it out on the full at least 10 times, and one player who has kicked it out on the full 15 or more times.

That one player? Shai Bolton.

I was surprised to see a number of these names on the list. Bolton and Izak Rankine were a little unexpected, given they aren’t always high-possession players (although the number of kicks a player has does impact the proportion of kicks that can go out on the full). Max Holmes has been touted as the best draft pick of the 2020s to date, while Hugh McCluggage and Jordan Dawson are arguably having career-best seasons.

Based on the list above, you can begin to understand why the Brisbane Lions, Geelong, and Adelaide find themselves at the pointy end of the table in terms of having the most out on the full kicks. And despite Carlton’s trouble moving the ball in 2025, they don’t seem to have as much of an issue kicking the ball out on the full (got to celebrate the small victories, right?).

Since the start of 2024 the most out on the full kicks by an individual player during a match is three, which has been done 10 times – most recently by Brisbane’s Zac Bailey against Adelaide last weekend (including two in the final quarter when the game was on the line). Other players to have three out on the fulls in a single game include Oskar Baker (Round 5, 2024), Brody Mihocek (R7 2024), Nathan Broad (R19 2024), and Jack Gunston (R6 2025).  

I hope that, at the very least, this post makes for some interesting discussion with your footy-loving mates.

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Which players are overrated and underrated?

TWIF survey

Naturally, asking a bunch of footy analysts to indulge in some hot takery about players being overrated elicited a fair amount of caution. Most didn’t like the question at all, but a few of the braver souls took some shots.

It’s probably worth recalling, too, the parable of Tyrese Halliburton, who was rather cruelly voted “most overrated” by his own NBA peers in April. He is now leading his Pacers into an NBA Finals lead against the Thunder, and is just two wins away from a ring (and a Finals MVP).

Overrate THAT

— Tyrese Haliburton (@TyHaliburton22) April 30, 2025

The only player to be mentioned twice for either question was Ben King, noted for perhaps being a little one-dimensional.

Several contributors identified midfielders who tend to catch the public eye. Nick Daicos, Jason Horne-Francis, Zak Butters, Sam Walsh and Patrick Cripps were all identified by someone as being perhaps a little too well-regarded.

That multiple members of two spluttering midfields were mentioned is perhaps not a coincidence.

Horne-Francis was mentioned for his defensive game and for his role causing Port to struggle to fit and balance their midfielders. Cripps was highlighted simply as very good at things that aren’t that valuable at present.

Someone also didn’t appreciate the hype around Archie Perkins.

In terms of underrated players, a lot of people simply mentioned someone from their own team, which means naming them probably identifies the respondent.

Among non-homer answers were many midfielders in a neat balance against the focus on them in the overrated question. Among these underrated midfielders were the likes of Ed Richards, Noah Anderson, Tom Atkins, Ollie Dempsey and Josh Dunkley. Dunkley was rather poetically/hungrily described as doing “all the mise en place so the chefs can cook”.

Defenders in the underrated mix were Connor Idun (balancing the focus in the AA team on Lachie Ash) and Ryan Lester.

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Which player would you want at your club?

TWIF Survey

It’s a juicy question. Out of anyone available in the league, which player would be the best fit at your club.

We didn’t ask whether it was just for a year, or forever.

That reflected the split in votes received for different players.

Some of our voters probably recognise that the most valuable recruits are young players of proven value.

Such players can provide potentially a decade of very good service to a club, helping move the dial on a sustained push to success.

However, it turns out that what many of our seasoned and sober analysts actually want to experience is the short term joy of just seeing the best player in the league run around in your own colours.

Nearly a third of all respondents want the 30 year old Marcus Bontempelli at their club over anyone else.

Several contributors went for younger stars like Pickett and Daicos while some sought to fill specific needs like big forwards or inside midfielders, but really, it was all about the Bonk here.

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XScore Pissers

Joe Cordy

My favourite kind of game to watch is an xScore Pisser.

They’re an opportunity to revel in the chaos of the sport, and the fact that a significant on-paper advantage is never truly safe from it just not being your day. 

For those who are unaware, expected score (AKA xScore) is a measurement of goalkicking accuracy. Every shot in a game is compared to a sample of similar shots based on location and situation to get an xScore value based on the average amount of points it scores.

For example, a shot that results in a goal 50% of the time, a behind 40% of the time, and a miss in the remaining 10% will have a value of (50% of 6) + (40% of 1) + (10% of 0) = 3 + 0.4 = 3.4 points. The total xScore for a match is the sum of every shot’s xScore value. 

If you’ve ever felt a team was either squandering or capitalising on their chances more than usual, xScore is the measurement that’d back you up. 

Since 2021 the current crop of amateur analysts have been able to record xScores for each match, and there have been two obvious takeaways:

• Over the course of a whole season, almost every team will end up within +/- 3 points of their xScore per game. The few exceptions are teams who funnel a disproportionate share of their shots through a small number of exceptionally good or bad players.
• Despite everybody regressing to the mean eventually, it has more variance week to week than virtually any other statistic. 

The latter point is where chaos gets introduced, and you find your xScore pissers. 

The xScore pisser isn’t a uniform type of game – rather there are several types of pisser to soothe the soul.

Double Swing

The classic of the genre is the double swing. When one team kicks well above their expected total, in perfect juxtaposition to their opponents wastefulness in front of goal.

You can typically find a low-scale example of one of these every other weekend or so, such as Round 12’s perfect mirror match of Walyalup vs Gold Coast where the visitors triumphed 9.10.64 – 11.9.75 from xScores of 75.5 and 64.9 respectively.

The really special games are rarer though. To see a proper swing not just between two teams, but two specific players both taking the lion’s share of their team’s looks at goal. 

In Round 21 2021, in one of the few games able to be played in Melbourne that season, the top of the ladder – premiership favourite – Bulldogs took on 10th place finals hopefuls Essendon.

The game, for the most part, played out how you’d expect: Bulldogs comfortably won KPIs like Inside 50s (60-39), contested possessions (127-108) and shots at goal (33-23), for an xScore finish of 114.6 – 76.5. This margin would see a team win the match 98.6% of the time according to Wheelo Rating’s model.

The beauty and tragedy of football though is sometimes despite having the clear talent advantage across the field, you can find yourself relying on one tall idiot to put the points on the board.

Both teams went in with one such idiot, with Josh Bruce and Peter Wright at the spear tip of either team’s attack. Josh Bruce, for his part, played a reasonable game: scoring 3.2.20 from 7 shots, and taking 7 marks (3 contested). Unfortunately for him and his team, his counterpart at the other end was performing alchemy. 

Peter Wright turned the same number of marks, one more shot, and less favourable positioning into 7.0.42, his best goal tally to date. 

Despite their domination of almost every other phase of play, the Dogs went down 12.12.84 to 15.7.97 for a 51-point swing from the expected margin. On their own Bruce and Wright combined for 27 of these. 

None of that helped the Bombers a few weeks later trying to end their finals drought against the same opposition, where they finished 27 points below their xScore, with Peter Wright not registering a shot on goal.

But a pisser is a pisser, and it made for one great night of chaos.

Taking Your Chances

The more common example is when one team, for one reason or another, simply cannot hit the final target. They can restrict their opponent’s chances, they can generate their own, but they can’t execute the only skill that determines the result.

There’s one club that is consistently on the wrong end of these results, and one club that is almost as consistently the beneficiary. 

Coming in to Round 16 2023 the Giants’ season was just barely hanging on to the hope of finals, sitting at 6-8 in 14th place. They had put together a bit of form winning 3 of their last 4, with the solitary loss being a single goal margin to Richmond.

The Demons had been going strong across the season, but were coming off a 15-point loss to Geelong where they kicked 8.15.63 from an xScore of 75.2. 

If they’d managed to just be not great in front of goals again they would likely have won reasonably comfortably, happy to simply secure four points. Instead they put on an all-time great display of not taking your chances. 

Despite falling just 3 points short of their expected total from the week before, and holding their opponents to 7.5.47 from an expected 44.1, Melbourne put up 5.15.45 to lose by two points. The worst offenders were Pickett, Petracca, Viney and Sparrow who generated a scoreboard impact of 1.9.15 from an expected 38. 

Nobody has benefited more from opposition inaccuracy since 2021 than the Giants, but this was their masterpiece.

Deadeye Dicks

The last and possibly most aggravating variation on the xScore Pisser for the losing team is when despite creating opportunities, and even making the most of them, your opponents completely forget how to miss for just one game. 

There are a couple recent examples of this: Hawthorn finishing two goals above their xScore total of 83.1 against the Suns in Darwin, while also restricting their quality and quantity of opportunities to 70.6, but still going down to 104-96 being one. 

The highlight of this subgenre that’s stuck in my mind since I watched it unfold however was the 2022 Anzac Day clash. 

Despite coming into their marquee fixture with a 1-4 record against a more talented opposition, Essendon had virtually everything they could hope for to go their way. They won the arm wrestles of territory, possession, shots on goal, and even found an unlikely goal source in Alec Waterman putting up 4.1 for the day. 

Despite a pretty meagre xScore total of 66.1, they managed to exceed it by 15.9 points for a respectable 12.10.82 final score. The only Essendon could’ve lost is exactly the way they did: with almost every opposition player making the most of their one opportunity, and a couple of centrepieces with golden boots.

Collingwood finished on a total of 15.3.93, outperforming expectations by over six goals. They found eight individual goal-scorers on the day, the two obvious standouts being Jack Ginnivan and Brody Mihocek arguably playing the best games of their Collingwood career, as they combined for nine goals from ten shots. 

The first entry in Macrae’s long history of being on the right side of fine margins, and in my opinion, still the funniest.

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Around the Grounds

• Check out Gemma Bastiani’s final part of a four part series that is the definitive document on the tactical evolution of the AFLW in its first decade. This time, she’s covering midfield development.
• At the AFL website, Cal Twomey looks at how openness about neutrodiversity and mental health is changing AFL recruiting and player welfare.
• Erin Phillips’ speech from the Hall of Fame event was pretty moving. 

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work here.

Before the Bounce

The back half of the season is underway with the race for finals firmly in train. With the turning of the corner This Week In Football decided to take an internal stocktake of how the the game is going in 2025.

This week we will run through the mid year All Australian team, while next week will week we will go through the teams that have surprised us, disappointed us, who we think will make finals and a whole lot more.

This Week In Football we have:

The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – defence

On Tuesday afternoon, one TWIF contributor summed up the task at hand.

The All Australian selections are hard. I may actually be developing some empathy.

Every year the public and media descend at two times to determine their best team of the year, ahead of the choices by official selectors.

With 18 teams and a range of talented players, selecting the best of the best is tough. To mark the halfway point of the season(ish) we’ve taken a bit of time to poll contributors about various elements of the game, including votes for an all-Australian team at this point.

With 11 entries from contributors and friends of the show, there’s hopefully a good mix of perspectives here and a fairly solid consensus team has emerged.

Let’s run through it line by line with some comments from entrants along the way, and then look at the end result, starting with the defenders.

All up, twenty-eight different players were nominated across 11 writers. Perhaps this is a sign of the depth of defenders across the competition. Maybe it demonstrates of how hard it is to evaluate defence, and who stands out at that end of the ground.

The top eight vote getters ended up quite heavy on talls. But there were two smaller players joing them as leading nominees: a rapidly emerging Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Bailey Dale.

Meanwhile, nearly unanimous nominations came for Sam Taylor with one note that he’s “still the best pure defender in the comp”.

Defensive balance is quite hard to evaluate these days. Different sides run a different number of options down back, and there are even more permutations when you consider the “plus one”.

Different people said three talls were “a cop out” and “probably a bit much” but like those commenters themselves, our final team will end up with the same mix:

B	Lachie Ash	Sam Taylor	Callum Wilkie
HB	Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera	Darcy Moore	Bailey Dale

The inclusion of two defenders from the Saints is notable, but probably reflects how Wanganeen-Milera in particular is “the reason the side ranks 6th for scores from the back half”

For partisans of those with less votes, we had comments such as:

• Connor Idun – “underrated from a defensive perspective”
• Sam Wicks – “convinced the entire league that Nick Watson was shit for one (1) round”
• Harris Andrews – “clear number one for keys”
• Jordan Clark – “has been awesome giving Freo some genuine drive off half back and contributing forward of centre” and “is the If He Was In Melbourne pick for 2025”

The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – midfield

While some nominate the defence as the most difficult part of the ground to populate with All-Australians, some also point to the questions at play for the midfield.

A key question with selecting a midfield is one of balance and role. Do you name true wings? Do you pick a group with different roles who can work together? Do you just name all the Western Bulldogs?

Most nominated in midfield group was Ed Richards, who is performing brilliantly in the most effective midfield in the competition. Eye catching territory gainers Bailey Smith and Jordan Dawson also garnered a lot of support.

All up our group of 11 picked 26 different players in their respective lists. This time it’s likely down to how little distance there is between the group.

The overall top five was clear, with the next few thereabouts for bench spots. No true wings were picked, so our consensus lineup stumps for the two most wingish of the five players.

C	Bailey Smith	Ed Richards	Jordan Dawson
R	Max Gawn	Tom Liberatore	Noah Anderson

It’s also not spoiling anything to also include the unanimously-selected Max Gawn in the consensus midfield lines here. Only two entrants even bothered with a second nomination.

To summarise: “He is #1 for Score Involvements, #1 for Score Launches, #4 for Hit Out Win%, #1 for Disposals, #1 for Marks (and #1 for Contested Marks and #2 for Intercept Marks), as well as being #2 for Clearances and #1 for Post Clearance Contested Possessions.”

Some notable comments on other nominations:

• Matt Rowell – “the best inside midfielder […] His ability to add outside running game this year has been outstanding”
• Touk Miller – “is the only player in the comp to play over 10 games while averaging a goal, 25+ disposals, 10+ contested and 5+ clearances. Quietly putting up an all time year for a midfielder”.
• Chad Warner – “has been as impactful as any attacking midfielder this year in the games I’ve watched, but hasn’t had anyone to kick to. He’ll fit right in at West Coast”.
• The Bonk – “Failing more injuries I struggle to imagine an AA team come September that doesn’t have Bontempelli in it.”

The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – forwards

In contrast to the other two lines, forward nominations were more tightly clustered with only 22 players named. The existence of an objective metric in goalkicking helps here, with one contributor bluntly just picking the players with the most goals.

Alongside Gawn in the ruck, Jeremy Cameron was the only other unanimous nomination across all 11 voters, with Cameron “leading the Coleman medal, most score involvements, disposals and meters gained of any Key Forward with 15+ goals”.

Jesse Hogan sits close behind Cameron. They are the two players meaningfully averaging over three goals per game.

The balance of the top 6 picks worked out two key forwards, two small forwards and two hybrid mid-forwards who both garnered a couple of nominations in the midfield category above but were chosen here.

Pickett and Rankine have moved much more in a midfield direction this season but Rankine in particular drew high praise. TWIFers noted that “he remains one of the league’s best finishers and creative ball users” and “the potential to be the most all round threatening player forward of centre of the second half of the decade”.

HF	Izak Rankine	Jeremy Cameron	Kysaiah Pickett
F	Ben Long	Jesse Hogan	Jamie Elliott

Jamie Elliott meanwhile was simply called “a must”.

There was also some praise for those who just missed the cut.

• Sam Darcy – “would have been an easy inclusion for me if he had made the games cutoff”
• Jack Gunston – “has been involved in everything – big numbers of shots plus high assists and score involvements as well”
• Tyson Stengle was included in a team picked for “goals, pressure, tackles and retention”.

The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – putting it together

So with the above votes tallied, let’s complete the picture.

First up, the bench is simply filled from the next most voted players with an eye to balance that meant excluding the key defenders Harris Andrews and Sam Collins as a tiebreaker.

Int	Caleb Serong	Hugh McCluggage	Nick Daicos
	Riley Thilthorpe

Riley Thilthorpe was picked by a couple of people who noted his “versatility edges him past the other key forwards” and at least in theory he can take a few ruck contests.

Daicos gets a tonne of discussion about his ratedness, being one of “best mids in the best teams” though for some “he hasn’t shown it in his games so far.”

Caleb Serong was noted as a centre bounce specialist who “attends nearly the most and has a really high rate of winning the centre clearance.”

McLuggage got slightly more support and could probably be replaced with the next most nomianted non-key defenders in Dayne Zorko or Jordan Clark.

In a real team an extra mid/small defender and forward would come in for McCluggage and Daicos – but this team isn’t playing games. If you wanted to do that, drop Zorko and West in, and name one of those two as a sub.

So that’s our consensus team:

Who does your team kick-in to?

Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | TheBackPocketAU

Ever since players have been able to play-on from a kick-in without impediment in 2019, some highly skilled young players began taking their team’s kick-ins. More cynical footy fans have used this as a way to question the value of players’ stats and their overall disposal count.

The value of a kick-in over any other disposal may be debatable but the responsibility is typically given to players deemed to be both skilled enough by foot and also good enough decision makers. These players are backed to pick the best target or to choose the right set play at the appropriate time.

But the next kick – and often mark – can be equally as important. Typically taken anywhere from 40-60m out from defensive goal and sometimes contested, this mark and subsequent kick can be the disposal that sets you up for a fast break or leaves you kicking backwards and scrambling in the back half. Worse, it could be cut off and turned into a repeat entry by the opposition.

In the 312 games since the beginning of the 2024 season, there have been 4,608 successful marks from a kick-in, shared between 587 players. 54 players have been the successful kick-in target on 20 or more occasions, and 179 players have been successful targets on 10 or more occasions. 

So who are your clubs’ #1 targets when kicking out from a behind? And who takes the most marks when targeted with the first disposal after an opposition’s minor score?

