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
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.
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:
Harry McKay shows sometimes less is more
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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