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

Peter Ryan at The Age has reported this week on a potential revival of State of Origin, but this time in Australian Football form. Yet again the thirst for seeing the best against the best has raised its head.

Despite the Origin format of interstate football becoming ubiquitous in League over the years, the concept started out in Australian Football originally a few years beforehand.

Since then Origin has become nearly bigger than the rest of league in this country itself, with its devotion to mates, states and mates going against mates who come from different states.

There is also no Gus Gould to set the mood in Australian Football.

But AFL administrators have seen the impact of Origin on the slightly differently shaped ball game, and the broadcasters have taken note of the ratings.

One of the big issues is which states should get a call up for the game. Ryan’s report notes that WA and Victoria have been tabbed for a potential 2026 game, leaving South Australia and a strong Allies side in the cold.

More important is the timing and potential rewards for playing. Pride only gets you so far in an increasingly professional environment. A preseason game may not drive the level of competition the rugby league origin game drives.

Whatever the case, we may soon have an even longer men’s AFL season ahead of us.

This week in football we have:

The AFL’s Sightseers and Homebodies

Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | @TheBackPocketAU

Why has Harvey Thomas maxed out his frequent flyer card in just 32 games?

Earlier this year, there was a much discussed stat about the fact that GWS youngster Harvey Thomas has played at 13 venues in just 32 games, surpassing Scott Pendlebury’s 11 venues in just his 23rd game. Harvey Thomas is a long way off league record holder David Swallow, who has played at 22 venues in his 245 career games. 

That’s a record that may be equalled or surpassed by Nick Holman, Jarrod Witts or Touk Miller should the Tasmanian Devils still join the competition in the 2028 AFL season.

But what is the reason for this? Is it simply Vic bias and the fact Collingwood never travel? Or is there something else at play here? 

Well, the easiest way to do this is to break down the grounds that Harvey Thomas has played at and why.

Harvey’s Giants already spread their games across two unique stadia – Manuka Oval in Canberra and Sydney Showground in Olympic Park – while their cross town rivals play at a different ground all together (the SCG). That’s three without leaving the confines of NSW/ACT.

You can tick off the other major stadiums pretty easily, with the MCG having four major tenants, Docklands having five major tenants, and Adelaide Oval and Perth Stadium having two each. This means every team will play at each of these grounds once a year. Thomas, already a mainstay at the Giants, only missed three games in his debut season. All up, that’s seven grounds without breaking a sweat. Add the Gabba once every year and a half (on average) and that’s eight.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that Scott Pendlebury too has played at all seven of the grounds listed above in the past two seasons and also at Carrara. Harvey Thomas is yet to play there as the Suns home game against GWS was during Gather Round last year, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Now we start to get to the fun part – the ‘bonus’ grounds. Where do we find the four (now five) extra grounds that Harvey Thomas has played at to surpass Scott Pendlebury so fast?

Well, first up was the aforementioned Gather Round game against Gold Coast. Fair or not, the clashes between smaller clubs are less likely to be played at Adelaide Oval, and the Giants and Suns clashed at Summit Sports Park in Mt Barker last year. This year they faced the Saints at the oddly shaped Norwood Oval.

Here’s where we get to the sticky part. Some teams – much like GWS – are in the habit of selling home games to regional cities to help generate a little more profit than ticket sales alone can create, but they don’t want to sell their games against Collingwood because they make the big bucks. Why sell a profitable home game when you can sell one that might struggle to break even? 

Collingwood are the Bulldogs highest pulling home game, while the Giants are their second lowest. This is why Harvey Thomas has now played in Ballarat against the Dogs and at York Park against North Melbourne. 

The last remaining ground on this list is Kardinia Park in Geelong, where Harvey Thomas has already played twice – for two wins I might add – while Pendlebury has never played there. While many – including myself – think that Collingwood should have to make the trip down the highway at least every second year, (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) there’s a few good reasons why he hasn’t yet. Geelong only play nine or ten home games at Kardinia Park, with the remaining home game/s held at the MCG. The Cats have requested to play the MCG games against large sides – this year Hawthorn, but with Collingwood getting the nod in many years. Collingwood also has a deal for 14 guaranteed MCG games a year expires, it is a no brainer that in seasons where they clash twice, Geelong will continue to host Collingwood at the MCG.