As you can see, some teams’ number one player is significantly higher than others. There are a few reasons for this; some teams play a less controlled game style, some teams don’t have a standard target, and other teams have had a change of personnel in the last 18 months either due to injuries or list management. 

Of these players some have significantly more than others, and some are on the same team as other top targets. The following are the top 10 (well, 11 because 10th is a draw) players league-wide for marks from kick-in since the start of 2024.

But what happens with these kicks afterwards? These players are obviously trusted to find the best option, so how often does this option convert to a score?

The overwhelming majority of kick-ins eventually result in a turnover, and 65% of all chains that begin with a successful mark are turned over to the opposition at some point down the line. Just 13% of these chains become a score, and 22% become a stoppage (or the quarter ends).

So, which players generate the most scoring chains from kick-ins? From the start of 2024, just 14 players have had successful scoring chains the first mark after a kick-in. Unsurprisingly some of the top kick-in targets are amongst these players.

There is a lot of discussion about players taking kick-ins as cheap stats, but there is a reason particular players are trusted to take the first kick, and even the second kick in the chain, as it can be the difference between a turnover and opposition score and a forward 50 entry; or even – as we have seen above – in some rare cases a shot on goal.

Much like every other part of the game, teams are so well drilled these days that every link in the chain is important, and given that many of the top teams score the majority of their points from turnover – the exception being the Bulldogs – having players you can trust not to turn the ball over in your defensive half is crucial to team defence, and the first two kicks in the chain are arguably the most important when clearing the ball from the danger zone.

So next time you see someone online or on a panel show parroting lines about “cheap disposals,” just remember that amongst the top five scoring teams in the AFL, almost half of their scores come from forward half turnovers, and the players most frequently entrusted to prevent this are some of the most important in the team.

A quarter behind the bench

Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson

About a month ago there was an article published for the ABC on interchanges and sideline signs.

We wrote it. This is it.

While researching the article we sat behind the benches for a game to observe the patterns with players coming on and off. All of this information is observable, and other sides have similar patterns of movement.

It’s not a complete picture, and we may have missed some shifts. For the period that there were only two KPFs on the ground, it appeared that Toby Greene played taller.

Some of these shifts were well planned, and some seemingly were extended due to ball placement on the ground and opportunity. If you had to watch the Giants this week, the rotation would be different – not least due to changing players.

Still, it’s an interesting look at how teams move, shift and evolve in one part of the ground across a quarter.

AFLW fixture strength of schedule – how unfair is the draw?

Sean Lawson

The AFLW fixture has finally been released for 2025 and it’s…just 12 rounds long. Those missing matches might end up mattering a lot.

Those five missing matchups this season shape the difficulty of the draw. Teams can either miss or make finals or top 4 narrowly, based on those differences in fixture difficulty.

The AFL deliberately makes a virtue out of fixture imbalance by weighting the fixture, with the impact of uneven opponent sets serving as a handicapping measure. The best teams play each other more often, and the weaker teams do likewise.

The process isn’t perfect, as Brisbane benefited from last year, on the way to a grand final berth.

In 2024 the Lions were handed a seemingly rough draw as befit one of the top sides, playing almost every previous finalist and skipping five non-finalists. But then those non-finalists in Hawthorn, Fremantle, Port Adelaide and Richmond all jumped into the AFLW finals, and turned the Lions apparently hard draw into one of the softest schedules in the league.

These shifts are unpredictable and always mean draw strength changes to an extent from preseason projections.

With this caveat in mind, we can take the 2024 results, use Pythagorean Expectation to calculate each team’s true strength adjusted for scoring luck, and see how well the fixture has been weighted and how unfair things might get.

First, here’s how the teams look following 2024:

Adjusting for team strength here mostly serves to highlight that North were really further ahead of the pack than wins and losses on the real ladder suggests. Meanwhile a couple of the bottom sides, especially the two Sydney teams, were probably better than 15th and 16th, while Carlton overperformed.

These strength ratings have consequences for fixture assessment – North and Hawthorn finished top 2, but there’s a gulf in strength making avoiding North Melbourne a big make or break factor for teams’ draws.

The AFL have managed to give last year’s finalists the eight hardest draws, which is commendable. Hawthorn and Brisbane have gotten off relatively lightly as top four sides, but this is mostly by virtue of missing more middling sides and fewer bottom ones. The Lions still play all the top sides from last year.

Down the bottom, we can identify GWS as a potential riser based on probably underperforming last year and also being handed the weakest set of opponents this season. The Giants skip four of the six top sides from last year. The Eagles, while not as strong in 2024, also miss the same top sides as GWS.

The AFLW fixture is more uneven than the AFLM

Overall, it appears that the AFLW fixture contains bigger inequalities than the AFLM draw. Here’s the strength of schedule rating for all 18 fixtures in the two competitions, with the strongest fixtures nearly 1 full expected win

Overall, the expected wins impact of the hardest and easiest draws in the AFLW is a bit higher than the AFLM, but that’s before we consider that the season is around half the length. Here’s the same strength of schedule impacts with the “expected wins” impact expressed as a share of the season’s total games:

Simply put, when there’s only 12 games, a fixture being over 1.5 expected wins harder than the easiest, makes a lot more impact than in a 23 game season.

Beyond the shorter season, though, another reason behind this is just that AFLW teams have a wider spread of strengths. Looking at 2025 preseason Pythagorean expectation, there were four AFLW teams rate stronger than the strongest rated AFLM team, including North Melbourne at a stupid 91% (remember, they won every game except for a draw).

At the other end of the scale, there were three clearly weaker AFLM teams and a group of 7 in the AFLW. The worst rated teams across either comp were the two AFLM laggards in West Coast and North, but there’s a greater spread of relatively struggling teams in from 2024 AFLW season – roughly seven, from Sydney on downwards on the underlying strength chart above.

What the greater extremes in team strengths mean is simply that there’s more variance in strength of schedule, so playing or avoiding the top or bottom groups of AFLW teams moves the dial more.

The most controllable factor, though, is season length. Getting closer to a full 17 game season as quickly as possible is a fairness and integrity imperative.

Around the Grounds

• Gemma Bastiani’s third part of her decade retrospective on AFLW tactical and game style evolution covers the world of the ruck
• Max Barry’s Squiggle Football game, a football management deckbuilder roguelike, releases a demo next week
• Marnie Vinall looks at the question of AFLM/AFLW double headers for the ABC
• The Back Pocket podcast, by our own Jack Turner, is looking for a womens footy show host or co-host

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

Sometimes it’s just fun to see something joyous.

The Mid-Season Rookie Draft has been with us for a few years now, and has evolved into a last chance saloon of hopes and dreams of young-ish footballers everywhere. By its nature it’s made up of players that have been passed over several times already, but have kept their dreams alive.

There have been some really solid finds through the short time it has been around (again), including Jai Newcombe and Ned Long. Mostly, thought, it has been used for fliers and filling gaps.

But this long journey often creates some of the most joyous off-field celebrations

"It’s an amazing feeling and emotions are running high."

Tom McCarthy joined #AFL360 moments after being drafted by West Coast with Pick 1. pic.twitter.com/Qj58tlC5zG

— Fox Footy (@FOXFOOTY) May 28, 2025

Tom McCarthy waited a while for his name to be called by a league club, but the celebration was well worth it. There was no shock in the announcement – to the degree that a club polo was on hand.

And that his mate was in an Eagles mascot costume.

Will Bravo narrowly missed out selection in the 2020 AFL Draft, and has been battling it out for the Tigers’ VFL side for the past few years. He knows the journey, and how hard it is to get to that final level.

We don’t know how Bravo got his hands on a costume, but it was worth it.

Congratulations Tom, and Will.

This week in football we have:

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Multiskilled Midfielders – The Value of Tackling and Clearing

Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com

The concept of a defensive midfielder – not a tagger – is becoming a more well known and widespread concept recently. But the real value is in a defensive midfielder who can prevent the opposition from getting out the back while helping their team get the ball forward.

So who does the best job of preventing the ball being cleared by the opposition or creating stoppages around the ground, meanwhile also getting the ball in the hands of their teammates at subsequent stoppages?

After the final round before the byes, there are just 18 players in the competition who average more than 5 tackles and more than 5 clearances per game (5+ games).

These 18 players come from just 12 sides. Adelaide, Collingwood, Essendon, Fremantle, GWS and West Coast are the only teams without a current representative.

North Melbourne and Tristan Xerri being the only outliers with the only ruck in a list of inside midfielders.

Despite these players seemingly having similar skillsets in regards to being able to clear the footy and clamp down on opposition mids, they usually specialise in one major skillset while being good at covering in the other. Effectively they give their team one and a half players in and around stoppages.

For example – as seen in the chart below – Tom Atkins and Jack Steele aren’t doing a huge amount to move the ball long post-clearance. Instead they are utilised more to get it out to the other guys in the midfield group.

Meanwhile players like Bailey Smith, Zac Butters, and – perhaps somewhat surprisingly – Tom Liberatore are used to get the ball moving forward as much as possible and as deep as possible.

There is also a significant split when it comes to the amount of contested vs uncontested ball these players are getting. That’s despite that split being something that you would think would be pretty consistent since clearances and tackles are both indicative of a contested mid.

This comes partly from a misunderstanding of what a “Contested Possession” really is, as well as how little of some players’ games are made of stoppages.

A contested possession, by definition, is “a possession which has been won when the ball is in dispute. Includes looseball-gets, hardball-gets, contested marks, gathers from a hitout and frees for,” which does not necessarily mean the ball was won in a contest, a stat better covered by “Hard Ball Gets”.

Instead, contested possessions are an indicator of how often a player wins their own ball vs how often their teammates look for them post clearance or turnover.

Of our list of dual-skilled mids, what makes some of these players able to play these “inside-outside” roles is the fact that they get the bulk of their clearances at stoppage around the ground rather than at centre bounce attendances.

While players like Liberatore, Newcombe and Rowell get a larger percentage of their clearances in the middle of the ground at restart, players like Butters, Taranto, and Patrick Cripps are more skilled at clearing the ball from stoppages around the ground, where they are able to lose their player in the chaos. Jack Macrae is somewhat of a unicorn here, winning St Kilda clearances from all types of stoppage as well or better than most (he is the second highest clearance winning player in the competition currently).

The final test of a midfielder’s mettle in the eyes of many (especially those who aren’t blinded by the glow of the confusing and popular contested possession stat) is the amount of score involvements they are able to generate. Score involvements are a skill relevant to clearance midfielders and outside midfielders alike.

The more inside players like Atkins, Bontempelli, Liberatore, and (mostly due to him being a ruck) Xerri have a larger number of score launches because they get more of the ball initially. Players who get the first possession less than others, but are still able create scoring opportunities later down the chain, are just as valuable. Seven of our seventeen midfielders are in the top 20 for score involvements amongst midfielders in the competition.

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Top 5 vs bottom 5: The definitive answer to ‘the poll’

James Ives

On Tuesday, I posted a poll on X that caused some intentional and some unintentional heated debate about whether your top 5 players or bottom 5 players have a greater impact on your team’s performance.

The unintentional parts are largely due to my poor wording. My intention was to pose whether it’s better to have a better top 5 and lesser bottom 5 compared to your opposition, or visa-versa.  

Let’s use an example using some methodology I’ll refer to later. 

In the Round 9, Fremantle vs Collingwood clash, Fremantle had the stronger top 5 players leading into the game according to AFL Player Ratings.

*I have used a rolling 8-game average to determine the top and bottom five players leading into each game 

Top 5 Player Ratings 

Player Name	Rating
Andrew Brayshaw (Fre)	19.2
Caleb Serong (Fre)	15.2
Nick Daicos (Col)	14.3
Steele Sidebottom (Col)	13.6
Luke Jackson (Fre)	15.1
Darcy Cameron (Col)	11.8
Alex Pearce (Fre)	11.3
Ned Long (Col)	11.7
Dan Houston (Col)	9.5
Sean Darcy (Fre)	9.0

Accumulative Total

Fremantle = 69.8

Collingwood = 60.9

Bottom 5 Player Ratings 

Player Name	Player Rating
Tim Membrey (Col)	6.0
Isaac Quaynor (Col)	5.9
Karl Worner (Fre)	5.8
Lachlan Sullivan (Col)	5.6
Oleg Markov (Col)	5.3
Will Hoskin-Elliott (Col)	5.2
Jye Amiss (Fre)	4.0
Patrick Voss (Fre)	3.6
Cooper Simpson (Fre)	3.3
Neil Erasmus (Fre)	3.2

Accumulative Total

Fremantle = 19.9

Collingwood = 28.0

Now consider the question, which top 5, and bottom 5 players would you rather have? How important is Collingwood’s depth compared to Fremantle’s in-form stars? This question sits at the heart of the poll. 

*Interestingly, Collingwood won this game by 14 points, yet only had one of their top 5 players feature in the top 5 on gameday (Cameron), compared to three of Fremantle’s (Brayshaw, Serong and Jackson).

Using this methodology, I’ve expanded the analysis to each game back to 2016 to try and understand what’s more important.

Here are the results based on the winners of each game.

All games

Key takeaways

• 25.2% of games are won by teams with the better top 5 and lesser bottom 5 compared to 20.8% who have the lesser top 5 and better bottom 5 – indicating it’s better to have a stronger top 5 compared to a stronger bottom 5. 
• 9% of games are won by the team that didn’t have the better top 5 and the better bottom 5.
• Only 44.9% of games are won by the team that have the best top 5 and best bottom 5 players.

Finals

• Looking at just finals, we see that most winners have better top 5 and better bottom 5.

Close games (under 12 points)

• In close games, we get a bit more randomness. Possibly because a close game will naturally promote a more even distribution of ratings points across both teams. 

Lastly, before we declare a definitive answer, let’s look at each club’s top 5 and bottom 5 player ratings average across the 2025 season.

Collingwood’s depth, through recruitment and system, show that you don’t need to rely on a small number of elite players to win. Gold Coast on the other hand, appear to have a contrasting profile, relying more heavily on the likes of Rowell, Anderson, Collins and Witts, while their young forwards find their way. 

*Sidenote – the player ratings love the Bulldogs

So, amongst all the confusion, maybe the poll was right… Across nearly a decade of games, an outperforming top 5 gives you a slight edge — especially in finals, where the margins for error shrink.

But the data also reminds us that depth matters, particularly in close games where every moment matters. 

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A modest proposal for upending the fabric of Australian Rules Football

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

Something different from me this week, brought on partly by *waves vaguely towards the entirety of human knowledge of head trauma* but more specifically two recent things.

Firstly, Paul Seedsman’s confronting interview on the ABC about his ongoing battles with symptoms from concussion. There are numerous write-ups available, but I think it’s best to hear it directly from him.

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Secondly, the collision between Darcy Byrne-Jones and Alex Pearce, and the subsequent tribunal hearing which saw Pearce’s three-match suspension overturned.

Contested marks where one player is running back with the flight of the ball are one of the most dangerous situations in the modern game. Some of the most celebrated moments in 21^st century football, Nick Riewoldt and Jonathan Brown launching themselves with no sense of self preservation, are deeply uncomfortable to watch today with what we know about concussion.

Even had Pearce’s suspension stood, his evidence suggests he doesn’t feel he could or should have acted any differently. His coach, probably correctly, stated after the game that he would have faced fierce criticism if he did not contest the ball with everything he had.

To date the AFL has attempted to address this through punitive measure. Suspend the player (or pay a free kick) where they get it wrong, and hope it influences their decision in the moment.

The problem isn’t a lack of punishment, it’s that the punishment runs contrary to the incentive provided within the game (winning or negating a mark) How do we change that?

There’s a bunch of proposals that could work:

• Only award a mark if, at the time of contact with the ball, the marking player is stationary or moving towards or lateral to the flight of the ball. Clarification would be needed around movement after engaging physically with an opponent, because I don’t think you need to prevent marks in the case of a push-off or jostle.
• Make any front-on contact in a marking contest result in a free kick (currently you are allowed to make front-on contact if your sole objective is to mark or spoil).

The intended outcome? Players stop going for all-or-nothing marking attempts. This is not intended to victim blame, but I would argue that the actions of the player running back with the flight contribute more to the potential for injury than those of the player coming towards the ball.

Under these proposed changes, If you’re coming back with the flight of the ball you’ll effectively treat it as a ground ball. Your priority isn’t just winning the ball but instead keeping yourself in a position to contest. You’ll take a bit of speed off, and you are unlikely to leave your feet. This is amplified by penalising any front-on contact. If the defence is set up it creates almost a “fair catch” situation you see in Rugby League or American Football.

You could make an argument that a mark should be allowed if the player is in space. There are a couple of problems –

• Running back with the flight you often won’t know how much space you have, because you’re not looking ahead of you
•  Players will continue to overestimate their ability to get to the ball in space – either because of their speed, their opponents speed, or the misjudging the flight of the ball.

Allowing marks in space still provides the incentive for players to go hell for leather with the flight.

Where a player does catch it in space with the flight, they also don’t necessarily need the mark as much. If they’ve got space ahead of them they can use that to play on. If they’re in a lot of space, a really clever kick to them will be placed to give them time to stop and turn, and effect a mark if they want to.

This would be a radical change to the rules of the game but I simply don’t see a viable alternative.

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Sydney’s long term free kick deficit: a product of club philosophy?

Sean Lawson

Free kick balances are a perennial topic of conversation. Rational people know free kicks broadly reflect a combination of game style and player attributes in general and luck in particular games, but they regularly get usually brought up by upset fans and provide regular grist for the content mill via “free kick ladders”.

Recently, Cench Footy circulated the following long term free kick differential table:

My initial facetious take was that this table is clear evidence that umpires are favouring blue uniforms and biased against red, yellow or orange teams. I’m about 20% serious about this – there’s famously some evidence that black uniforms earn more penalties in the NHL.

