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
As we reach the home straight of the season, the likely finals field has narrowed down to just nine teams (James has more on this later).
As the potential September sides have shrunk, talk has turned (as it always does) to how to get more sides involved.
Finals expansion has long been discussed at different points of the V/AFL’s history, but recent years have seen a push for a “wildcard weekend”.
While this push for finals expansion seemingly comes from an American basis, finals expansion likely has its origins in Australia instead.
In 1898 the VFL expanded their finals to eight teams… comprising of the whole competition. The use of the system culminated in 1900, when Melbourne, who finished 6th through the home and away season, were able to storm the finals and finish on top.
The Australasian stated:
The fact that the system of determining the premiership is not the best that could be framed detracts little from the credit of their performance. They have fulfilled the requirements of the scheme, and they are honestly entitled to the honours they have gained.
The system was not only used in Victoria, but also around other football playing strongholds such as South Australia. Unfortunately, the system was so successful that it was shelved since then.
Maybe the solution is not a modest American expansion, but a full-on Australian one. Noted football #influencer Eddie McGuire made a similar proposal a few years back. If there’s one thing Eddie is known for, it’s being measured in his public statements.
Maybe we all aren’t being bold enough.
This week in football we have:
What Makes a Key Forward?
Joe Cordy
Jack Riewoldt copped no small amount of mockery recently for saying about Gold Coast spearhead Ben King:
“I’m starting to come to the belief that I don’t think [he] can be a big finals player. He doesn’t get the ball enough…He is not a key forward, he’s a tall half-forward flanker… If I’m Damien Hardwick, I’d put a call in to Tom Lynch.”
I don’t know that I agree Ben King can’t play well in finals, or what possessed him to suggest a soon to be 33-year-old Tom Lynch is good for what ails his former coach, but there was something intriguing to me in what he said.
It’s plainly obvious to me that Ben King doesn’t get enough of the footy to seriously affect games as much as he could, especially compared to others with the key forward label.
With an average disposal location 51m forward of the centre circle, and an average mark location 57m forward, Ben King is the deepest sitting player in the league in 2025.
Keeping himself as close to the goals as he does is oft reflected in his output. As well as sitting equal third in the Coleman Medal race, among key forwards this year with at least 10 games under their belt, he’s the only player averaging at least four shots at goal a game with an average expected score per shot above four points.
This trend of sitting deep can be seen in his Suns compatriots too, with Jed Walter and Ethan Read pushing the 4.0 xScore threshold for their shots. This is despite King taking the lion’s share of the Suns’ scoring attempts. The issue, which Riewoldt identified, is how little King creates for anyone else.
Compared to the other high volume shot takers, King stands out for his total single-mindedness in kicking, averaging just one kick every other game not directly aimed at the big sticks.
The same trend can be observed in where he marks the ball. While he’s a constant and ever-reliable target for the Suns at the end of their attacking moves, if you see Ben King mark the footy beyond the arc you should appreciate the sight, as it’s unlikely to come about again another three whole games.
In fact, his total marks per game is less than what Charlie Curnow manages just outside the 50m arc.
All of this stands in stark contrast to how Damien Hardwick’s key forwards in the Tigers dynastic run would operate, which makes it stand out all the more. Riewoldt, and particularly ex-Suns captain Tom Lynch, would frequently push up the ground to link up play, creating inverted structures with Dustin Martin often sitting deepest forward and using his supreme athleticism and goal sense to finish attacks.
Arguably the key forward group that most resembles this style of play are with the Tigers’ biggest rivals from that era. Led by Coleman Medal and All-Australian Centre Half Forward frontrunner Jeremy Cameron, Geelong have a trio of talls who not only create ball movement further up the chain than anyone at the Suns, but have retention and threat creation numbers that are pushing for the highest in the league.
While I’m still not sure that Jack Riewoldt and I have an aligned vision of a tall half-forward flanker, I think we’d agree that this is closer to what we’d like to see from a key forward. Less of a big man waiting for it to be lobbed on top of his head, and more of a Thierry Henry-esque dual-threat in finishing and creation.
I think Ben King has the tools to add this creative output to his game, but at the moment the Suns setup keeps him restrained fairly strictly to always being within a kick of the goals. Whether this is a reflection of the Hardwick’s estimation of King’s abilities, his changing tactical sensibility, or just how he feels the Suns are best structured given their other pieces is hard to tell at first glance, but it seems clear they’re not currently getting the most out of the former #6 draft pick.
A few insights from the season so far
Given the clear separation between the top and the bottom teams, I thought it’d be interesting to have a look at the ladder based on games against the top 9.
- Collingwood consistently come up on top, no matter what metric you look at.
- Fremantle are a surprise in 2nd place, with key wins against the Western Bulldogs, Adelaide, GWS and Gold Coast.
- The Western Bulldogs find themselves at the bottom of the list, with relatively close finishes against Collingwood, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Geelong.
- Port Adelaide’s percentage is a concern for those who believe they have turned the corner after recent wins against Carlton, Melbourne and GWS.