So is it Victorian bias? Or simply a case of luck? Arguably it’s a bit of both – or neither. Even last year – in a season where they were historically poor – one of the most travelled teams in the country in West Coast only played at eight different stadia, the only difference to Pendles being that they had to play in Geelong.

The real answer here is that as long as the poorer clubs continue to sell two or three home games a season, the smaller interstate teams and other poorer clubs will continue to play games at more grounds than their opponents.

Goal kicking isn’t one of the most under-rated stats, but it’s maybe one of the most poorly analysed

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

This article makes heavy use of the excellent wheeloratings.com by Andrew Whelan for this piece (and many other pieces). If you’re not familiar you should go have a look, it surfaces a lot of things that will help you understand the game far better than official league stat offerings.

Goal kicking, eh?

Last week for the ABC Cody and Sean poured some much needed cold water on the supposed goal-kicking crisis. More articles followed this week and, apart from the aforementioned, surface level would be a generous description of them.

Goal accuracy = goals / shots. It’s a simple proposition and attractive because of it. However, like many simple explanations it misses more than it hits.

I’ve instead measured teams goalkicking performance based on three different attributes:

• Volume – how many shots is a team generating per game
• Quality – on average, how high quality are those shots (xScore per shot – xScore is a measure of how many points on average you would expect a given shot to result in by comparing it to similar shots taken previously. A set shot from the goal square would have an xScore of almost 6, a shot under physical pressure from the boundary might have an xScore of under 2.)
• Execution – is a team making the most of those opportunities (total score / total xScore)

It’s my tentative view that execution is largely chance based rather than a quality of a given team. Over the past 5 seasons the only team to not record seasons both in the negative and positive is Fremantle. Last year Melbourne were above average in executing while this year they’re abysmal. If you’re going to be weak in one thing you want it to be this because it doesn’t represent a structural problem.

I’ve then grouped teams on overall performance in these categories:

• Elite – overperforms in at least two of the categories
• Poor – underperforms in at least two of the categories
• Strength outlier – A mixed bag, but defined most clearly by a strength
• Weakness outlier – A mixed bag, but defined most clearly by a weakness
• Average – Teams who neither overperform or underperform majorly in any given category

Some interesting things jump out right away.

Geelong and the Dogs excel on all metrics. If you need another excuse to hop on their premiership chances, this will help you get there.

By contrast Adelaide’s quality of shots is lagging a bit. Gone are the days of Tom Lynch or Josh Jenkins getting endless passes out the back to an undefended goalsquare. These “cheapies” have been made up for by volume of shots and maximizing the chances they do take.

Collingwood’s attacking strength has been predominantly the volume of opportunities they create, with fairly average quality and execution.

Gold Coast and North Melbourne are both generating their shots in really dangerous places. The difference between the finals fancy and the Roos at the bottom of the ladder is North’s lack of supply – which continues to be a critical problem.

St Kilda and Hawthorn don’t have a real strength or weakness and hit around average on all three measures.

GWS and Carlton’s execution has been strong through the year, making up significant ground in their attacking space. Fremantle’s quality of shots has covered a similar role for the Dockers.

Brisbane are creating a lot of shots at a decent quality. But so far this year their execution has let them down. If their execution lifts they could easily click into another gear coming into finals.

Melbourne are abysmal at executing on their shots, by far the biggest outlier of any metric by any team.

Sydney’s quality of shots generated is the biggest thing letting them down. This may have to do with the lack of targets they’ve had up forward for much of the year.

The bottom six has several predictable tales. Essendon are executing well enough on the shots they generate. Execution is Richmond’s strongpoint relatively but still below league average. West Coast is underperforming on all three metrics.

We can also apply a similar method to looking at the shots a team concedes. For this one I’m not going to use a three-axis chart, as (in my view) a team has little control over the week-to-week accuracy of their opponent. What is replicable for a team’s defence is how many shots it concedes and where it concedes them.

Collingwood are clearly the best defending team in the league – outperforming in both restricting the quality and volume of their opponents shots. Carlton are the clear next in line.