But what I want to do is investigate the team at the bottom here, the Swans, who for a quarter of a century have conceded the worst free kick differential in the league by some distance. The Swans have a differential of -638 free kicks or about 25 a season, or 1 per game against their opponents. It’s a comparable tally to the average edge in free kicks per game provided by many teams’ home ground advantage.

So, what gives?

I think the persistence across generations may be evidence of something systemic about how this very stable club builds itself.

Let’s dig into where the discrepancy is coming from on an individual player basis. Broadly speaking, the Swans players with notably negative free kick counts fall into three groups – defenders, rucks and a secret third group.

Defenders

Let’s start with the defenders – here’s a chart of something resembling a who’s who of Sydney defenders since 2000, identified mostly by career rebound 50 counts (excluding obvious exceptions or edge cases like Adam Goodes, Luke Parker and Callum Mills).

Collectively this group of 20 defenders has a combined free kick difference of -467, and just like that we’re over halfway to explaining the differential.

One might suspect that defenders in general may give a lot of free kicks away, but here’s a scatter of defender free kick differentials since 2000:

It’s not the case that defenders all have negative free kick differentials. There’s even been plenty of Swans defenders that don’t infringe as often. It’s just that a group of long-term mainstays have given away a heap for them over this century, in the pursuit of their generally miserly work.

Rucks

If Sydney’s defensive history is characterised by the stable procession of long term mainstays, its ruck stocks have been altogether the contrary.

Only two specialist rucks have played 100 games for the Swans this century – Darren Jolly on 118 and Mike Pyke 110 games, which leaves by far a majority of Sydney games rucked by a shorter-term journeyman. The club has chopped and changed every few seasons, rarely if ever developing a ruck from the national draft through to a stable long-term career at the club.

Here’s the free kick balance of every specialist ruck for the Swans with more hitouts to their name since 2000 than the 182cm Jude Bolton:

Almost every Swans ruck this century has been prone to giving away free kicks. A lot of these names have been either undersized, or very physical in their craft, and quite a few were overmatched in many battles.

Not since the retirement of Mark Seaby have the Swans even had a ruck push into positive double figures, and collectively this grouping is -237 in free kicks.

The big names up forward

Finally, there’s a few big names we need to talk about who have collectively kicked about 18% of Sydney’s goals since 2000 while registering a combined free kick differential of -218.

Top 5 Sydney goalkickers since 2000	Free kick differential	Goals
Lance Franklin	-54	486
Barry Hall	-124	467
Adam Goodes	-40	445
Michael O’Loughlin	-7	396
Tom Papley	2	295

These are Barry Hall (-124 free kicks), Lance Franklin (-54) and Adam Goodes (-40). These three singular talents each had their own peculiarities.

Hall was known for onfield violence, and also conceded frees in part time ruck duties. Franklin regularly infringed in his battles with defenders.

Goodes played such a long career, spanning stints in defence, ruck, midfield and forward, and his free kicks differential ebbed and flowed. It was most negative during his Brownlow-era midfield work, but rarely pushed very positive.

Midfielders

Speaking of Adam Goodes, we can also just note the key area where Sydney have not been free kick merchants. Sydney’s midfields have generally earned free kicks more than given them.

Here’s a collection of Sydney’s biggest clearance-getting players since 2000, a mix of midfielders and more forward types. It excludes rucks and also a couple of guys classed as defenders above (Florent, McVeigh, Lloyd):

The midfield has been characterised by plenty of players earning their share of holding and high free kicks, as well as a few who haven’t.

Broadly, though, it’s positive in free kicks to the tune of 258, noting that there’s a little positional overlap with the defenders above.

Bringing it together

So there we have it, we can now assign that -638 free kick count for the Swans using our counts for different onfield roles:

The four categories shown above add up to -624, pretty much netting out to explain the imbalance.

Now if I can get a little subjective, I would suggest that some of this reflects the sustained long-term characteristics of the Swans as a club.

The negative differential was at its greatest during the Paul Roos era, but we can see it persisted through most of the Longmire years. It’s pretty negative in 2025, but it’s way too soon to judge the Cox era.

What we can say though is that, more than most clubs, we can assume the existence of some long term list and gamestyle philosophies thanks to the back office continuity they’ve enjoyed since 2003.

The Paul Roos and John Longmire coaching era covers nearly the entire period and was a smooth handover with no regime change. Kinnear Beatson ran list management and recruiting for most of the era, between 2006 and his recent step back. The Swans worked through a succession of football managers, each served for at least half a decade and a couple going straight on to executive positions at the club afterwards.

One persistent feature of this emergent Swans list philosophy has been a steady rotation of ready-made ruck journeymen, rarely lasting more than 3 or 4 seasons and never threatening, say, an All-Australian squad posting.

Another has been stalwart defenders, often a bit undersized, often found in the recruiting bargain bin. These free kicks never seem to have hurt Sydney’s defence all that much, with the Swans being a below average defence precisely once this century.

Evidently, both the rucks and the defenders are expected to compete in such a way that they are going to give away a lot of free kicks in the pursuit of the priorities expected of them. Experience for the Swans has been that these players can concede free kicks mostly without damaging the prospects of the team.

Throw in a couple of undisciplined spearheads, and it’s a recipe for a long term persistently negative free kick record.

Either that, or it’s all a giant conspiracy.

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Around the Grounds

• Gemma Bastiani produces some of the best work on AFLW tactics and gamestyles, and is taking a multi-part look at the tactical evolution of the AFLW in its first decade. Here’s her coverage of the forward approaches and the defensive setups
• Sydney Swans VFL listed player Jordan Endemann hits a 100m torpedo goal against Coburg
• A public acknowledgement by Brandon Gale that the Tasmanian team remains conditional on uncertain politics doesn’t change anything ahead of a key parliamentary vote, but it’s good to keep the footy world reminded of the real situation
• This week on Shinboner, Ricky Mangidis breaks down the tweaks Melbourne and Sydney have made that have impacted their fortunes this season

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

As we enter the second week of Sir Doug Nicholls Round, increasing calls have been made to seek other rounds of celebration, recognition and action.

Some have asked about Multicultural Round – which has been transitioned into the Cultural Heritage Series.

Others have made – maybe – slightly less serious calls for acknowledgement.

Italian round NEEDS to happen, I would love to see the @AFL have an Italian round. As I am Italian myself and to the representation and to see the Italian players be celebrated would make me feel proud.

— Sakata (@QLDFootballClub) May 15, 2025

The events of the last few months on and off the field have prompted increasing calls for a round of recognition and promotion of the cause of mental health as well.

There’s nothing wrong with those calls. It is worth noting that awareness and talking are one thing, but a far better public focus would be campaigning to address the shameful underfunding and inaccessibility of vital mental healthcare in this country.

Sport, politics and social issues are inexorably interlinked. Sport is a reflection of the society it exists in, often with social norms and rites that draw from it. Sport is just a microcosm of broader life.

In that sense a round focusing on assisting mental health awareness would be better than nothing. But it would be far more powerful if it was to linked to a broader set of actions, rather than a recognition of those who have slipped or fallen.

It shouldn’t take a public series of stories, or a death, to prompt us into action to help address mental health care in Australia.

If the AFL does eventually choose to focus on a mental health round, they may have to consider their linkages to industries that have detrimental effects on broader mental health in Australia.

Bring on change for how we talk about and treat mental health issues – with or without a football round to support it.

This Week In Football we have:

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Debutants are all around us

Lincoln Tracy

Earlier today Essendon announced that Angus Clarke, pick 39 in the 2024 National Draft, will make his debut on Friday night when the Bombers face off against Richmond in the Dreamtime at the ‘G clash.

The young South Australian becomes the sixth Essendon player to make their debut in 2025, following Isaac Kako (Round 1), Tom Edwards (Round 2), Saad El-Hawli (Round 3), Archer Day-Wicks (Round 9), and Lewis Hayes (Round 9).

The Bombers’ announcement got me thinking about the record for the number of players making their debut across a teams’ first 10 games of the season in more recent years, i.e., excluding Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney during their first year in the league.  

At the time of writing only their opponents in the Dreamtime clash, Richmond (seven), have played more debutants across their first 10 games of the 2025 season. The Bombers draw equal with Euro-Yroke (St Kilda), who used six debutants in their first 10 games.

In contrast, Collingwood, the Gold Coast, and Hawthorn have not played a first gamer across their initial 10 outings – although the Suns have the opportunity to do so in their clash against the Saints (which is their tenth game of the season courtesy of ex-tropical cyclone Alfred).

Looking at the year-by-year breakdown for clubs reveals some interesting patterns. For example, Essendon had no debutants during the first 10 games last year.

However, 2025 is the first year since 2013 where Hawthorn have not blooded a debutant in their first 10 games of the season (although they have had several players make their club debuts – Ginnivan, Barrass, Battle, Chol, etc.).

Kuwarna (Adelaide) holds the post-2012 record for the highest number of debutants played by a club across their first 10 games of the season.

Eight first-gamers were used over this timeframe in 2020: Fisher McAsey (Round 1), Ned McHenry (Round 2), Will Hamill (Round 3), Shane McAdam (Round 4), Andew McPherson (breaking the streak in Round 6), Kieran Strachan (Round 9), Harry Schoenberg (Round 10), and Lachlan Scholl (Round 10).

If you’re interested in seeing how some of these debutants have panned out for clubs, check out Emlyn Breese’s great visualisations of how draftees have been retained and how they perform, which featured in last week’s edition of This Week in Football. 

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The subs of the Gold Coast sky?

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

Digging into interchange stuff to assist Cody and Sean’s article on the ABC last week (go read it) left me with way more data than could ever fit into one article, so it’s probably something I’ll come back to a few times.

Today I’m diving into the use of the sub, focusing from 2023 onwards (when the current tactical sub rules were introduced, rather than requiring a player be medically unable to continue in order to be subbed off).

The thing that jumps out to me immediately is Gold Coast as a real outlier, only needing to use their substitute to replace an injured player six times since the tactical sub was introduced.

This data is gathered from the match reports on the official AFL website, so it’s possible that it’s not perfect. But it matches up with Gold Coast consistently having a really limited injury list across the same period. In August 2024 the Suns had a total of 95 games missed through injury – a full 20% below the next healthiest squad.

Compare this to the Bulldogs, who have had to activate a sub to cover injury 44% of the time. This gives the Suns a much freer hand when deciding when and how to deploy an impact player.

Those with my specific brand of trauma (Editor: Melbourne coded alert) will be having a visceral reaction to the sole game Narrm went through without activating its sub in September 2023.

When teams have the option though, how do they use it? Let’s isolate just games where both subs were used tactically rather than injury driven, to see who is Han Solo and who is Greedo.

Across the three years Hawthorn are the standout in aggressive use of the sub, pulling the trigger 75% of the time. Sydney (25%) and Brisbane (32%) initiate far less.

If we break it down to just 2025 we see some pretty interesting changes. Brisbane has reversed their previous trend, initiating the sub 2/3rds of the time. Adelaide is the most aggressive this year and Hawthorn is split down the middle.

The Dogs have been pretty cautious both this year and across the previous two, which is understandable given how often they have had to call upon their sub to cover an injury.

The last thing we’ll look at is the types of player used and the output gained from them.

As you’d expect, most clubs stick to medium-height players that can play a range of roles rather than key position players when naming their sub.

In terms of output we can look at time on ground as well as a projected rating points output if the player had 80% time on ground for the game.

Gold Coast and Sydney are getting the highest impact per minutes from their subs. Angus Sheldrick for the Swans is a clear leader among players named as sub more than once – averaging 7.2 rating points in just 25% of game time across his 5 games as sub. Gold Coast’s numbers are boosted by impressive games by David Swallow and Nick Holman, and some solid work put in by Jake Rogers in his 4 games starting with the vest.

There’s a lot more in this data – the next thing I’ll probably look at is when clubs use their last rotation and when they’re stuck with multiple players on the bench through injury.

As always hit me up on BlueSky if you’ve got any feedback or questions. In the meantime I’ll be trying to figure out what Gold Coast’s secret to health is.

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Trouble at the coalface on Lygon Street?

Cody Atkinson

Win the hard ball, win the game – or so the abridged saying goes.

Since Michael Voss took over at Carlton no side has been better at winning first possession at stoppages than Carlton. If you remember what he was like as a player that’s no surprise.

In 2021 – the year before Voss took over – Carlton finished third last for first possession differential. They finished that season 13th for points differential from stoppage, but were able to convert their first possessions into clearances at about league average rates – 77.5% of the time to be clear. In short – low quantity, decent efficiency, subpar output.

This is the first short diversion of this short piece. Winning first possession isn’t a guarantee that you win a clearance. If you aren’t in enough space when you get your hands on the ball, or there isn’t enough support around you, winning first possession can turn right into a repeat stoppage or (significantly worse) a turnover and opposition clearance. Sean Lawson and I wrote a bit on this topic for the ABC recently.

In the Voss era Carlton has finished 4th, 2nd and 2nd for first possession differential. This year they are streets ahead of the competition with a differential of +9.1 per game. If that holds it’ll be the biggest differential in the last half decade.

So there’s a big tick for winning the ball. But what’s even more interesting is that they’ve gotten less effective at getting the ball to the outside of the contest successfully.

In Voss’s first season (2022) the Blues sat fourth for converting first possessions to clearances. That translated into the second best clearance differential in the league, as well as the second best clearance scoring differential.

Since then the Blues haven’t finished in the top half for conversion from first possession to clearances. This year they are sitting second last for first possession conversion, ahead of just the Tigers at 72%. They also allow opposition first possession to clearance at a relatively high rate – 77%, or fifth worst in the league. This indicates that they might be hunting the ball a little too much at the expense of holding space and structuring up correctly at contests.

The eye test tends to back this up, with the Blues often pack hunting for ball at the bottom of contests. While it is a great thing to watch a player emerge from the hardest of contests with clean ball, it can hurt you the other way if you overcommit.

The Blues do sit fifth for clearance differential and seventh for scoring differential from clearances, but this is comparatively low considering how much early ball they win.

This year the big culprits are Tom De Koning and Sam Walsh.

De Koning gets his hands on the ball at stoppage more than any other Blue, but he’s also among the worst at converting that early ball to clearances. He’s only converting to clearances 66% of the time – well below both league and ruck average. The only other two first choice rucks with a lower conversion rate are Luke Jackson and Kieren Briggs – and both of those players take the ball from stoppages first far less of the time. This could be an earlyish season anomaly for TDK – it’s a drop from his previous two seasons, but that drop has been continuous over time.

Second diversion – and it’s a question. How sure are we that TDK is going to be the best in his position one day as the hype machine goes? He’s good in the air, very good at winning the ball on the deck, but maybe a bit average defensively and from a spacing POV. Just a question for now.

Of more surprise at face value is Sam Walsh, who sits at a rate of just 63%. Walsh’s trends might be even more concerning as well. The former number one draft pick has not finished with a conversion rate above league average since 2021. While Walsh does his best work as first receiver from players like Patrick Cripps, it appears that he struggles to get the ball out in tough situations compared with his comparable players across the league.

So how does Voss fix this shortcoming in the short term? Well, the de-emphasis of Walsh in the middle might be a sign that some things are changing – his volume of first possessions has dropped considerably this year. For De Koning the goal might be sitting up in the contest a little more and applying pressure rather than pouncing at will. A focus on balance might assist the defensive side of their stoppage game as well.

Or – perhaps somewhat radically – it might be a problem that Voss sees as secondary to their broader issues across the ground and in transition from the defensive half.

There’s only so many problems you have time to fix, even if the season drags on forever.

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AFLW and women’s league crowds

Sean Lawson

Women’s sport is in a place now where many events can get huge crowds.

The Matildas now routinely sell out international friendlies – your scribe has been caught out missing their upcoming match against Argentina in Canberra due to it selling out weeks in advance. The women’s soccer World Cup in 2023 averaged 30,000 people per game. Women’s State of Origin crowds now outstrip men’s NRL games.

A Crows grand final at Adelaide Oval has drawn 50,000 people. Overseas, the right promotion of the right derby or rivalry matchup in soccer can net tens of thousands of people in Mexico or Brazil or England.

At 12 games per season, the AFLW is inching closer to a fuller season of 17 matchups but remains a fair way off. To extend the season, the AFL has imposed a crowd “target” of 6000 people per game in order to allow the season to go even to 14 rounds in the next few years.

Much has been written about the headwinds imposed on the league achieving this target. Obstacles like 5pm weekday time slots, far-flung and poor quality venues in some cities, and superheated near-summer conditions have no doubt hurt attendances.

I thought I’d try to contextualise the AFLW into the broader landscape of women’s sport and show where it sits, and how it’s tracking against attendance in other peer leagues. It’s an important context for asking whether criticisms of crowd numbers, and the target for expansion, are particularly fair.

There’s clearly an ever-greater interest in attending women’s sport. However, since those boom attendances are so far mostly concentrated in “event” games like internationals, tournaments, finals, and certain hyped up rivalries, it is surely not how we should be judging the regular week-to-week grind of domestic league attendance. 

Here’s a look at every domestic club’s home game crowds in their most recent season:

The average attendance at regular standalone home games in Australian women’s sport is about 2,500 people. Of these leagues, Super Netball is easily the highest drawing. 

In fact, in Perth and Adelaide, the netball side outdraws the four other local teams combined. Netball is the biggest women’s ticket in every city it’s played.

Aside from the larger footprint of most netball, for all other sports in this country, week-to-week domestic attendance at is generally in a similar place: a few thousand attendees per team for standalone games. Indeed, no team outside netball meets that AFL benchmark of 6,000 people per game, and they all play netball.

