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.
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Before the bounce
And just like that, there’s only two months of the season left. As the nights get colder, the battle for finals gets hotter.
Something else that is getting hotter is the seats of several coaches are getting warmer. After an offseason where only one coach stepped away (John Longmire) relatively late in the process, we could be entering a summer with several job opening across the league.
One of these changes is already confirmed, with Port’s Ken Hinkley stepping away after the season and Josh Carr taking over. Several others, such as Carlton’s Michael Voss, North’s Alistair Clarkson, Fremantle’s Justin Longmuir, St Kilda’s Ross Lyon and Melbourne’s Simon Goodwin have been mentioned by fans or media as having some threat to their job.
There’s a very real chance that most of these coaches will stay in their jobs, and most clubs will deny that there was any threat to their employment.
Idle speculation is cheap, all around.
There’s also a chance that conversations are being held about other coaches across the league. This job uncertainty adds an extra dimension to the final weeks of normal AFLM football for the year.
This week in football we have:
The Joe Daniher (or Buddy) replacement nobody suggested
Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | TheBackPocketAU
The Lions look ominous in their premiership defence, but the absence of an experienced key pillar is still notable
I know I’ve been critical of trade discussion slop during the season, but this article has become topical this week despite my plans to keep it in the barrel until the season was over.
Take two hypothetical key forwards. Both 26 years old, and have had many seasons interrupted by injury, including their most recent one where they only managed four games.
The first player averages 1.79 goals, 4.5 marks and 5.1 Score Involvements over his 70 game career.
The other averages 1.76 goals, 5.8 marks and 5.5 Score Involvements over his 108 game career.
They each have a career high of six goals, and have kicked bags of five multiple times.
Who are you picking? The numbers probably sit slightly with Player Two, especially considering that on average the first player would kick just the one more goal per season than the second if they played a full 23 games.
But if you missed out on the first one, you would likely be happy to take the second, wouldn’t you agree?
So as you may have guessed, the second player is Joe Daniher – specifically at the point of his career when he left Essendon. He had only played four games that year and four games the year prior, never able to get his body right.
Then he moved to Brisbane, kicked 46 goals from 24 games, and you know the rest of the story.
The other player is forgotten Hawks forward Mitchell Lewis. Came back last year only to be felled by injury again, but his best has been clearly good enough – and he’s still only 26. Recently he has been back in the news as he has been eying a VFL return.
This isn’t to suggest that Mitchell Lewis is the talent that Joe Daniher was. Daniher was a game breaker in a way that many key forwards struggle to be. But as the saying goes, “we can recreate him in the aggregate,”.
Mitchell Lewis hasn’t played a game at any level since he ruptured his ACL against Geelong in Round 17 last year, in what was his first game back after a cartilage problem from a past partial ACL tear kept him out from Round 3.
In the 2022 and 2023 seasons, despite managing just 15 games, Lewis tallied 36 and 37 goals, finishing runner-up in the Hawks goalkicking both years and averaging the most goals per game in the team.
With Sam Mitchell and the Hawks courting Oscar Allen, and with Calsher Dear and Mabior Chol already making that forwardline their own, you wonder if there is any room for a fit Mitch Lewis in 2026 anyway.
Brisbane have somewhat of a recent history of getting players bodies right, with Joe Daniher the obvious example, but even Lincoln McCarthy – despite unluckily getting injured in their premiership year – strung together five full seasons at the Lions having never played one at Geelong.
The Lions have looked intimidating at times this year, and short of firepower or accuracy in front of goal at others. Logan Morris is starting to come into his own as a key forward, but is a little more one-dimensional and less crash and bash than Lewis can be and Daniher previously was.
This may all be a different story if Brisbane instead get Oscar Allen this year, as is now being rumoured more and more as the season goes on, but there is another club who could use a replacement key forward – for both structure and marketing purposes. That team is the Sydney Swans.
Sydney’s forwardline has been their weakest link since Buddy left, with a combination of injuries and form preventing any of Logan McDonald, Hayden McLean or Joel Amartey from really stamping their authority over it, with the Swans forced to throw key defender Tom McCartin back at times this season.