Adelaide and Gold Coast are quite similar – doing quite well in restricting the volume, but around average for constraining those shots to low quality ones. GWS and Essendon are the reverse but moreso – elite for restricting their opponents to low quality shots, but they do allow a lot of them.

The Dogs and Melbourne can restrict the volume of shots to some degree, but the ones they do concede are dangerous.

Finals chasers Hawthorn, Fremantle and Brisbane are above average on both axes.

While at the other end of the scale is West Coast. They are the Melbourne of this chart, a clear outlier that stretches the axis.

Cooling it all down

Cody Atkinson

The last two weeks of footy have seen something that’s usually experienced by players and fans amplified to an extreme

While footy is meant to be a winter game, the combination of a surprisingly cold start to winter and the perplexing scheduling of two night games in the coldest AFL cities in the country have led to a couple of notably low scores. Sometimes the scoreboard lies about the quality of a game, but both last week’s Hawthorn-Adelaide match and round 13’s game between GWS and Port were scrappy affairs.

Don’t just take my word for it.

“We haven’t played a lot of night games here and…I’m sure you saw on the bench there was fair bit of steam coming off the heads of the players and things like that.” Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell said after the match in Launceston.

“So it was obviously colder than we’ve played. So it was a beautiful day absolutely ma magic um day here today but obviously the temperature drops quite steeply with no cloud cover,”

“It meant that it was going to be slippery and I thought both teams, I thought, handled it really well early…I think it was the conditions that led to the low scoring.”

“I think both teams – it was slippery you know. It’s dewy obviously – there’s there’s no doubt it

was a slippery wet game. So that’s a challenge when it comes to finishing your work off.” Adelaide coach Matthew Nicks added.

Wet weather gets talked about a fair bit, with a return to first principles and 80s style footy often getting sprinkled amongst more established game plans. Focus around the contest and straight line movement comes back into play, and the ground tends to get “skinny” and long.

We will get to what that looks like later.

Cold weather footy gets talked about a fair bit less. That makes sense – we see a lot less of truly cold conditions here given the general climates of where the games are played. It can often be hard to work out why there are issues. In Canberra the dewy surface was noticeable in person, but may have not come across on TV.

“It wasn’t a pretty game of footy but it’s not a “pretty game of footy” weekend.” It was pretty slippery all over the place this weekend.” Port coach Ken Hinkley explained.

“Of course you have to adjust to what you play (to) what the conditions are so, you know, it’s something we had to do.”

When watching the game, one particular attribute came through clearly. That is how “skinny” the game was.

Playing “skinny” is pretty simple – it generally refers to playing on the narrow side of the ground without looking to stretch through the corridor or the fat side by using horizontal handballs or kicks. Generally, skinny games are also accompanied by a “long” set up, with bookends sitting far deeper than normal to attempt to provide some vertical spacing.

If you are watching in the stands or at home, an easy test is where the widest players are sitting when the ball is near the boundary. If the wing roles are sitting well inside the centrepoint of the ground, chances are that it’s a pretty skinny game.

This is one example of Port’s set up when exiting 50 when in Canberra.

Up the ground the Power crammed hard to the boundary. Another example comes at this midfield boundary throw in. Players are heavily concentrated on the ball, and no-one is sitting on the fat side of the ground.

I asked Ken post-game about this

“It seemed like you tried to play a pretty skinny game?” 

“Yeah we did because the conditions made it a bit more challenging…that’s what was happening, I think, in the second quarter. We were throwing the ball around a little bit too much, boys were trying to probably fight through too much contest.” Hinkley explained. 

For those who love data to back up the eye test, here it is.

For the rest of the season, Port and GWS are the two sides most likely to use the corridor when transitioning the ball from their defensive third – or behind the back of the centre square. In Canberra, both sides avoiding doing so stringently, with the exception of the unsuccessful foray that Hinkley mentioned in the second quarter.

The Hawthorn and Adelaide game last week saw both sides try the corridor more often than in Canberra, but there were other hallmarks of a modified style of game. The sides combined for 16 contested knock ons, well above their combined average of 10. There were also 183 intercept possessions – almost 60 more than the league match average of 128. There was also one passage where interchanges were stranded for about 10 minutes, kicking rotations right out, due to the ball being stuck on the “wrong” side of the ground”.