Habitual mass attendance at regular week-to-week games just isn’t so widespread a behaviour yet for the new women’s leagues in traditionally male sports, but that lag shouldn’t be a surprise or a criticism. Men’s leagues have had a century and a half of cultural centrality and ingrained habit behind them, during which time the same culture was largely suppressing the very idea of women’s professional sport.

The picture mostly looks broadly similar globally, though with some notably successful case studies to look at.

Many other soccer leagues have lower crowds than shown below, I just selected the soccer leagues with known high attendances, such as the biggest European countries’ leagues plus the American WNSL and the Mexican league. I couldn’t find IPL crowds but a news report suggests crowds there averaged about 9,000 to 13,000 people with the biggest crowds topping 30,000, putting the richest women’s cricket league potentially near the forefront of women’s spectator sport globally as well.

Some notable findings here.

• Something that stands out immediately is how especially well the two big American women’s leagues do in terms of crowds. Portland and Seattle are long-time women’s soccer powerhouses and are now joined by two other big west coast soccer teams in San Diego and LA. Meanwhile Caitlin Clark has driven massive growth in attendance for the Indiana Fever this season.

• We should again note just how relatively big netball is on a global scale. The West Coast Fever have the second biggest average attendance of any women’s team I can find outside of North America, and the Vixens, Lightning and Swifts all stack up really well too.

• Then there are Arsenal and FC Barcelona. Playing most of their games at their club’s big primary stadium, recruiting superstars, basically never losing, and building much bigger crowds than anyone else in their league. It’s not exactly a model that can be replicated in a league with a salary cap and a draft, but it’s a notable example of one way women’s clubs are building bigger things.

• Elsewhere in Europe, we can see much more modest crowds at most clubs, far more in line with the sort of lower key domestic attendance typical in Australia.

In general then, the AFLW probably doesn’t stack up too badly. AFLW crowds are pretty typical among Australian sporting leagues, and notably fairly tightly clustered on a global scale with no dominant outliers. This parity is probably a strength, since all clubs are pretty equal in terms of salary cap and the like. The AFLW won’t see growth by building a few superstar clubs and a bunch of also-rans. We’re not going to have an Arsenal or FC Barcelona dominating the league.

How do crowds grow? A lot is probably just waiting a generation or so for massified attendance habits to build and culture to develop among the current generation of new fans, but I would suggest one of the biggest controllable factors is a regular, convenient, and well-liked home ground.

Overseas, whether it’s Arsenal at Emirates or Seattle and Portland inner city venues, the home ground matters. In the AFLW the biggest drawing teams have popular venues like Windy Hill, Henson Park and Alberton Oval to call home.

The Brisbane Roar lead the ALW in standalone crowds by playing at Perry Park on a rail line and potentially the location of a future whole-of-club home.

Teams playing at the same ground as the mens team, such as the Newcastle Knights and Geelong, can also do quite well building on existing habits at a known ground.

It seems obvious but building the habit of attendance means making a venue appealing to go to in the first place. In other words, get the vibes right.

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Around the grounds

Here’s plenty more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy

• Jonathon Horn from The Guardian is basically a lock in this section. This week, his take on grief and sport is an essential read.
• Andrew McGarry from the ABC looks back into history for the 20th anniversary of the last AFL game at a suburban Melbourne venue.
• ESPN draft expert and occasional TWIF contributor Jasper Chellappah has his updated draft power rankings with a firming leading pack for fans to start getting their head around as club fortunes become clearer this season.
• There was a forum hosted by the Tasmanian Government which picked at many elements of the Hobart stadium plan (h/t ABC).
• Also on the Hobart stadium, Dan Brettig from NineFax covers comments by Cricket Australia boss Todd Greenberg saying the Tasmania stadium roof designs are “unacceptable” for any form of cricket to be played in daylight.
• The great Ricky Mangidis at Shinboner breaks down Bailey Dale’s 49 possession game
• The Squiggle power rankings is starting to show some signs of movement. It looks like there might be a small group clubhouse leaders amid an 11 team contending pack.
• The Swans and Essendon both announced they will be hosting the Pride Game this year, with St Kilda no longer involved.

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

This week marks the 10th Sir Doug Nicholls Round, and the 19th AFL Indigenous Round. The week marks the culture of Indigenous Australian and recognises their contribution to the sport.

Yesterday the AFLPA released this year’s Indigenous Players Map.

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You’re going to hear a lot of stories of great Indigenous players past. Tales of the current stars.

You might even hear about the time that Adrian McAdam kicked a goal from The Tree.

Enjoy it all. Embrace it. Go and read about Polly Farmer, or Andrew Krakouer, or Glenn James or even Sir Doug Nicholls himself.

This week in football we have:

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Harry McKay shows sometimes less is more

Jeremiah Brown

With a combined three Coleman medals between them, Carlton’s royal duo of Prince Harry and King Charlie are a handful for opposition teams to contend with.

They don’t just kick goals, they also take massive clunks, with the pair having produced over 4 contested marks per game combined through the last three seasons. Their opponents this week Sydney are averaging only 5.7 as an entire team.

Their numbers as a contested marking duo relative to the rest of the league, over a sustained period of time, are striking.

Each of Harry and Charlie have finished a season with the most contested marks per game – Harry in 2021 and Charlie in 2023 both with 2.6 per game. They also won winning the Coleman (respectively) in that same year that they lead the league in contested marks.

Since 2021 Harry has been seventh per game in contested marks or better. Charlie has been around the same mark since 2022.

This is a well known Carlton strength, and one which is often talked about. Carlton are the number one team contested marking team in the competition, at 11.3 per game, with a differential of +3.6 per game. They’re also the second highest team for marks per game and marking differential per game, at 96.6 and +13.3 respectively.

Much of this marking value comes from the back half setup, with Nick Haynes currently leading the league in marks per game at 8.8, along with Jacob Weitering at 8.5 marks per game.

But what is less commonly talked about is the value provided by the forward pair of Harry and Charlie as general marking targets, with their combined marks per game leading the competition amongst pairs of key forwards for the last four season.

In 2022 they were a shade above Jeremy Cameron and Tom Hawkins, while the closest duo in 2023 and 2024 was Brisbane’s Joe Daniher and Eric Hipwood.

This year? As Joe Cordy covered in Round 4, this year the loss of Daniher ahead of the ball has changed some parts of their ball movement. Instead, the closest forward pair is technically Mason Wood and Cooper Sharman, but Wood has seen a lot of usage up the ground as a winger as well.

If you look more strictly for genuine forward types, then the next closest pairing is the emerging duo of Sam Darcy and Aaron Naughton, who average a combined 11.9. There’s also Adelaide’s interesting forward triple threat of Thilthorpe (5.2 per game), Fogarty (5.1) and Taylor Walker (5.0).

Despite having arguably the best key forward duo in the league, Carlton need to get better at finding easier ways to score. In trying to address this over recent seasons, there has been a slight reduction year on year of the proportion of marks the duo have been getting which are contested, from a peak of 36% in 2022  down to 31% this season.

This may be reflective of Carlton’s adjustments in trying to use the pair higher up the ground and find them more space at times.

This is a critical adjustment, because while Carlton fans like myself may love seeing Harry taking big contested clunks down the line as the outlet, the numbers actually show that the key to victory for Carlton may be finding him in space.

Harry has averaged fewer contested marks in victories from 2021 to 2025 than he has in losses. It sounds obvious, but reducing Harry’s contested situations may be an important ingredient in getting more wins.

While this week might see Carlton try and attack Sydney’s contested aerial deficiencies (they are currently second worst for contested mark differential at -4.1 per game), over the course of the season, Carlton’s ability to kick consistent winning scores may come down to how effectively they can utilise their key pillars to retain possession with more easy marks, especially late in games.

This was on full display in the last quarter of Carlton’s tough victory over the Saints last Friday night, with the pair taking a combined 6 uncontested marks, and no contested marks between them. Big Harry was the more influential of the pair, taking four uncontested marks in his clutch fourth quarter, with one resulting in the set shot that sealed the match for the Blues.

Often it is Charlie who gets the plaudits, but after some of the challenges he has faced off the field earlier in the season it was perhaps fitting that it was Harry who stood up in Spud’s game.

If Carlton can continue to find him space and those easier uncontested marks, it may help them find a way into the 8.

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Draft Pick and Mix

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

Draft picks are one of the primary resources available to an AFL club – maximising them can lead to dynasties, whiffing on them can leave a club in a very dark place.

Our first chart looks at each top 10 pick from the last 10 drafts. It’s organised by how many years into their career a player has reached – so the first column has the first year output of every top 10 pick, while the last column has the outputs in years 8-10 for the 30 players selected in 2014, 15, and 16 (being the only ones in the system long enough to have had an 8th, 9th, or 10th year).

We can see a couple of things immediately:

• Of the 100 players drafted in the top 10 since 2015 all but 4 were still in the system by their 8th year. The exceptions being Fisher McAsey drafted by Kuwarna, Sam Petrevski-Seton and Lochie O’Brien by Carlton, and Jaidyn Stephenson by Collingwood.
• They’re generally still at their original drafted clubs, the main exception being the older group of Suns and Giants like Callum Ah-Chee, Jack Bowes, Izak Rankine, Jack Scrimshaw, Jacob Hopper, Tim Taranto, and Will Setterfield.
• There’s a fair bit of variance in how many games first year top 10 picks get, but most clubs range around the 50-75% of possible games played.
• As you’d expect, a small proportion of those games are rated elite. The impact of Connor Rozee and Nick Daicos here is amplified by Collingwood and Yartapuulti only having taken 1 other top 10 pick between them in the last decade (although the other, Jaidyn Stephenson, had three elite rated first-year games – as many as Nick and one more than Connor)
• As they move forward in their career the proportion of games played and proportion of elite games played lifts – both as players settle into their career, and at the risk of putting things too harshly the average stops getting dragged down by players who weren’t making it and have left the club.
• Gold Coast has taken 16 top 10 picks in the last decade – literally breaking the axis of my chart.
• North are the only team to have lost a top 10 selected player after only 1 year – Jason Horne-Francis. If we look to players leaving after two years we also pick up Josh Schache from Brisbane, Jack Scrimshaw from Gold Coast, and Will Setterfield from the Giants.
• Josh Gibcus’ injury struggles are clearly visible on Richmond’s chart.

Now the top 10 isn’t the whole of the draft so here’s something for the real sickos. I have attempted to chart every club’s entire draft haul over the last decade, from the top of the national draft through to mid-season drafts, supplementary picks, even the Essendon top-ups.

There are a couple of bugs I know about but haven’t had the time to iron out yet – Marty Hore (Narrm), Matt Carroll (Carlton), and Derek Eggmolesse-Smith (Richmond) hold the distinction of being drafted by the same club twice. In Marty Hore’s case it wasn’t even a case of shuffling the rookie list as he spent time delisted inbetweeen. They each appear twice on their team charts.

The other requires an apology to Sam Fisher, not the Euro-Yroke player, but the one who spent one year on Sydney’s list in 2017. For whatever reason he kept breaking Sydney’s chart every time I tried to render it so I’ve expunged him from the records. Sorry Sam.

Beyond that, have a look – it’s broken down into categories of draft picks and shows games played at the club or subsequent clubs, as well as highlighting elite rated games.

If you want to engage with me or tell me I’ve got something horrendously wrong, the best place to do so is Bluesky.

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Perth Bears is a bad name for a football team

Sean Lawson

The recently announced NRL expansion to Perth is partly an overdue return, to tap into a big potential market. It’s rife still with possibility after the Western Reds were a victim of the ruthless logic of consolidation, after the ARL expansion and Superleague schism left rugby league trying to fit too many teams into too few spots in the late 1990.

They’re also, partly, an effort to revive another victim of that process of team cutting, the North Sydney Bears. Perennial strugglers on the wrong side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, who also tried to make a go of a merger with Manly and a move to Central Coast, North have been left languishing in the NSW Cup alongside the likes of the Newtown Jets.

There’s an interesting experiment here to see whether the composite identity will work along the lines of the Sydney Swans’ ability to retain fans in Melbourne via plentiful away games bringing them home, but I want to talk about the aesthetic problems created by forcing together this club identity into this city:

Perth Bears simply has too few syllables to be a good team name.

Here’s a statistical breakdown of the sounds behind team names in most of Australia’s major sporting codes.

Most Australian team names have a sort of easy rhythm to them. Team name, mascot name. The most common syllable schemes for major Australian sporting teams is a pleasing trochaic pair of syllables, stressed syllble followed by unstressed for both components, a couplet each for location and mascot. MELbourne DEMons, RICHmond TIGers, CANberra RAIDers, SOUTHside FLYers, and the like.

Weirdly, the inverse pattern, an iambic name, is relatively rare. Among geographical names it’s mostly just GeeLONG and (arguably) the soccer term “FC” is one of the few suffixes with an unstressed syllable followed by a stress.

Geographical locations which present the monosyllable problem are pretty uncommon in Australian sport, with basically just Perth and Cairns bringing a bare single vowel to the affair and Wests in the NRL making things a bit awkward for themselves. The Taipans, Glory and Wildcats show how a two syllable name can work to balance a short town name here.

The only other dual monosyllable name in Australian sport is Perth Lynx in the WNBL, not a terribly catchy name, but at least the mascot is unique with that final X sound to spruce things up and give some emphasis. We can sort of count the Dolphins as only containing two syllables as well, if we choose to ignore that they’re definitely Redcliffe even if they’re officially claiming not to be.

This new venture presumably can’t stop being the Bears, but the side could solve this critical branding problem either by doing the usual WA team trick of substituting in a more rhythmically pleasing “West Coast” or “Western” for Perth, or perhaps insisting everyone always uses the word “The” in front of the name, as will probably happen anyway just to add some emphasis to a tricky little name.

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Is Essendon defending the whole ground?

Cody Atkinson

As most footy fans know, the eternal hypemeter surrounding the hopes of Essendon to break their finals drought continually oscillates between “lol right” and “it’s coming home”. There are no middle measures, no sensible middle ground.

Last week saw a firm switch to the latter camp, with the Bombers notching their fifth win in the last six games. They’ve tightened the screws defensively in the last five weeks – conceding the fewest points from stoppage and third fewest from clearances .

Spoiler – their last five games haven’t exactly been a murderer’s row. It’s likely only two of those sides will make finals – Collingwood and either Sydney or Melbourne.

They’ve also limited opponents to very hard shots during this time, with the lowest xScore per shot of any side in the competition over that period.

Plenty of ink has been spilled over the rise of Zach Reid, including claims that he will be ‘the best Essendon player of the last 20 years‘.

Without pouring too much cold water on the hopes of Bombers fans, there are a couple of things (schedule aside) that seem to be a little concerning.

Essendon have allowed the third most transitions from defensive 50 to attacking 50 over that hot streak, and only trail West Coast in allowing full court transitions. That full field defence was a weakness last year, and seems to have gotten worse this year.

The Bombers’ defence seems to thrive when they can reset at stoppage, or aren’t as stretched straight down the ground.

They’ve also struggled to stop opponents from taking marks inside 50 – albeit they seem to concede them in tougher locations to score from. With that type of defensive philosophy it makes sense that deep attacks might be harder to defend against, as allowed breaks and covering defense would find it harder to cover.

They’ve also been quite poor at moving the ball from D50 to their own arc – second worst in the league so far this year. Continuing to hand over territory like that puts any team at a disadvantage.

Being 5-3 is undoubtedly better than 0-2. Things appear to be improving for Essendon generally. But these troubling signs could turn into legit problems unless issues are addressed.

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Around the Grounds

• Daanyal Saeed at Crikey wrote an important story about a sustained online harassment campaign directed at sports reporters including an AFL-employed journalist.
• Former Swans 150-gamer and 1996 grand finalist Troy Luff lined up for his 600th senior game of footy at age 55. He kicked 10 goals.
• GWS want 2020-style 16 minute quarters to help them get more fans and prevent late quarter blowouts.

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

On Tuesday SEN’s Sam Edmund reported something that has been a long time coming – a crackdown on injury list reporting from clubs.

Focus was placed on one club – Geelong. 

But that’s a bit of a narrow target, and a bit away from the broader point.

TWIF said that the crackdown was a long time coming. Well…that’s because it also happened last year.

Last year Nine’s Anna Pavlou reported that:

“It is not permissible to provide general availability windows, ie. short term, medium term, long term,” the AFL confirmed in its 2024 policy.

So this week isn’t so much a new crackdown, but a crackdown on a crackdown. 

TWIF also understands the perspective of clubs. Injury management is hard, and the expectations of those who rely upon injury reports for personal gain is sometimes unrealistic. But there also has to be some transparency in a league where there are meant to be guidelines and standards for almost anything imaginable. What may be a more palatable solution is some type of middle ground – one that doesn’t provide definite dates but instead windows of availability.

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Mastering the dark arts of defending the control game

James Ives

The Brisbane Lions won the 2024 premiership on the back of some of the best ball movement we’ve seen since the Clarkson-era Hawks. They sliced and diced through opposition zones with quick-release kicks —finding uncontested marks in tight spaces to suck in defenders and opening space for their dynamic forward line to exploit.

In what is typically a copycat league, you’d expect more clubs to adopt Brisbane’s blueprint in 2025. Yet, surprisingly, many teams appear to be zigging when we expect them to zag. 

Consider the question: Are opposition defenses tightening the screws to nullify the strengths of the reigning premiers? Or is there a broad acknowledgment that Brisbane’s style is difficult to replicate without the right personnel?I lean toward the former—led by the likes of Collingwood, teams are beginning to master the dark arts of stalling opposition movement without conceding a 50m penalty. So much so, Brad Scott requested a please explain to the AFL umpiring department.

If we revisit each team’s use of quick-release kicks in 2025, similar patterns emerge.

