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”.

The AFL chose not to introduce a wildcard weekend for the 2025 finals series.

But if they had, the race for the last spot in September would be truly wild right now 👀

HOW IT WOULD WORK >> https://t.co/O6FQaiBBl7 pic.twitter.com/gwFUka80IF

— Fox Footy (@FOXFOOTY) July 1, 2025

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:

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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.

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A few insights from the season so far

James Ives

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…

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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.

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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.

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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

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