Pairing a (hopefully) fit Mitch Lewis with a slightly less wayward Joel Amartey would make for an imposing forward pairing, and might be what gets the Swans to take that final step in 2026.
Now this might all be pointless if Hawthorn don’t land Allen or chase another key forward in the off season this year, or Mitch Lewis may simply want to try a change of location in an attempt to get his body right – either way, don’t be surprised if Mitch Lewis finds himself a new home in 2026, or at the very least has his name come up in discussions during trade week.
Until then, lets just hope that Lewis gets through this weekend of VFL unscathed.
What goes around comes around (once in a blue moon)
One of the much talked about inequities of the AFL fixture is who plays who twice, and when they do so. For example, Carlton has played both West Coast and North Melbourne twice in their 14 games so far this season, while Geelong didn’t play either team until Round 12 (when they played the Eagles).
Here’s a list of teams that have played each other twice to this point of the season, prior to the start of Round 16:
Brisbane and Geelong, Carlton and North Melbourne, Carlton and West Coast, Port Adelaide and Sydney, and the Western Bulldogs and St Kilda.
Three of these pairs of teams had their second meeting in Round 15 (Brisbane/Geelong, Carlton/North Melbourne, and Port Adelaide/Sydney), but there was something about the Power and Swans game that caught my attention – and no, it wasn’t Joel Amartey’s abysmal night on the goal kicking front.
Last week Sydney’s Justin McInerney put his side in front when he kicked the opening goal in the first minute of the match; a lead the Bloods would not relinquish for the remainder of the game. The Power got within three points partway through the second quarter but never got things back on level pegging (or held their own lead at any point during the game).
Source: afl.com.au
This is the opposite of what happened when the two sides met in Round 6, where Sam Powell-Pepper registered the first goal in the fourth minute. The Swans never held a lead at any point after this, although they did draw level with the Power in the first quarter, which I suppose is an improvement compared to the more recent game.
Source: afl.com.au
After looking at scoring chain and match result data for nearly 350 matches going back to the start of the 2018 season, I believe this is the first and only time this reversal of fortunes has happened during that particular period of time.
The two teams will most likely take little notice of this incredibly useless finding, given Ken Hinkley and Dean Cox have bigger issues to deal with. Something to add to their summer reading piles, perhaps?
Which clubs have a lot of player contracts expiring soon?
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
Player contracts have obviously been in the news a lot lately, particularly in the wake of Melbourne signing Kysaiah Pickett to the end of 2034.
Using Footywire’s database of contract status I thought it would be interesting to look at how each list shapes up in terms of who is locked away and for how long.
To the left, in the faded area, you can see how long a player has been on that club’s list. The right shows how far into the future they are contracted.
Let’s also get a quick summary of who has the most potential fluidity in their list over the next few years.
For this year, Port Adelaide and Collingwood have the highest proportion of their list unsigned.
If we look forward to the end of 2026. Carlton, Port Adelaide again, as well as Hawthorn and West Coast all have 70% of more of their players yet to extend.
At the three-year mark we’ve got Richmond, St Kilda, Carlton and Hawthorn with 90% of their list potentially out of contract by then, with the Bulldogs just shy.
Going from the opposite direction Fremantle, GWS, Collingwood, and Brisbane have the highest proportion of players contracted out past the end of 2028.
West Coast, Essendon, Gold Coast, Hawthorn, and Collingwood are the only clubs with no players contracted beyond 2030, with West Coast’s longest current commitments ending with Jake Waterman, Jack Hutchinson, and Liam Baker in 2029.
Attacking off the mark
Cody Atkinson
If you watch enough footy on a weekend, you’ll likely hear the commentators implore players to attack quickly after taking a mark. Attacking instinct has always been envied in football, but the “stand” rule has seen some see attacking directly from marks as a priority.
There’s a couple of quick ways this can happen. Teams can either look to play on immediately after marks, with the running finding space and ideally bouncing the ball before kicking, or they can look for either an overlapping or forward handball. This is an example of what the latter looks like.