Most of last year’s leaders—Brisbane, St Kilda, Essendon, and Fremantle—have experienced a noticeable drop in their ability to find uncontested marks through quick-release kicks. 

With a shift back towards chaos across the league this year – 54% compared to 44% in 2024 – the control brigade, led by Brisbane, will be hoping the umpiring department are listening.

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Different Ruck Roles and who does them best

Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com

Rucks have a lot of responsibilities in football, and arguably many of the most important ones happen outside of the ruck contest. Different players have different strengths – and the best rucks in our game are multitalented – but we decided to drill down into what some of these roles entail and who excels at them.

The numbers below are based on the 21 players who have appeared in at least four games this season, and attended more than 50% of ruck contests.

Defensive Ruckwork – Using height as a shield

There are a few ways in which rucks can defend. You may have heard recently some commentators talking about how well Darcy Cameron intercepts opposition possessions down the line, and though most of this is done in the front half, it is a key aspect of team defence. 

There are currently seven rucks who average more than 2.5 intercepts a game, and only two who average more than two intercept marks. Darcy Cameron and Max Gawn leading the way with an average of 2.63 and 2.38 intercept marks respectively.

Another way rucks are able to assist with team defence is dropping back to help out with spoils and one percenters to help create stoppages where they can utilise their ruck craft.

Matt Flynn has averaged five spoils a game form his appearances for West Coast this year, while a total of eight rucks average more than two spoils a game.

Rucks as a Midfield Weapon – Using rucks as an on-baller

Modern rucks are notable much more agile and skilled than the rucks of yesteryear, and the best rucks are able to rack up as many disposals as some midfielders.

There is an old adage of “don’t handball to a ruckman,” but the game has evolved past that in many cases, and there are multiple rucks receiving upwards of five handball receives per game.

As well as racking up touches from handball receives – or more commonly marks – the more agile of our modern game’s giants are able to pick up the ball below their knees and create attacking possession chains for their teams.

As many as six rucks currently average 4.5 or more ground ball gets per game, and Brodie Grundy averages a whopping 3.25 post-clearance ground ball gets.

Attacking Through Rucks – Creating scores through ruckwork and possession

Which rucks contribute most to the score? Of our 21 nominal rucks, ten average 4.5 or more score involvements a game, some off their own boot, some goal assists, and some involvements in scoring chains.

While some rucks average more scores themselves, these ten are involved in the most scores for their teams.

Big Targets up Forward – Using Rucks as keys

While some rucks rest forward, some also drift forward after a contest to create an option – think the way Petracca or Heeney does, only a foot taller and significantly slower – with ten rucks taking a mark inside 50 at least every second week but only Sam Draper averaging better than a goal a game.

Where do they get their footy?

Looking at possession locations, we can see that the majority of rucks get their ball in the front half, with just the following nine players receiving more footy in the defensive half of the ground.

From the others – the majority of rucks who average 50% or more front half possessions – just four average 60% or higher front half possessions. This obviously makes sense with Jackson and Darcy sharing duties, but speaks to the team structure of Geelong and Brisbane that Stanley and McInerny spend so much time down there.

But what does it all add up to?

While all of these skills are individually valuable, the best rucks in the competition string multiple of these together to become more than just a hitout and mark player.

You will notice that the best rucks in the competition appear on multiple of these lists of roles and skillsets – players like Max Gawn, Rowan Marshall, Darcy Cameron and Tom De Koning – and this is what makes them so valuable in relation to their peers.

The days of the tap only ruck are well and truly behind us, and you have to be talented at much more than just ruck craft in order to be picked over a lesser ruck who outperforms you in other parts of the ground.

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What might Dean Cox be adjusting?

Sean Lawson

In a radio interview this week, Sydney Swan Matt Roberts summed up the experience of a successor coach, noting the change that comes with a previously subordinate internal voice taking over as the primary voice.

Where previously Cox “had to listen to Horse” and couldn’t “put his full spin on it”, now he can be fully clear about his own preferences about how he wants the team to play.

Even without a new coach, one imagines that a big source of change for the Swans would be addressing the way they lost the grand final last year and were also soundly beaten on some other occasions. We can assume that changes this year pushed by the new coaching team are heavily driven by those experiences.

So after two months of football, against the backdrop of poorer performances, what can we glean about the changes Cox might be implementing?

First up, the Swans seem to be taking the game on more. No team has taken more running bounces per game in the last five years than Cox’s Swans, and they’re also gaining a bit more ground per disposal.

This may be a response to the way opponents sought to cut off Sydney’s transition game with a high defensive line and corridor density last year. If short kicking options are cut off, the running game can be a risky but rewarding alternative method of transition.

The run and bounce by Blakey, Bice, and Warner (all in the top 20 for most bounces) are most notable and visually striking, but Wicks, Florent, Roberts, Heeney and Campbell all chip in here with a variety of options. Most are also among Sydney’s preferred distributors, the better to put opponents in two minds.

Second, the defence is… changing.

Dean Cox has talked of a new defensive approach multiple times this year, and famously tried to move McCartin forward to cover injuries while leaving new players like Paton and Hamling to cover the gaps.

Watching live, there have been notable moments of confusion about handovers and trade-ups, despite many of the same personnel involved. This suggests changes in role assignments, a shift in philosophy about when to hand off, when to provide help, when to come up or sit deep, and so forth.

What we can say from the statistics is that this new approach, so far, seems to be resulting in more isolated defenders and more defensive contest losses. Sydney last year spoiled more than just about anyone, relative to the defensive load faced, they feasted off spilled ground ball in rebound, and they kept moments of defensive isolation to a minimum.

The Swans after two months with Cox at the helm, are facing more 1v1 contests per game, and losing more of those than in previous years. They’re also spoiling less, and although as Cody notes below, spoils are down across the league, Sydney have also slipped from having the most spoils to merely 4th most.

Last year, Sydney were notably vulnerable to possession and control games, most dramatically in the grand final when the Lions’ uncontested marking was off the charts. Clubs looked to deny the turnover game by keeping the ball away from them.

This year, Sydney appear to be making more of an effort to push up and apply pressure and deny that possession game. Opponents are marking the ball less often, and the average metres gained point to longer ball use and perhaps less shorter and more lateral options.

All of these things are very preliminary, and occurring in the context of significant midfield and forward line absences, and and unsettled defence, but they are elements to watch as Sydney tries to find their feet under the partial break with the past represented by their successor coach.

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Where have the clunks gone?

Cody Atkinson

I got into a discussion yesterday. 

On the internet. 

So not a discussion but more a character limited amalgam of words, ideas and preconceived notions. Not an argument either, although the internet is good for them – and the line is often fine between fight and discussion.

When researching some items around ball movement, something glaring stood out.

A lack of clunks. What happened to the big men, and their ability to fly and take big grabs?

It’s still early days this season, but the 8.8 taken per team per game this year would be the lowest in the era we have records for. It was 9.6 last year – which doesn’t seem like a huge drop, but it’s been as high as 11.5 per game in the last five years. That’s almost two a quarter across both teams.

The first reaction is to look at whether it’s an attacking strategy symptom – going for more open targets down the ground – or a defensive improvement. All up, there’s a slight downtick in the number of overall marks, but nothing dramatic that would indicate a massive course correction.

Looking at the number of spoils, we have some indications that it might not be a pure – or traditional – defensive cause either.

This season has also seen the fewest spoils per game of any season since 2012. There’s about seven fewer spoils per team per game than in 2019. That’s 14 per game across both teams, or nearly four a quarter. 

If you take the spoils and contested marks together there are twenty fewer contests than in 2019, or 20% fewer.

Kicks are down in that time period as well, but only about 5%. Total marks are down about 5% too – which makes sense. That’s proportionate.

The easiest conclusion is that in the past few years there has been an emphasis towards teams finding open short and intermediate targets at the expense of bombing the ball long to packs. Football is a battle between position and possession, and the former may be taking precedence over the latter. This has happened before – note the massive rise between 2005 and 2010 in that first graphic. It could be a sign that the tide might be turning leaguewide, as James alludes to above.

There could also be some personnel issues. There’s been a number of noted contested markers missing time this year, from Sam Darcy to Jesse Hogan and Harry McKay. As availability shifts for the league this number may rise.

But it is worth tracking over the coming weeks. Keep a look out for the clunks and the fists.

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Around the grounds

Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy

• Tasmania stadium updates – the Tasmanian Government has decided to go it alone on the funding front (for their portion of the stadium). They also look like bringing the matter before Parliament in the next few weeks. Things might be heating up for Team 19.
• Squiggle’s Power Rankings sees a new club (the Bulldogs) take top spot.
• Ricky at The Shinboner takes a long look at one particular centre bounce set up to a very entertaining effect.
• The AFLW season opener has been announced as being Carlton v Collingwood, to some general consternation.

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the Bounce

We’re not quite a third of the way through the season, winter is starting to make itself felt, and footy is starting to become a routine grind after the flashy baubles of the early season fixture.

Conventional wisdom would say that this is a good time to take stock of the ladder and how it’s starting to take shape.

Plenty of pundits like to whip out hot takes that only handful of teams can win the flag. Some have already shouted that the season is over for teams – such as Sydney – just because they have a negative win loss record two months into the year.

However at this stage of the year there are a lot of caveats that need to be considered. Firstly, there are some real sample size issues. Teams have also played against very different opponent sets.

It’s still early, and things change. Some of the hottest teams have not yet faced the full weight of opposition analysis finding counters and exploiting their weaknesses. Other teams are starting to work on emergent flaws in their game. Some teams are starting to rally and settle, others maybe falling apart after early friskiness.

Work undertaken by Max Barry’s Squiggle power rankings shows us a more nuanced picture.

This paints a picture not too different to expectations at the start of the year. There’s a large group of 12 teams not too far apart from each other, separated as much by injury fortunes, close game luck, tactical quirks and scheduling as anything else.

Then, the universally expected three rebuilding stragglers at the bottom, and a group emerging who are struggling to keep pace – perhaps most surprisingly, including Melbourne.

The ladder doesn’t exactly lie, even at this relatively early stage. But it can do with some extra context.

This Week In Football we have:

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Welcome back, Jack

Ben Cochrane

Welcome back, Jack.

Not long ago on Twitter, I shared a strange little story from the margins of AFL history -a forgotten era, and a tale of a missing name.

Between 1965 and 2005, the AFL went through a major Jack shortage, a period that I now call The Jackless Era – a staggering 40-year stretch where the name Jack all but disappeared from the league.

It’s especially odd when you consider just how central Jacks once were to the game. Think Dyer. Titus, Clarke, Hawkins. These weren’t fringe players, Jacks were champions of the game. Then, suddenly, they vanished.

This wasn’t just a blip. It was a full-blown drought – a naming recession that stretched across generations. And while the game kept evolving, Jacks stayed behind.

At the peak, from 1939 to 1941, the AFL saw three consecutive years where 11 players named Jack – a full 25% of the field – took to the ground in a single game.

But sometime in the early 2000s, something shifted. 

Demographer Mark McCrindle suggests Australians tend to bring names back from the past and have a preference to go for colloquial, down-to-earth names.

There could also be a generational skipping effect, where recent children are named after a grandparent or great grandparent. 

Data suggests AFL names rolling in trend with US babies, albeit with a slight lag. 

And one can’t help but see a role of the titular 1997 Oscar winning motion picture Titanic, with the heartthrob Jack Dawson playing a role. 

Whatever the reason, Jack was back in cribs – and soon after, back in clubrooms.

By the mid 2010s, the Jack Renaissance had well and truly begun, and it has had non-insignificant impacts to win-rates.

Historically, of the 6,986 games of AFL played with a ‘Jack Differential’ (one team having more Jacks than the other), the more Jack-endowed team has won 50.4% of the time. 

A basic regression suggests that each additional Jack your team has over the opponent increases your chance of winning by ~0.14%.

Now, the AFL is once again full of Jacks. St Kilda notably leading the charge. Jacks are to St Kilda as to lengthy headbanded blonde hair is to Geelong.

We even saw the greatest ‘Jack Off’ in the modern era occuring in Round 1, 2019 where St Kilda (6 Jacks) defeated Gold Coast (4 Jacks).

But not every club has embraced the return.

In fact, one club now holds a rather unwanted record: Essendon. The Bombers haven’t fielded a single Jack since 1980. That’s 45 years without a Jack – the longest current Jack-less streak.

It’s a curiosity. A coincidence? Maybe. But given their finals drought it might be starting to feel like a curse. Could a deliberate Jack recruitment strategy be the key to breaking Essendon’s drought?

Only time will tell. But for now, one thing’s for sure.

The Jacks are back and Essendon is on the clock.

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Reports of the death of tackling have been greatly exaggerated

Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com

It’s that wonderful time of year again. After 130 years of V/AFL football the tackle is dead, and with it goes the game we love.

You can’t even lay a good hard tackle anymore without being suspended, so how on earth are these players supposed to play the game – or so a handful of pundits (and North Melbourne players) would have you believe. 

Or is this all a little bit much? Is the tackle really dead?

AFL on X: “Paul Curtis has been handed a three-match suspension following this incident involving Josh Sinn. Full Saturday Match Review findings: https://t.co/JFXj8niYlo https://t.co/b1YCH1AMYE” / X

If I asked you what percentage of tackles this year had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a penalty, what would you guess? What if I asked you what percentage had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a suspension?

Would you guess 5%?

Maybe a little more conservative and guess 1%?

Well, we painstakingly went through all of the rough conduct reports from the start of 2024 to find which ones were dangerous tackles, and either of those guesses would be way off. 

Just 0.1% of tackles have been cited this year – the same as it was for the whole of 2024. And of those 33,000 tackles since the beginning of 2024 just 0.04% have resulted in a suspension.

That’s around one in every two and a half thousand tackles.

Is it true that the matrix could take more things into consideration? Sure, but with the knowledge we now have around concussions, when tackling you have a duty of care to your opponent.

Tom Atkins has placed a record pace 76 tackles so far this season without having been cited once. Last year H&A leader Matt Rowell and overall leader James Rowbottom both went the whole season without so much as a fine. So it certainly is possible.

*Data taken from available footage of rough conduct charges on MRO reports and checking match video for incidents

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Taking the Foot off the Pedal

Joe Cordy

Approximately halfway through the last quarter of Saturday’s clash between the Lions and Saints, Zac Bailey slotted his 3rd goal of the day to extend the lead to over six goals. If there was the faintest sliver of hope for a comeback up to this moment, it had just been extinguished.

It left everybody in the ground with the question of what they do with the last remaining ten minutes of play.

For Jonathan Brown and Dermott Brereton the answer from the Brisbane perspective was obvious: put the foot down.

They were clearly the better team on the day, and now they had an opponent with nothing left to play for. It was obvious to both commentators that they should boost their percentage, as about half of the top eight places would come down to a tiebreaker from teams on equal premiership points.

Instead of piling on the score, though, the Lions largely just saw the game out. They stopped chasing or applying as much pressure as they had been. The Lions put on another three goals but let another three through.

This allowed St Kilda their highest quarter score of the night, and the margin ended up in much the same place as when Bailey put the game to bed.

This decision to preserve energy isn’t unique to Chris Fagan. Last weekend also saw:

• After completing a streak of twelve unanswered goals, Gold Coast brought key players to the bench and conceded their first major in nearly an hour against Sydney.
• Following their dominant third quarter the Bulldogs gave their captain and current best player in the game the last term off.
• Most conspicuous was Melbourne’s decision to rest their captain and allow Richmond to score the last four goals of the game.

None of these decisions put the potential result of the game into question, but they all cost their team an opportunity to increase their percentage.

It’s likely they’d made the same observation of a trend around percentage: it’s exceedingly rare for percentage to come into play, and even rarer for it to have any consequences.

Of the 234 ladder positions decided in the 18-team era, 71 belonged to teams who had fallen behind another on percentage. Of those 71, only 20 made a difference in September.

Broken down further, the most common consequence is missing a home final in the first week (i.e., teams finishing 3rd, 4th, 7th or 8th on the same number of points as 1st, 2nd, 5th or 6th). Only four teams in the last 13 seasons have realised the nightmare scenario of missing finals completely because of their inability to run up the score on their day, or play out the four quarters on their opponent’s.

When put side by side a clear trend can be seen in the variability between where percentage will put a team on the ladder:

…and where collecting premiership points will put you:

With the introduction of the Opening Round, Gather Round, and the pre-finals bye, men’s seasons are longer than ever measured both by games played and the days between the first and last bounce. Players are also expected to cover more distance at higher speed, with less opportunities for a spell on the bench.

For teams aiming to go deep into September, they now need to not only manage the games they’re in, but the weeks and months ahead as well.

While you may see coaches flip magnets around, even so egregiously that their counterparts take exception to it, we’re unlikely to see teams breaking any scoring records in the near future.

The showdown lowdown

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

Want to really annoy some people? Make a list.

It seems we’re in marquee season right now. We’ve got the Q-Clash and the Sydney Derby coming up this week, and across the last two weeks we had the Easter and ANZAC matches.

What better time to rile everyone up by ranking the various marquee fixtures across the league.

I’ve detailed my methodology over at CreditToDuBois if you want to have a look, but I’ll present the end results here.

In brief, I’ve ranked each clash across the last 10 instances across criteria of competitiveness (50%), investment from fans (25%) and investment from players (25%) to come up with a completely objective and scientifically rigorous order.

The methodology linked above goes into far more detail about how I reached these rankings, but this gives a quick overview of how the different components contributed.

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What it’s like doing a post-match press conference

Cody Atkinson

There was a fair bit of discussion about AFL post game press conferences this week, especially around the confrontation between Ross Lyon and Gemma Bastiani.

Full disclosure: I’ve collaborated with Gemma in the past and she’s one of the best minds in football media going IMO.