These matchups will go a long way in shaping the final 8. Look no further than round 18, where we have a stacked round of season-defining games.
Round 18:
- Gold Coast vs Collingwood
- Western Bulldogs vs Adelaide
- GWS vs Geelong
- Fremantle vs Hawthorn
Buckle up.
Darcy Fogarty leading the expected score ladder – one of the best set shots in the game.
Max Gawn is almost a flawless player. Outside of shots inside 50…
Do the Bombers Bomb?
Cody Atkinson, idiot
Nominative determinism is a fun thing. You know, a baker with the last name Baker, a gold medal winning sprinter named Bolt or a banker named White Collar Fraud.
We kid (please don’t sue us).
That raises the obvious questions as posed by the headline. Do the Bombers (of Essendon) bomb?
We aren’t talking about actual bombing. As is very well known, bombing on the footy field was banned in the 1960s during the ANFC era.
Instead, we are talking about taking pings from deep – you know, long bombs at goal.
So…do the Bombers bomb?
No.
They do not bomb. In fact, they bomb less than almost any other team in the league. They are particularly reticent from set shots, where they have taken the second fewest shots from outside 50 this year.
Taking shots from deep serves multiple goals. Firstly – and most obviously – it puts points on the scoreboard. TWIF was recently told that scoring more points than your opponent means that you win games.
That’s a good thing!
There’s also a metagame at play. Taking shots from deep helps to stretch the defence and make it harder to defend when going inside 50. If there are credible targets across a wide variety of spots in the forwardline – from close to goal to pushing 60 – teams will find it hard to effectively close them off. It helps to render spares less valuable, and reduces the impact of tall defenders who peel off and help.
Some teams get nervy about the accuracy drop that comes with shooting from deep, and there are some with tall targets (or effective enough set ups) to not need to stretch the defence further. For all teams not named the Bulldogs, fewer defenders where you want them to be is the goal.
The Bombers have played one less game than most teams, and have faced significant injury issues through the year. But their most reliable bomb threat (Peter Wright) has been in and out of the team for various reasons over the last two years.
If the Bombers are to rise up the ladder again, maybe they need to bomb more.
Premiership windows
Sean Lawson
The “premiership window” has been a beloved content generator for the Fox Footy Couch for a number of years, and it’s pretty appealing, being a simple all-in graphic that shows which teams are good.
If you haven’t come across it yet, this is sort of what it looks like.
The idea here is incredibly basic – nearly all premiership teams finish in the top 6 for both scoring points, and conceding few points. The exceptions to this pattern since 2000 are the same two teams who are nearly always the exceptions to a premiership pattern: Sydney in 2005 and the Bulldogs in 2016. Both had low to middling scoring power.
There are of course issues! The big one, for me, is the presentation of this chart as a set of rankings. Plotting by rank equalises the gaps between teams, stretching closely bunched teams apart and collapsing large gulfs between different teams.
If we take exactly the same data as went into the above chart and instead just show the values directly, the difference is fairly clear.
Immediately we can see which teams are being pumped up or underestimated by the ranking presentation.
Collingwood and Adelaide currently sit a reasonable difference away from the pack, and instead we see a cluster of teams with similar figures both inside and outside the “window”. We can also see that the bad teams are quite a lot worse than everyone else!
Of course, there’s a lot more statistics in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in On The Couch’s philosophy, and some amateur analysts have added to the space by pulling together their own statistical measuring sticks for premiership contention that go beyond just reading the ladder.
Friend of the site Andrew Whelan is a must read on this, measuring a whole series of aspects of footy use and defence in an easy to parse dashboard and scatter plot:
On the offensive side are not just scoring and scoring shots, but various territory measures and possession chain measures.
From this we can see that Adelaide and the Bulldogs are setting the pace across most metrics. We can also see certain other middling teams producing some dangerous characteristics, like GWS’ turnover scoring and Melbourne’s front half game.
On the defensive side, it’s still the Crows shaping well, pointing towards a team quietly building the profile needed to succeed this year. Among the middling teams GWS defend turnover as well as they score from it, Essendon are doing very well with post clearance ground ball, and Sydney can hang its hat on a new defensive focus, being very hard to transition against.
Intriguingly, Carlton appear to be still, somehow, stacking up quite well in many of these metrics, especially on the defensive side. This adds yet another perspective to their struggles, pointing towards what many observers have found so frustrating about the Blues in recent years. Somehow the team manages to be much less than the sum of its often impressive parts, doing many of the right things and not getting results from them.
As the run to finals heats up, it’s well worth keeping tabs on Andrew’s metrics to see how the race among the contenders is shaping.
Around the Grounds
- Jonathan Horn at the Guardian isn’t happy with the corporate killspeak coming from Carlton
- Jack Snape, also at the Guardian, breaks down the evolution and return to tradition in Australian sporting team mascot names
- One of the bigger marks ever taken in a district footy game or any other
- Possibly the week’s best news is that Chloe Molloy has been cleared to return to play after her ACL
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