The concept is that decisive movement forward can catch the defence before it can settle, especially early in chains after intercepts or stoppage wins. Although the clip above didn’t end up in a score for Brisbane, it did give them a clear look inside 50 – about as good as you can get in modern footy.
The second benefit is that it can often leave the man on the mark as a passenger in play, looking to cover off two different objectives without moving.
Some teams look to attack this way more than others. TWIF have looked at how often teams handball directly or bounce from taking marks.
While a couple of very solid sides rely on this type of movement, two of the league’s teams to beat (Collingwood and Brisbane) sit near the bottom. This shows that instead of a universal strategy, it’s more situational. Too many overlap handballs can leave you exposed the other way if the subsequent use isn’t accurate. Unlike what is often discussed, handballing or playing on straight from marks is a “sometimes” activity.
It also inherently takes away the biggest advantage of a mark – a pressure free disposal. Pressure on kickers has been shown to increase the likelihood of turnovers and reduce the accuracy of kicks. Players and teams need to be sure that the trade off is worth removing this advantage.
Another angle to this is when attacking from marks lead to scores.
Adelaide and Brisbane don’t go hard after marks as much as other teams, but when they do it comes off more of the time. By contrast Port Adelaide and Essendon probably go to attack too often based on their ability to score from these types of attacks.
So what’s the lesson from all of this? Maybe it’s that there is more than one way to get the ball through the goals, and attacking all out isn’t always the right move.
Which players love the tough conditions?
Sean Lawson
Following on from our look at weather impacted footy for the ABC, Emlyn suggested we have a look at individual player data related to the weather. It turns out there’s some poor schmucks have played in the muck much more than others. And some players go their best when conditions are far from ideal.
The players who have played in the wet since the most since 2022 are mostly Crows players – namely those who have played in all their 16 rain affected games. But there’s one non-Crow on the top.
Daniel Rioli’s move from Richmond to Gold Coast sets him apart from the rest. The Suns have played 5 games in the wet this year, to add to his steady diet of soggy MCG games in previous years.
Rioli also tends to have a bit more impact in the wet, improving his average AFL Player Rating from about 12 to about 14. The picture of which players go best in the rain is just a who’s who of pretty good AFL players more generally, but Christian Petracca stands out as a genuine mud pig, having rated a little higher in the rain than even Marcus Bontempelli since 2022.
Many of the top players are skilled or powerful midfielders, but two relatively mobile big men in Luke Jackson and Tim English also stand up in the rain. Jackson, in fact, is one of the biggest wet weather improvers overall since 2022, behind only the surprising name of Jake Lever whose player rating in wet games goes to 14.5 against 8.9 on other occasions.
Living up to their hydrophilic club mascot’s identity, two battling Swans talls, Hayden McLean and Aaron Francis, also seem to have a knack for impacting plenty in the rain.
At the other end of the scale, a number of very skilled forward half players and some other more traditional rucks historically fail to impact as well when there’s rain around.
As far as heat goes, Murphy Reid has started brightly at Freo and stands out as having played nearly half his games this year in temperatures hitting above 25 degrees. Suns and Dockers players dominate the list of players who have spent the largest share of their games in the heat, and the Suns completely monopolise the list of most games played hot conditions.
As noted in the ABC article, hot weather games tend to lend themselves to open running as pressure and defensive running gets harder to maintain. The list of players to improve the most in these conditions tends to be a list of players who benefit from finding some space to create and attack in.
Finally, in cold weather, the biggest improver is Bulldogs runner Jason Johannisen. Amusingly, there are a number of Brisbane players who show large increases in performance in the cold weather.
Perhaps, with Tasmania on the horizon, a few of these cold-weather Lions might consider a move southwards.
Around the Grounds
- One Percenters works through the ethics of being a football fan when it comes to seeing players take head impacts.
- Wooden Spoon Data, a Youtube channel, looks at the issues with Effective Disposals, including a chat with our own Liam Crowhurst.
- Jason Lassey of FootyIndustry fame breaks down where the AFL’s crowd numbers stand relative to past records.
- Andrew Stafford’s thoughtful writing about Carlton at the Guardian midweek has only become more relevant after last night.
- Here’s an unlucky bird getting smashed by accidentally flying into a kicked football.