I’ve been paid to go to the football for several years now, including getting the opportunity to learn from coaches. Given the discussions of the week, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about how at least one journalist sees the process.

The game after the game

After the siren blows the next phase of a football game begins. If football is the action, the post game is the reaction.

Fans tend to look for either the exits from the ground or the way onto the field for kick to kick. The players eventually float towards the rooms to get a brief debrief before cooling down in front of the inner circle, friends and family.

Staff and security start to pack down and secure the venue, turning the haven of activity into a ghost town once again.

A small handful of individuals head the other way, into a typically dark hidden room in the bowels of the grandstands.

The results are typically broadcasted live across the nation and uploaded to youtube shortly after.

This is what happens at an AFL post-game media conference.

Before it begins journalists tend to work up their questions. Sean and I tend to dial up our data and look if it matches with trends we’ve observed across the game. We also try to weave any questions interested onlookers have fed us through the match.

The sound and camera guys have to set the room up beforehand, with one inevitably playing the role of coach. Journalists that are kicking around often help set the room up at smaller grounds.

Different journalists have different motivations at these events. Most are there for filing match reports or instant analysis for quick consumption. Very occasionally you’ll see someone from the host broadcaster down to dominate the early proceedings – a practice that seems to have stopped in recent years. There’s a few that are looking to fill out articles about broader topics of the day – think reaction to tackles or the like.

Even rarer still are journalists who are looking at deeper issues or trying to fill insights for other articles. That’s where Sean and I usually fall.

That means generally you’ll see three different types of questions:

• Surface level on the who, what, where of a game, including injury concerns.
• “Gotcha” questions trying to get a quote to base a “topic of the day” article on.
• More strategic, deeper questions on how footy is played in 2025 and the roles of different players.

Coaches also have different motivations in these press conferences. They realise that, due to the potential audience, they have some responsibility to provide an explanation for what we have just seen.

For losing coaches, there’s always a natural undertone of disappointment and anger. Winning coaches are almost always happier.

When the cameras are on.

It’s important to note that the behaviours of both coaches and journalists tend to shift before cameras are turned on and once they are turned off. There’s joking, light tomfoolery and the like. It’s a workplace, after all.

Speaking their language

As someone who tends to ask the more strategic questions, it often takes time to signal to coaches the line I want to take. As it differs from the usual line of questioning, making sure that language and terminology that Sean and I use is correct is critical.

I got it embarrassingly wrong once with Sam Mitchell, using lingo from another club to try to talk about the Hawks’ choices.

The one thing I’ve learned from doing it for the last few years is just how willing coaches are to just talk about how footy is played (within reason). Once they know they can talk about spares, stoppage, swinging the ball and spreads, they are extremely willing to elaborate. They – like most reading this – are footy nuffs or nerds.

I’ve also talked to Ross Lyon, who gave me a similar “grilling” when we started asking questions. Like last week’s press conference, the Saints had just lost a game. I was relatively prepared, and able to swing it back where I wanted to go (including getting a couple of quotes I needed for upcoming pieces) but there was a moment of uncertainty at the start. It felt like a battle, but a fun one.

I understand Ross may have enjoyed it too, especially as we started to get into the nitty gritty more.

But my motivations were pretty different to most journos, and certainly to the role that Gemma would have played at the presser. It’s an odd task – asking about how someone just publicly lost.

In my reading that press conference would have been far better if Ross engaged with the questions straight up, and given Gemma the chance to ask follow ups (or lead her there). But I also didn’t lose by 45 points in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands of people.

Overall, some see the process as a waste but I strongly disagree. I’m very biased though.

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The best kicks: Are the most threatening and the safest kicks the same players?

Sean Lawson

Last week Liam showed off his updated alternative to the AFL’s kicking efficiency stat, where two values, kicking threat and kicking retention, show how damaging players are compared to the average for their kicking context, and how well they retain the ball. This got me thinking about to what extent these two types of “good kicking” come from the same players.

The top quartile of most frequent kicks (currently having at least 67 kicks so far this year) are spread across all points of the spectrum, but it’s relatively rare for high volume kickers to be equally very strong on both score threat and ball retention. This stands to reason – it requires a player to produce scores from their kicks at a rate elevated from usual for their position, and also to have kicks that don’t get turned over as often as typical. Balancing safety and threat is hard, since intuitively players generally need to take risks to lead to scoring, but those risks also raise turnover potential. 

Pat Lipinski, a key linking component of Collingwood’s ladder leading play, currently sits at the top in terms of combined threat and retention rating, with other standouts including the all-rounder Isaac Heeney, and Dylan Moore and Isaac Cumming, both also members of very effective offensive midfield/forward setups.

At the other end of the scale, perhaps fairly emblematic of Melbourne’s issues with the ball, Christian Petracca is using it much less threateningly and with more turnovers than would be expected from where and how he’s operating. He’s never been a high retention player but his threat rating is through the floor in 2025.

Three other things we can observe looking at the quartile of players who kick the most are:

1. A bit over a third of high-volume kickers are both threat and retention positive, what we might consider to be the all round effective kickers.
2. Most are better than average on at least one side of the ledger. Only a quarter of the 100 most frequent kickers were negative for both threat and retention
3. Safe but less threatening kickers are more common than the reverse.
   

This all tends to suggest that despite the clear difference between kicking to avoid turnovers, and kicking to produce scoring opportunities, the two skills aren’t entirely separate from each other.

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Around the Grounds

Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy

• Max Barry, creator of the premier website for footy modelling Squiggle, is launching a footy roguelike deck builder game
• Madi Chwasta at the ABC covered the comedy accountability project that took down a sportsbet ad campaign by simply reporting the outcome of the bets they promoted
• According to Channel 7, GWS are exploring selling a home game to be played at the MCG

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the bounce

This weekend in football tends to get dominated by one topic in particular – war.

The round containing ANZAC Day tends to feature more attention to the intersection of war and football than all other weeks combined.

There are some real connections between the game we love and the fighting we hate. Hundreds of footballers – amateur and professional alike – have served in wars over the years. Some of the game’s greats have arrived in Australia displaced from war-torn regions (either directly or via their families).

That includes footballers lost to the horrors of war. According to AFL records, 155 V/AFL footballers have died on the battlefields. Two of those men died in the Boer War, 94 in World War I and 59 in World War II.

The great Russell Jackson wrote an insightful piece on this subject for The Guardian in the past, reflecting on the broader point and a more personal journey.

So before you get hooked on the emotion this weekend, just remember football is a game, and war is horrific.

This Week In Football we have:

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Matthew Nicks’ Plan B

Joe Cordy

Every year since the top-eight finals system was introduced, at least two teams have made finals that weren’t there the year before. Recently, it’s been a common sight to see a team slingshot from outside the eight into a double chance. Adelaide have established themselves as one of the favourites to complete this maneuver and play their first finals games of the Matthew Nicks era. 

The composition of the Crows list during Nicks’ tenure has never leant itself to defence, and they’ve hovered as an average to below average defensive side since 2020. To compensate for this they’ve leant heavily on outpacing their opponents in attack: Nicks’ Crows invite the opposition onto them, waiting to intercept the ball and play on the counter, getting it to their talls in isolation like a Sean Dyche Burnley team.

This tactic has made them both the most damaging team in attacking from turnover, as well as the most improved team from 2024. 

The Crows are #2 in intercept possessions, #1 in points from turnovers, #3 in marks inside 50, #1 in points from the defensive half, and are one of only four teams to average more points from chains beginning in their defensive half than their forward half.

This deep-sitting, counter-attacking style of course has the obvious issue of always allowing the opposition plenty of looks at their own goal. At the end of Round 5 they were conceding 48.0 points from forward half chains (4th highest in the league), and their Round 2 victory against Essendon was just the third time in the last 10 years that a team has managed to record a 10-goal victory while conceding at least 100 points.

After a 3-0 start they hit successive road bumps against fellow top-four aspirants: a controversial 1-point loss to Gold Coast, and a blown lead to Geelong. The cracks in Nicks’ gameplan were showing across these two games, as they allowed 18 shots from front half chains in each match for 58 and 63 points respectively.

Chris Scott identified in the post-match presser that his plan to nullify the superior firepower Adelaide have in the forward line was to turn the game into a shootout, exposing Adelaide’s backline and levelling the talent gap up forward through sheer number of opportunities. 

Even with their spearhead Jesse Hogan missing, the GWS game threatened on paper to be a similar affair. The two teams came into the game as 1st and 2nd for points scored from the back half, putting similar emphasis on rebounding attack but with GWS showing more defensive grit. Instead living up to its potential on-paper of a high-scoring end to end affair the Crows came in with a gameplan to completely shut the game down.

The two sides combined for a score of 11.20.86, a total that wouldn’t have been enough to beat Adelaide in any of their first five games this year. Even though the total score of 34 was assisted by the Giants inability to put it through the big sticks, the underlying metrics such as only allowing 15 shots (nearly half of the Giants per game average coming into the round) and handedly winning post-clearance contested possessions 97-83 paint a picture of a team that was able to find a totally different path to victory to what they’d previously been using.

Instead of getting brought into another basketball game, they slowed the pace down, clogged up their opponent’s opportunities even as it cost them their own, and turned the game into a slog. 

It may have been ugly to watch, but it showed a tactical adaptability typical of top-end teams. In a week where other ladder climbing aspirants like St Kilda had their front-half stoppage game picked apart, and Gold Coast’s transition game was stopped by a roof, it was a good time to avoid headlines.

Sometimes instead of digging your heels in and declaring “it’s who we are, mate” it’s better to find the most effective way to four points.

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Dayle Garlett – A personal reflection

Jack Turner

This piece was first published on The Back Pocket.

Everyone who grew up playing enough football has that one player that they believe with all their heart could have torn apart the big stage if only they had applied themselves.

I have multiple. Some had kids young and decided not to nominate for the draft (a decision that still makes no sense to me to this day), others who were approached by AFL clubs when we did our School footy 16s Melbourne trip but decided that the footballing life wasn’t for them. 

And then there’s Dayle Garlett.

Dayle is the single most naturally gifted footballer and athlete I have ever played with or against. Which is fair praise, as I played junior football with names like Nathan Broad (who I also played a lot of one-sided backyard cricket against), and Murray Newman, and against the likes of Stephen Coniglio, Rory Lobb and Charlie Cameron.

He was the type of player who could tear you apart in minutes, all the while barely looking like he was even trying. He could outpace the average player gracefully, could kick the ball 50 meters with both feet, and had the arrogance to make it all work confidently.

Garlett wasn’t selected in the 2011 AFL draft, mostly due to the already evident behavioural issues. He wasn’t welcome on the aforementioned Melbourne trip – despite being listed as an underager in the Under 18s All-Australian squad that same year. He was also selected for All-Australian honours again a year later, but once more was overlooked in the draft.

In the 2013 AFL draft, finally an AFL team was ready to take a risk on this clearly elite talent, and Hawthorn took him as a 19-year-old at Pick 38 and their second pick overall. He spent the pre-season living with then-captain Luke Hodge, but already signs were there that he was going to be unable realise his full potential.

After a few months of late appearances and missed training sessions – despite reports his professionalism was on the improve – Garlett was given permission to return home to Perth to obtain his drivers’ licence. 

Just one day after Luke Hodge assured the media that there was nothing more to see here, Garlett told Hawthorn that he was quitting football shortly after landing in Western Australia.

“Unfortunately this situation hasn’t worked out as the club or Dayle would have hoped, and while we’re disappointed we understand his decision. Despite the club’s efforts over the past six months to help him adjust to an elite lifestyle, Dayle has found the regimented systems and standards of a professional club challenging,”

then Hawthorn football boss Chris Fagan in 2014. 

We acknowledge that Hawthorn Football Club places high expectations on all of its players, but it is equally supportive in working with each player to help them meet our standards and behaviours if they are committed to doing so.”

Later it was learned that his feelings of isolation had reportedly led to erratic and spontaneous behaviour, resulting in Garlett getting mixed up with criminals in Melbourne’s drug industry, leading to a habit he was unable to shake on his return home.

In late September 2015 – just weeks before his former teammates celebrated a third consecutive premiership – Garlett was charged with a series of theft and driving-related charges dating back to just weeks after his return to WA, and sentenced to five years in prison.

As is sadly the case with many who end up in the system and mixed up with the wrong people at such a young age, he has consistently reoffended since then, spending most of the last decade in and out of prison.

Shortly after his first sentencing, his lawyer requested a suspended sentence for Garlett, stating that the jail term was “manifestly excessive” and would be “crushing,” arguing that there was only a “small window of opportunity” for his client, whom he said had “a very promising career prospect”.

“He is worth another chance and he’s a good bet to succeed,” Mr Giudice said.

Now a man who has spent the vast majority of his adult life in prison, Dayle was once a prodigiously talented teenager who was charged with – amongst his more serious offences – stealing a pair of trousers to wear to court because he said he “wanted to show respect for the magistrate”.

When I think about Dayle now, I feel only sadness. Mostly for him, but also for his mum and his stepfather, who from all of my interactions with them seemed to be truly lovely people. It was his mum who once suggested the interesting strategy of getting me to tag Dayle’s tagger. He was such a good player that despite putting one of our worst players (me) in the midfield, it worked.

I think that as much as Dayle’s is a cautionary tale, it is one of how we could be doing so much more for our troubled young people – both as a sport and as a society. 

Compassion and care is often an afterthought when publicly discussing the fates of teenagers and young adults. This doesn’t condone the behaviour, but such attention may not do much to rehabilitate the individual or improve the safety of society. It is important to remember that – while public figures – these players are just people who are figuring out who they are and their place in the world.

The near-constant media harassment of players who take time away from the game or who have minor slip-ups in the public eye (like almost any twenty-something) does nothing to improve the quality of the game we love, nor make it any more attractive to the talent it wishes to attract.

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We have all the time (on) in the world

Lincoln Tracy

This is an excerpt of a longer piece I’ve written over on my blog, so check that out if you’re interested in this topic.

Earlier this month The Age’s Scott Spits wrote an interesting piece about how the average length of each quarter has been slowly increasing over time.

Based on data for the first six rounds of the season, quarters were lasting more than 32 minutes each, meaning the average AFL match took almost 130 minutes to complete. 

I won’t go back over the entire article – including his exploration of some of the potential reasons as to why games are longer than ever before – but my eye was drawn to one particular section.

The part in question related to a social media post made by Geelong skipper (and then AFL Players Association president) Patrick Dangerfield earlier this year. 

As audiences attention span reduces the debate will continue with the AFL quarter lengths. It’s Time to reduce them. – cue outrage 🤬 https://t.co/hT8KSF5nb3

— Patrick Dangerfield (@dangerfield35) January 29, 2025

I found the timing of Spits’ story and the reference to Dangerfield’s social media post interesting, as less than a week before the story was published Geelong had taken full advantage of longer quarters in their Gather Round clash with Adelaide.

This series of events got me thinking about which teams benefited most from longer quarters this year – by scoring more heavily in “time on” compared to the “actual” quarter (the first 20 minutes).

Geelong have registered 54.42.366 in regular time and 33.25.233 in extra time, which translates to 37.9% of their points scored beyond the 20-minute mark. This ranks them sixth, behind Carlton, Hawthorn, Richmond, Port Adelaide, and Brisbane. 

However, scoring points is only half the battle. Having a high-powered offense in the dying stages of a quarter may mean little if your defence leaks like a sieve. This is where looking at the net difference in points scored versus points conceded comes into play.

Credit to James Ives for the chart inspo

Hawthorn and Carlton remain the top two teams (albeit the positions have switched) in terms of dominating scoring during time on. The Hawks score 44.5% of their points and allow their opponents to score 31.1% of their total during time on (+13.4%), defending slightly better than Carlton (47.3% versus 36.1% for their opponents, +11.2%). 

Similarly, Essendon and the Western Bulldogs find themselves at the bottom end of the scale, conceding a greater proportion of scores in time on compared to what they can put forward themselves. 

And while St Kilda are slightly below league average in terms of the proportion of points scored during time on (35.6%), they are ranked third in the above chart due to their impressive ability to not concede scores during the same period. To this point in the season the Saints have allowed opponents to register 27.5% of their score in time on – clearly the lowest in the league. 

It will be interesting to track the breakdown of when teams score over the rest of the season, as a series of poor performances late in quarters could be the difference between playing finals or starting the off-season early.

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Marking Out

Emlyn Breese – CreditToDuBois.com

Just a snapshot from me this week, but one I intend to build on as the season goes.

Reading through James’ analysis of Melbourne’s forward entries last week put F50 marking opportunities even more front of mind for me than it has been for the last few years.

To paraphrase Scott Steiner (and more recently his nephew Bronn Breaker), they say all marks are created equal, but you look at Melbourne, and you look at Gold Coast, and you can see that statement is not true.

A noticeable element of Melbourne’s forward line for a long time has been when they do generate marks inside 50, it often seems to be from lateral leads deep into the pockets generating low quality shots.

A quick look at WheeloRatings.com seems to back this casual observation up – they have been bottom 2 for the average xScore from set shots every year back to 2021.

To enable some quick analysis we’re going to define a “hot zone” – within 40m of goal and at no greater than a 30 degree angle from either goal post. Any time you draw a line it will cause some arbitrary inclusions and exclusions, but to me this seems like a pretty solid feel of what a really high quality opportunity looks like.

I’ll also break down the marks in those zones into three categories – Contested, Marks On Lead, and Uncontested.

Here’s how teams in 2025 are performing generating marks in the zone.

Unsurprisingly, Melbourne are dead last for marks in the most valuable area, and with a particularly bad return from contested marks. This is despite them generating the most offensive 1 on 1 contests in the league (16.3 per match, Carlton being the next on 13.2) and tracking at just below league average win rate for those contests.

It’s also worth looking at how teams are conceding marks in the zone.

West Coast and Melbourne being bottom 4 on both tables really illustrates some of the problems they’re having. West Coast are off the charts on conceding high value uncontested marks, which probably speaks to the kind of entries their midfielders and forwards are allowing opponents to set up through lack of pressure. I was somewhat surprised to see North with a relatively modest return here – not good by any stretch, but not catastrophic. 

To finish up we’ll combine the two tables for a net differential which again shows Melbourne and West Coast as two laggards. The numbers don’t lie, and so far they’ve spelt disaster for both teams. 

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I’m Leo DiCaprio, he’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and this Wednesday night it’s footy from every angle but the ones that matter*

Ryan Buckland

I watched today’s Adam Yze pre-game press conference so you don’t have to. 

Yze generously, earnestly, and very strongly, answered questions which all had something to do with Noah Balta for the first half of the session. 

Questions which included:

Question: “The $45,000 paid to the victim, was that paid by the club or by Noah?”

Yze’s paraphrased answer: What a strange thing to ask, I can’t comment on that anyway. 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

Question: “Are you personally comfortable with how the club has handled [the situation]?”

Paraphrased answer: Really? Yes 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

Question: “Is he locked in from Round 16 onwards?”

Paraphrased answer: We’re worried about Round 7 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

It was revealed later that there was a moment scrubbed from the Tigers’ official release of the media conference where Yze and a Tigers staffer told the pack there would be no more questions answered about Balta.

Hardwick fires back, and Hinkley on Wines' health.

Watch Footy Feed with @Nat_Edwards and @sarahjolle, thanks to @Telstra. pic.twitter.com/nGMv5tX07e

— AFL (@AFL) April 23, 2025

This wasn’t enough for some. 

I watched this clip from AFL360 last night so you don’t have to.

AFL 360's Gerard Whateley criticises Richmond for its handling of the Noah Balta-heavy press conference, asking where senior club figures were.

📺 Watch #AFL360 LIVE on ch.504 or stream on Kayo pic.twitter.com/P0W73cIDXO

— Fox Footy (@FOXFOOTY) April 23, 2025

“Come and field all the questions, in the suit… let them punch out, then bring the coach in… that’s what should have happened today,” said erstwhile host Gerard Whately.

“You can’t naively front up, you choose who the spokesperson for the club is, they chose the coach. You can’t then complain that the questions of the news media are about the story of the day.”

A lot of words were spoken in performative outrage, all to chasten a club for not being a willing participant in the manufacture of some soundbites to lead a 6pm news bulletin.

Gerard Whateley spends at least 30 seconds more or less laying out what he thinks should have happened. He does this by playing out what predictably would have happened: bunch of questions about process, decision-making, reaction, hindsight, what happens next, answers given, footage gets clipped up and sprayed out later that evening. 

Nothing which happens in that version of reality is different to what actually transpired; the difference is it’s some guy in a suit rather than Yze in the clips.

It’s 2025 football media writ large. A particularly vapid and pointless form of Inception where a broadcast partner spends time on its flagship panel show moralising are about how a club managed a weekly press conference.

Shit. Does that mean this missive is the Hotel, or the Snowy Mountain Hospital? I’m not in Limbo am I? 

Actually, that would help explain the bleak, soulless, depressing state of ~football~ from Sunday evening to Thursday afternoon.

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An ANZAC Day Watch

James Ives

Essendon ranks 17th in D50 to score and 18th for scores from kick ins – highlighting their challenges in transitioning the ball from the back half. 

On the other hand, Collingwood ranks 1st  in % of intercepts generated i50 – indicating that much of this game will be determined by Collingwood’s ability to win and own territory vs Essendon’s ability to transition from deep in their own half. 

Looking at Essendon’s kick ins, their profile appears much more diverse than the competition leaders, Hawthorn. 

Which raises the question, is it better to be selective and pick your spots or take territory with predictability? 

Against the best front half teams, it might be the latter. Let’s see if Essendon modify their approach on Friday. 

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Kick Retention and Threat

Liam Crowhurst

Kicking efficiency is dead! Long live kick retention ratings! 

No longer are we bound by the archaic and poorly designed metric of kicking efficiency. Long ago, a line was chosen at 40 metres. This serves as the core of the definition of an effective kick.

A 39m kick to a contest is judged “ineffective”. A 41m kick to a contest is judged “effective”. Surely there’s a better way to judge Australian Football’s most fundamental act. Kicking efficiency served its purpose, and now it’s time to move on.

Kick Threat and Retention Ratings was first created by myself in 2023 as a way to more accurately judge a player’s kicking abilities. This project has now graduated and is now publicly available for all to see on Andrew Whelan’s fantastic site Wheelo Ratings.

What goes into these ratings? There are two main outputs to generate ratings across around 320,000 kicks over the last five AFL seasons:

Retention Outputs: “Retention” is split into three groups: “Retain”, “Contest” and “Turnover”.

Retain looks if the player’s teammates get first possession (or acts first) after their kick. Contest finds if the next action is a spoil or a stoppage. Turnover is similar to retain, except the opposition gets first use or possession after the kick.

Threat Outputs: “Threat” looks at whether the kick generates a shot at goal later in that possession chain or not. As a guide, roughly 23% of chains result in a scoring opportunity.

Those two outputs are classified using location, angle, context and distance:

• Kick location: this is measured by a x-y coordinate of where the kick took place. Shots at goal have been excluded since I consider goal kicking a completely separate skill to field kicking. There’s already a great metric for shooting performance called xScore.

• Context: This looks at how the player received the ball.This acts as a proxy for implied pressure on the kick. Context is split into three types: Contested, Uncontested and Set. Contested is a grouping for all loose and hard ball gets, crumbs, and gathers from hitouts. Uncontested contains all handball receives, gathers, bounces and advantage frees. These all imply a level of control from the ball carrier, compared to a contested possession. The last group is Set, which includes all marks, and kick-ins and free kicks. This group implies there is no pressure on the disposal.

• Angle: Angle is a continuous variable from -180 to 180 degrees. For the statistically inclined, this is the arctangent of the kick start and next action (i.e. a mark) location. This captures the angle from the kick location relative to the parallel direction forward.

• Kick Length: This groups kick distance into two categories – short and long. The end location of kicks is difficult to precisely determine due to dataset limitations. I’ve chosen to take the kick intention of short v long rather than the actual distance. This group is split at the 32m mark, which is the midpoint of the two distance peaks.

The next table looks at base rates of each of these groups. Also included is a “defensive” or “offensive” half identifier for kicks that were taken in the each half of the field.

Here’s a more plain language explainer.

A player who kicks the ball short and backwards from a set play in their defensive half should expect to retain the ball 98% of the time.

This is considered the easiest kick in football, and a player that hit their target 98/100, with the other two going to a contest/turnover. As a result the player would finish with a retention rating of 0, and gain no benefit from exclusively taking easy kicks.

However, they would have nearly 100% Kicking Efficiency! Wow what an amazing player! Alas, they have kicked at the AFL average for that situation.

A player that kicks straight and long from a contested possession in the forward half is expected to hit their target 32% of the time. If they hit their target more often, they would be kicking above AFL average and would receive a positive kick rating. Hitting tougher kicks more often does more to boost your retention rating.

The crux of this model and analysis is that it takes into account the situation in which the disposal took place. These contextual pieces give us a broader understanding of kicking effectiveness, divorced from an arbitrary line from the early 2000’s.

These features are then modelled using an XGBoost classifier to generate expected retention and threat rates for every kick in the AFL. From here, we can generate ratings and find out who truly performs.

The actual kick rating formula is as follows:

For each player or team we can use this formula to generate the respective rating by comparing their expected output to actual output.

You can see the final outputs on my twitter:

2025 AFL Kick Threat and Retention Ratings: Best Kicks pic.twitter.com/qldxJjmBfc

— Liam (@crow_data_sigh) April 17, 2025

Access the freely available data here:

Thank you very much to Liam for his work developing the threat and retention kick ratings. These are now available on Wheelo Ratings for players and teams from 2021 onwards.

Player Statshttps://t.co/4kldde94EA

Team Statshttps://t.co/NdUet17zcz https://t.co/Jc5N1tQeNe

— Andrew Whelan (@andrew_whelan) April 22, 2025

This is just an introduction to my ratings, next week I’ll analyse the outputs for players and teams.

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Staying wide in Sydney

Cody Atkinson

Last weekend I went to Sydney. This in itself is not newsworthy. It might be the opposite of that actually.

I saw the sights, went to galleries and museums, even went to a couple of gigs. I may have even had a drink or two too many (according to my bank account at least).

And I went to the Swans, mostly to watch the game but partially to talk with Dean Cox and Ken Hinkley.

For those who didn’t watch the game was almost a classic comeback before it wasn’t. The Swans fell short, and the Power continued their surge up the ladder.

Then the explanations began.

Some may think the post game media scrum is a perfunctory exercise to provide praise, health updates and placate fans. But with the right questions – or more importantly the right answers – they can shed as much light on the modern game as any other source.

Here’s an example from a (slightly edited) question I asked Cox post game:

“It seemed like in the first half both teams tried to defend the corridor very hard and it seemed like you guys were going more and more direct. (Is) taking more risk something that you want to see going forward?

“I think there’s times where you can test and use the corridor and try and open up the corridor. But if Port use it you don’t want to force it,” Cox replied.

“And that’s probably one thing I do want to make clear to our players. Port they’re the number one D50 to corridor team in the comp…so they got a couple of goals early we sort of knew that… to the boys credit they had 29 front half turnovers so the ability to be able to stop that – they went at 15% rebound 50 to inside 50.”

There’s a few things from Cox’s brief response that are worth looking into.

Firstly – Port love to hit the corridor. All teams do, but Port are particularly corridor heavy. Instead of D50 to corridor, I’ve use the defensive third to centre square for a couple of reasons. Before round 6 Port used the corridor as much as any team in the league.

Against Sydney, Port managed to hit the centre square for chain disposals from the defensive third (behind the centre square) just *three* times. That’s massively down on their season to date.

One of those examples is likely what Cox was referring to in his statement.

Port attack Sydney through the corridor from defensive 50. pic.twitter.com/m4x0LMVyIW

— Cody Atkinson (@CapitalCityCody) April 23, 2025

Cox’s statement also hints at their strategy through the game – to wall off the corridor and induce chip kicks down the wings and long kicks down the boundary line to force stoppages.

Teams generally wall off the corridor by pushing their outside mids, wings or high half forwards near or on the “skinny” side of the square. This creates the appearance that a  kick into the square will be contested at best. It’s like a puffer fish at its fullest expanded state – protecting territory through the idea of danger.

Ball is in the air in line with the three circled Swans.

That strategy played off to some degree – Port finished way ahead in marks and contested marks, and the Swans won the predominance of ground balls.

Sydney also largely decided to eschew their own corridor game – partially due to similar tactics by Port. In the capture above from a D50 set ball, no Sydney players are leading into the corridor. Opening up the corridor is often a mutual decision – one that can end in mutual destruction (on the scoreboard).

There’s a lot of jargon there, I understand. More simply, Port like to chance playing in the middle of the ground to open up their post-Dixon forward line. They aren’t the most efficient team in the league when doing so, but that isn’t critical given how valuable the corridor is.

So how valuable is the corridor? This year all defensive possession chains starting in the defensive third score, on average, 0.44 points. If you get, say, 50 of them a game you should score about 22 points from them.

But if you can use the ball from the square, the scoring rate increases dramatically. For defensive third chains that hit the square teams score at just over a point per opportunity. Across the same 50 (roughly how many chains teams average from that part of the ground) that’s 52 points per game, or six goals more.

Six goals is probably the difference between the best and worst teams in the league. Six goals in a game is a lot.

Why is getting the ball in the square so important? It makes the ground bigger, and harder to defend. Spare defenders, and third men up, can be effectively defanged due to the sheer variety of targets from the middle.

As a result, every team ideally wants to get into the corridor – sans ramifications – and wants to stop the opposition from doing the same.

That’s why Cox was clear that the green light was faint for his attacking ball users, and why his own directness was only dialed in when the game needed rescuing.

And that’s why you go to the media scrum.

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Assessing the “AFL Power Index”- who are the financial heavyweight clubs?

Sean Lawson

“The numbers have been crunched, and the verdict is in: Richmond is the most powerful club in the land” reads this recent article at Codesports.

It’s a grab bag of financial and fanbase measures, but it doesn’t quite hit as an assessment of the “biggest” or richest or most powerful clubs. I’ll try and do better using annual reports collected by Jason Lassey’s amazing Sports Industry AU website to drill into what makes a club financially “big”.

Here’s what we’re working with:

The list of measures they used is a mix of financial and soft fanbase indicators as follows:

I’m not going to argue against social media and surveyed support, both seem reasonable enough tests of future growth potential.

Rather, my focus is the financial measures which I think overlook key features of the economics of football clubs.

To illustrate, I’ve compiled (partially estimated) the revenue sources for AFL clubs in 2024.

The clubs generating the most money from football itself, ie memberships, tickets, merch, stadium hospitality, are shown at the top, but the most important part of this analysis is to note the AFL equalisation distributions. The AFL gives more money to clubs have more structural need due to a smaller fanbase.

This thorough financial equalisation has been a quiet revolution since 2015, and has made club profit and loss statements largely meaningless. All clubs are supported to fund their football operation, and to run at a breakeven level. Unlike many sports, discussion of financial power has mercifully almost nothing to do with the prospects for success in the modern AFL, it’s just a fun little exercise in curiosity.

As we can see. West Coast, Collingwood and Fremantle are the biggest “heavyweights” when it comes to football revenues, with massive crowds and corporate support. Next is Geelong whose stadium deal at Kardinia Park sees them keep a much bigger cut of a smaller stadium revenue pie.

On the topic of Geelong and stadium facilities, you can also forget asset value as a worthwhile measure of club power, since AFL clubs, as a rule, barely pay for their key assets, As Greg Blood at Australian Sport Reflections notes, in nearly every case, club facilities end up on club balance sheets mostly via grants or via concessional transfers from government. That’s successful political lobbying, not financial power.

Readers will note that the likes of Richmond (in a spoon year), Carlton and Brisbane have lower football incomes than the top bracket, but big side businesses that generate high revenue. Brisbane are 4th in the league for revenue thanks to the competition’s biggest pokies operation in Ipswich, but the Tigers with their fitness centres appear to dwarf everything else.

Unfortunately, that is all just gross revenue, and the power index missed its mark in focusing on those. Nothing comes for free, and clubs need to spend money to make money:

The key goal for clubs isn’t revenue, it’s profit. These iinvestments are to provide an operating surplus for reinvestment into football.

At the moment, pokies still reign as the most profitable side business. The Lions with the largest pokies profits and the highest proportional reliance on them, made about $8m in profit last year at their venue.

Meanwhile, clubs looking into diversification into alternatives like gyms and corporate education programs are pushing into lower margin activities.

They would hope for long term profits, but at the moment, that extra revenue is not really helping the bottom line. Clubs with resources to invest are equally capable of just holding onto them and gaining a passive income though interest and dividends, instead – something several clubs like West Coast quietly do.

We can also apply this revenue vs profits question to football income. Clubs generate income from tickets, merchandise, memberships, sponsorships, hospitality, but all those things also don’t come for free.

So let’s isolate club profit from commercial football activity – how much money do clubs actually get out of their football, after they’ve booked the seats to sell to members, bought the merchandise to fill the club shop, paid the corporate comms staff, and so forth:

This chart takes the red “football revenue” figure from the top chart and shows how much of that is actual profit, what I’ve called “net football income” here.

This is probably the most appropriate key indicator for the financial preponderance of football clubs as football clubs. The more surplus a club can extract from footy, the “bigger” the club.

Some clubs have a higher football income but don’t make as big a surplus. Sydney for example has the highest sponsorship income in the league, but this comes with high operating costs, and they pour a lot of money into reaching a somewhat disengaged fanbase. Adelaide by contrast runs a cheaper operation in a quieter city and has a devoted fanbase who don’t take much “activation”.

But a key point here. Only five clubs are even capable of paying their players just from their own commercial football activity. All clubs rely on AFL distributions to fund their on-field performance.

The primary goal for all clubs is to fund their football programs, which in 2024 required 34 million dollars, about 29m for AFLM and 5m for AFLW.

The true “heavyweights”, then, will be the clubs who can reach the mark of funding their football program with just their own football profits, a base AFL distribution, and, if needed, any side income.

That’s the big clubs mentioned above – West Coast, daylight, then Collingwood, Adelaide, Richmond, and Fremantle. Essendon also meets the mark with their pokies and fitness centre revenues. Carlton might be likely to climb into this group if they were to have a run of success, roughly the way Richmond’s dynasty propelled them.

But also remember that with modern equalisation, being a “financial powerhouse” has never been less relevant to AFL success. Just ask Carlton or Essendon or Fremantle about how many premierships their money has gotten them.

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Around the Grounds

Here’s some other good looks from elsewhere this week.

• Marnie Vinall for ABC reports on women’s footy teams facing poor treatment, in light of the Kyneton team’s breakway and forced folding
• Ricky Mangidis via Shinboner covers Richmond’s veterans and Sydney’s search for balance.
• This clip of former umpire Ray Chamberlain explaining how holding the ball actually works is very handy to all footy fans. Ray goes a step further and suggests some commentators learn the rule.
• Everyone likes a good goal right? Here’s an end-to-end two-kick goal from Ballarat footy.

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com

Huge shout out to Polly Porridge who designed the new images and banners all across This week in football. Her design work is great. And if you are a Swans fan, or Sydney-curious, you should listen to the True Bloods Podcast.

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Before the bounce

This week the entire footballing world congregates in the city of churches to watch as much top level footy as is possible in one weekend (outside of Melbourne). Nine games in nine timeslots in one city(ish) offer the most dedicated of footy fans the opportunity to overdose on on-field action.

It’s also rare that all eighteen clubs are in one place at roughly the same time. It provides the opportunity for discussions great and small between footy staff – hopefully away from the gaze of the tabloid media. Loose lips sink ships, or so the saying goes.

Week five is also getting preciously close to the point in a season where there’s enough information to really form opinions about teams across the league. This holds even stronger for clubs that have changed coaches or methodologies over the summer. A month and a half provides enough tape and data for opinions to form, and become concreted in. Opposition analysis gets easier to run after this point, and teams will increasingly start to adjust to these changes.

There’s also the real chance that a team or two comes out of Gather Round with their finals hopes severely dented, if not scuppered entirely.

This Week In Football we have:

• False Starts and Flag Fancies (on Fremantle)
• Eppur si (non) muove (also on Fremantle)
• Elements of Speed (you’d be shocked but also Fremantle)
• The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game (surprisingly, about Carlton, not Fremantle)
• More is not always better (not Fremantle)
• What is the real Gather Round cost? (also not Fremantle)
• The breakdown of a breakdown (about Melbourne, not Fremantle)

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False Starts and Flag Fancies

Ryan Buckland

If I were shown a picture card of the current AFL ladder as part of a psych evaluation and asked for the first thought that popped into my head, it would be the disappointment that is the Fremantle Dockers.

With the team tucked away safely on Sunday afternoons, you probably haven’t been tortured the way I have so far this year. A team with top talent on every line, a credible and settled back six, adding Shai-frickin-Bolton, just can’t seem to Put It Together.

That’s my diagnosis. For fits and starts, the Dockers are breathtaking in their endeavour, their speed, their skills. But when the synapses need to fire on a balmy Perth winter’s afternoon in June, the drool starts pooling and the thousand-mile stare sets in.

Coming into the season Fremantle was a consensus top four selection. Bolton was the finishing touch on a team coach Justin Longmuir had spent five years curating, and it was all supposed to work. The results so far have been anything but the play of a team bound for September. The groans of a weary Dockers crowd – so conditioned to disappointment, so ready to feel it, but still not accepting of it – are already ringing in my ears.

Something said on the Sunday broadcast piqued my interest, and not (just) as a chance to sink the boot into little brother: the Fremantle Dockers haven’t grown up.

In a league which the excellent Cody and Sean are telling us is getting older by the year, the Dockers are getting younger. In fact, in the Longmuir Era, Fremantle’s selected team age profile has been below the league average every single week.

Ross Lyon, still the only coach to take Fremantle to a Grand Final, oversaw the early years of deleveraging once it became clear the team wasn’t quite good enough to win it all. Between 2015 and 2019 the average age of the selected Fremantle side declined from a peak of 26.7 years (~1.5 years above league average and the oldest team in the league) to a low of 24.3 years (~0.8 year below league average and amongst the youngest).

Hence, the team has bubbled along below league average, rising and falling but staying anchored in the depths of inexperience.

All things being equal, if a club picks 23 players and the team doesn’t change from one year to the next, the average age will go up by a year. The fact Fremantle’s age has continuously fluctuated around the same marker for each of Longmuir’s five seasons hints this isn’t happening.

This is a significant contrast to teams who have contended for flags for long periods of time over the past decade. 

Consider Richmond, from 2016 to 2022, Brisbane from 2018 to 2024, or even West Coast from 2014 to 2020.

That’s a few selected examples (you can play with the data here). But pick any team who has been at the top for a sustained period over the last ten years and the same broad pattern repeats. Settled coach. Core team forms. The age and experience of the selected team grows by the week, and the contention window opens.

The Dockers have been hit hard by player departures over the past few seasons. Bradley Hill, Blake Acres, Lloyd Meek, Liam Henry, Jesse Hogan, Adam Cerra, Rory Lobb, Griffin Logue, Darcy Tucker and Lachie Shultz all left the club between 2019 and 2023. None of them are out of the league yet, suggesting they could have been critical cogs in the Longmuir machine.

They have been replaced by some experienced players coming through the doors, but in the main the Dockers have leaned into the draft. Murphy Reid, a strong Rising Star candidate for mine, is the latest in a line of quality players taken in recent years.

Fremantle want to play a very precise, controlling game. This is evidenced by an excellent observation of Emlyn Breese this week: the 2025 Dockers have the highest rate of kicking from behind the mark of any team since this stat is available to mere mortals. The second highest is the 2021 Dockers.

Longmuir himself moved over to a permanent employment contract with the Fremantle Football Club before the start of this season proper, ala Brendon Bolton at the Blues before him. Interpreted as a sign of comfort between coach and club, could it have been tacit recognition that there’s still a ways for the Dockers to go before they reach their apex?

A fortnight of opportunity to show us what they’ve really got awaits, with the young Tigers on neutral ground and hapless Dees on the wide expanses of the MCG on the slate. Anything less than eight quarters of excellence will be a resounding answer to this question.

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Eppur si (non) muove

Emlyn Breese / bsky.credittodubois.com

In news that will surely make David King’s heart sing, Fremantle are by one metric the most stop-start team of any from 2021 onwards.

In the season to date, only 26.4% of frees or marks to Fremantle sees them do something other than taking the kick from behind the mark.

The next lowest is also Fremantle – in their 2021 incarnation – at 27.5%.

This year has an outlier at the other end also  – This year’s Giants are the highest from 2021 onwards at a rate of 38.7%.

Now, the lowest from 26.4% to the highest at 38.7% gives a relatively narrow band, so let’s see if we can unpack it a bit more. A decent chunk of frees and marks in the forward half will be in viable scoring range. Most of the time a team is going to go back and take the shot – or at least think about doing so and then potentially find a pass in a better position.

If we only take marks/frees in the defensive half the differences become far more apparent.

Fremantle in 2025 are still the lowest we’ve got on record at 28.2%, but the highest we’ve got is up at 52.3%, and they’re another 2025 team.

In fact, the four highest on record are all from 2025 – Gold Coast (52.3%), Port Adelaide (46.0%), Essendon (45.2%) and GWS (44.3%).

If we limit it even further just to defensive half intercept marks and frees Freo are yet again the lowest in our records (17.6%), and four 2025 teams are on top, although not all four are the same – Port Adelaide (43.5%), Sydney (43.0%), GWS (41.9%), and Collingwood (41.7%)

Now, this may change over the course of the season. Small sample sizes will often lead to outlier results, but it’s certainly something worth keeping an eye on.

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Elements of Speed

James Ives

Off the back of Emlyn & Ryan’s analysis, let’s continue with the Fremantle theme. Here is a snapshot of how long it takes each team to dispose of the ball from a mark.

Fremantle are clearly the slowest team in the comp across all three zones leading into the forward 50m, closely followed by Collingwood. Essendon, Brisbane and Geelong like to keep the ball in motion. St Kilda, Richmond and West Coast appear to speed up as they move the ball up the ground, while the likes of Gold Coast and Carlton get slower.

These stylistic differences can part personnel, part where the game is being played. If you’re a front half team generating intercept marks high up the ground, you may need to be patient, rather than blazing the ball back into congestion. If you’re winning the ball in your back half with elite foot skills at your disposal, you may prefer to slice your way up the ground with quick release kicks.

If you’re neither of these, you may prefer slow long-down-the-lines while over-indexing at the contest to win the chaos game. There’s no right or wrong if everyone’s on the same page.

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The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game

Jasper Chellappah

New ‘speed of ball movement’ captures from Champion Data in 2025 present a clear summary as to where Carlton’s transition footy is at. These metrics need to be unpacked, but they back up a fair bit of what you can figure out watching the 0-4 Blues yourself. They routinely panic bomb the ball on top of their key forwards’ heads, neglect to create overloads in transition and frustratingly go slow when they have the opposition on their heels. 

Thanks to CD’s Chistian Jolly on the ESPN Footy Podcast for these fresh numbers.

To start, the Blues move the ball fastest of all 18 teams from an uncontested mark. That is to say, from the point that an uncontested mark is taken anywhere on the ground, Carlton players gain the most metrage in the least amount of time. Conversely, the Blues are the fifth slowest team in moving the ball from a contested mark. Let’s dive into what that means in a footballing sense.

When the Blues find an uncontested mark they throw the game back into chaos more than any other team. There’s little regard given to retaining possession, picking holes through defences and methodically working up the ground. In reality, AFL defences are best set up when allowing an uncontested mark – it often means midfielders have rolled behind the ball and allowed the open space. It’s been rare to see the Blues retain possession and work the ball up the ground through switches and the ‘45’ corridor kick. It shows in the fifth least uncontested marks per game.

Given they’ve struggled to retain the ball, it’s mind boggling to consider that Carlton would consistently bomb the ball forward to outnumbered situations. With no method to the madness, the Blues are systematically kicking long into set defences and turning it over from positions of advantage.

The game is quicker than ever before. But moving the ball quickly isn’t always wise, and the best teams pick their moments. For example, moving the ball long and direct when the opposition is well set up is not the method of Brisbane, Collingwood or Geelong, our three most recent premiers.

Michael Voss shoulders as much of the blame for this as his charges. It’s a game plan contrived from the ideals of territory footy and metres gained, where winning the midfield battle would more often than not win you the game. But footy has changed and the Blues haven’t changed with it.

What makes these numbers all the more confounding is the fact that Carlton is the fifth slowest team to move the ball from a contested mark. You can probably envisage those moments – where a bruised and battered Charlie Curnow has taken his time up off the ground after a big pack mark on the wing, or where Jacob Weitering’s intercept hasn’t kick-started transition but rather led to a slow-play bomb down the line.

They take the third most contested marks per game so it’s not a rare aspect of their makeup. Carlton win the aerial 50-50s better than the vast majority but concede any advantage they gain.

The Blues have elite aerialists in Curnow, Weitering, Tom De Koning and the returning Harry McKay. The upside of contested marks around the ground is opposition defences are typically unset. There’s space out the back or pockets of open grass in the corridor to exploit. These are the moments where good teams go quickly, take ground with handball chains or inboard kicks and drive the ball deep inside 50 over the back of the scrambling defence. 

Adam Simpson explained this concept on AFL360; the ‘small bubble’ and ‘big bubble’ in relation to the fastest ball movement side in the AFL, Brisbane. As soon as they took a mark the opposition wasn’t willing to concede “the bomb goes off” and scoring opportunities present.

Applying this to the Blues, as soon as they take a contested mark they expand the bubble and the bomb should explode. But it doesn’t. Instead, Carlton becomes the slowest team in the league to move the ball. These are rolled gold scoring opportunities being snuffed out by a lack of recognition and impetus.

The Blues are playing transition footy the wrong way around. They kick long to shallow inside 50s off uncontested marks and go painfully slow after opening the ground up with contested marks. It therefore makes sense that the club is top four at intercepting the ball in the air, but bottom two for scores from turnover. This group sits at the bottom of the league for disposal efficiency and leads all comers for clangers per outing. 

There’s an issue of personnel, but on these metrics the Voss game plan simply isn’t stacking up with modern footy standards.

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More is not always better

Lincoln Tracy

Last week Cody Atkinson looked at this season’s Ironmen – the players who have spent barely spend any time on the pine across the matches to date.

Cody makes some great points about the potential benefits of allowing certain players extended stints on the ground.

But after reading his piece I couldn’t help but think about the fact that just because a player spends a lot of time on the ground doesn’t guarantee they will have a significant impact on the game.

For example, Ben McKay, who averages 99% time on ground across the three games he has played this year, has copped it from all angles over his performances thus far.

Which leads me to ask the seemingly obvious question: who has spent a lot of time on the ground but had little to no impact on the game?

(I will admit that I originally wanted to look at the relationship between distance covered and impact, but that question will have to wait for another day as detailed Telstra Tracker data are not publicly available, as far as I can tell.)

It’s worth noting the AFL Player Ratings only measures direct impact. For key position defenders a lack of impact can often be a positive – a sign that an opposition side is unwilling to attack them, or unable to due to superior positioning. Until there’s further development in this space (such as from including player tracking information), there’s missing information for the effectiveness of defenders.

The AFL have an official measure of the direct impact each player has on a game – player rating points – so we can use that in our attempts to find an answer.

The table below displays the minimum, maximum, and average AFL ratings points for players who average at least 95% time on ground across at least three games. As Cody highlighted last week, the list features a lot of key position defenders.

McKay doesn’t have the lowest recorded player rating in terms of an individual game – that “honour” goes to Brisbane’s Harris Andrews for his 12-disposal effort in the Lions’ 28-point win against Richmond over the weekend.

But he does have the lowest average player rating, with scores of 6.4, 5.9, and 4.0 from his three games to date.

Essendon fans will be hoping the week off will be just what McKay needed ahead of their Gather Round clash against Melbourne on Saturday night.

At the other end of the spectrum, Carlton’s Jacob Weitering just edges out Sam Taylor (Greater Western Sydney) and Tom McDonald (Melbourne) as the player who has spent the most time on the ground and had the greatest apparent impact on the game during said time on ground.

The Blues have left their fans frustrated this year, sitting with a 0-4 record despite leading at half time in each of their matches. If the same happens against the bottom-placed Eagles this week, Weitering’s consistency will be of little comfort.

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What is the real Gather Round cost?

Sean Lawson

Gather Round is generally regarded as a success for the South Australian government, with the whole city seeming to get decked out with inflated footballs, club colours, and advertising boards, while several thousand travelers roll in to fill the hotels, and the eyes of the footy world fall on Adelaide for a few days.

All this comes at a monetary cost, however, with the ABC currently estimating 16 to 20 million dollars a year being spent by the government on the event. This is a fair chunk of money, easily the most ever forked out by a government other than Victoria’s on the rights to host footy games. The SA government outlay was enough to get the AFL to quietly put aside any plans of using its answer to the NRL’s Magic Round as a tool for footy promotion in New South Wales, an idea that eventually became the much more watered-down Opening Round concept without the actual addition of extra games to the schedule.

But how does the Gather Round expenditure, as reported, actually stack up with other outlays by state, territory and local governments for AFL content?

The Gather Round deal, taking $18 million as the median of the most recent reported values, costs almost double any other AFL content deal on a per game basis, with the WA government spend to bring North Melbourne to Bunbury and Perth, and the Hawks’ new Launceston deal the other contracts currently costing over one million dollars per game.

However, Gather Round caters to some fairly large crowds and when looked at on a per-attendee basis, looks about middle of the pack with the most comparable deals, roughly on par with what the ACT government spends bringing footy to Canberrans.

This also means that if other states do try to force the issue with the AFL before Gather Round gets entrenched as a permanent fixture in South Australia (and a permanent fixturing leg-up for its teams), another state is probably going to have to outbid the total expenditure, and in doing so they’ll perhaps do it without any guarantee of comparable crowds in isolated Perth or non-football heartland Brisbane or Sydney.

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The breakdown of a breakdown

Cody Atkinson

Zero and four is not a good start to a football season. This is where Carlton, Melbourne and West Coast fans start to wince in unison.

But for all the issues to date with the Blues and Eagles in 2025, let’s turn our attention instead to the side that has most recently been premiers.

Most would point to Melbourne’s forward line as being the biggest source of their issues. After all, they’ve struggled to get the ball forward, mark the ball up forward and score at all.

The three teams at the bottom there? Yep, the 0-4 club. But let’s ignore that for a second – just a brief one.

When Melbourne was at their competition beating best it wasn’t because of their attack but instead their defence. Led by Steven May and Jake Lever, the Demons were as solid down back as any other side – providing room for their sometimes sputtering attack to…well, sputter. Between their defence and the weight of ball they could win from stoppages, the Demons could grind sides into submission.

This year their defence has struggled to find its rhythm through personnel issues and what seems to be broader communication problems.

Here’s an example from last week’s game.

This is ugly stuff. There’s at least five errors in the clip above – from not denying space for the lead, to not communicating who should be marking who, and even the poor kick at the start. Despite all of this Melbourne still spoil the kick (partially due to Stengle cutting the lead), but don’t have effective support at ground level to stop Dangerfield.

Again – how do you leave PATRICK DANGERFIELD so open in the forward 50?

The Demons are struggling in stopping both raw volumes of opposition scoring shots, and allowing high quality shots against them. Melbourne is bottom four in both these measures – usually a sign of a very, very, very bad defence.

At times Melbourne seems stuck between a more zone based defence – protecting space instead of players – and a man defence with spares utilised for protection. At times – from the comfort of the couch – it appears that exact roles and responsibilities aren’t getting communicated on the field effectively.

To be fair to Mebourne they have struggled with availability. However, with Jake Lever out for up to two months, this may not get better any time soon.

Melbourne are running out of time – if something doesn’t change soon, their season will be over early.

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Around the Grounds

Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy

• Ricky Mangidis is doing some of the best stuff in football right now. This week at The Shinboner looks at the age spread of each team so far in 2025.
• The fantastic Marnie Vinall reports at ABC on the body dysmorphia and general mental health toll inflicted by online discourse on footballers’ partners.
• Gemma Bastiani charted the quarter by quarter breakdown of the top AFLW goalkickers, showing some fun trends in which players start strong or finish very well.
• Horn at the Guardian has a balanced take on the events surrounding the Oscar Allen non-event.
• There were more Tasmania stadium news reports, including Jacquie Lambie suggesting the roof be a tent, parliamentary ructions about possibly trying to renegotiate with the AFL and extensive reports about the independent assessor meeting with activists.
• The Friday Footy Quiz is always worth a go, but as it’s a self-reporting honour system, make sure you’re honest about how you did.

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