By now you might have cottoned on that it sounds a bit like wet weather footy. It’s similar, yet different.

But sometimes conditions are down to how you perceive them. I also asked GWS coach Adam Kingsley about the conditions in Canberra post game and he had a different view from my frozen fingers.

Conditions play a bit of a factor with the ball movement?

“Nope, it’s pretty dry out there I reckon. We may have made it look a bit wet at times but for the most part it was pretty good conditions.”

Completing the Australian Football Hall of Fame

Sean Lawson

The Hall of Fame of Australian Football has an oft-discussed Victorian bias, with statistical analysis showing that, from before the national era, lower levels of achievement will lead to likely induction versus South Australian and Western Australian players.

Initially dominated by Victorian journalists (the-13 person inaugural panel featured only SANFL president Max Basheer and Perth journalist Geoff Christian), the Hall started with 116 of 136 inaugural names having played substantially in Victoria.

More recent years have seen some attempt to correct the record, with AFL chair Mike Fitzpatrick ordering a review in 2010 that led to a required 25% minimum of selectors living outside Victoria.

The Hall then started to belatedly recognise early non-Victorian stars like Tom Leahy (notably an even match for Roy Cazaly at interstate carnivals) and in 2018, analysis by Daniel Hoevenaars and James Coventry in Footballistics showed that since the regime change, WAFL and SANFL nominations had kept pace with pre-AFL names from Victoria. 

There has also been more effort to correct for the relative under-representation of eras before about the 1970s.

Keen students of Australian geography will be aware that there are in fact more than three states in Australia. All of them have long football histories, and lost in a lot of the older debates about the relative merit of SANFL and WAFL players have been other worthy candidates across the full geographical sweep of Australian football’s century and a half of history.

So, what of the Hall of Fame representation of the rest of Australia? What recognition has there been so far, and who might we look to for still-unrepresented regions of the footballing nation?

For those looking for those overlooked Victorians such as Sav Rocca you have found the wrong article.

Tasmania

First up is Tasmania, clearly the fourth state among football states. Tasmanian VFL players Darrel Baldock and Peter Hudson were inaugural legends, and Ian Stewart joined them in the following year. Others like Roy Cazaly, Stuart Spencer and Ivor Warne-Smith developed later ties to the Apple Isle. Several players who began their footy journeys down south have been inducted into the Hall, including Terry Cashion, Verdun Howell and Laurie Nash. 

It wasn’t until almost immediately after Fitzpatrick’s review when Tasmania finally had players inducted who hadn’t played in the VFL. Horrie Gorringe in 2010 and John Leedham this year are the only Tasmanian players inducted solely on the basis of their play in Tasmania. Several players, such as Cashion, almost exclusively plied their trade down south. Of the states outside the big three, Tasmania possibly is the best represented and needs the smallest correction.

New South Wales

The New South Wales Australian Football Hall of Fame features 10 legends in its ranks.The majority of these legends had extensive careers in the AFL/VFL or elsewhere, such as Tony Lockett, Paul Kelly and Terry Daniher, but it also features several names from earlier eras.

Haydn Bunton Sr is notable in this list of NSW Hall of Fame Legends, because to read the national Hall of Fame Legends entry his career simply starts at age 20 already at Fitzroy. This is despite Bunton having been rather famously the subject of an illegal payments scandal to get him there at all. He played several senior seasons at Albury and West Albury (both former incarnations of the current Albury Tigers) from age 15 until age 20, and won the only premierships of his career there.

The entry of NSW Hall of Fame legend Ralph Robertson in 2024 arguably broke the duck for NSW footy excellence being recognised on its own terms. Robertson did play 14 games for St Kilda in 1899, but his Hall of Fame case was built on the strength of his contributions to footy in Sydney. Robertson played for East Sydney (now merged into the UNSW/Eastern Suburbs Bulldogs) and North Shore, and represented New South Wales on several dozen occasions. Longtime Swans chair Richard Colless, himself a legend in the NSW Hall of Fame for football administration, publicly lobbied for this inclusion for years. 

Figures such as leading goalkicker Stan Miller (the namesake of their Coleman), administrators Harry Hedger and Jim Phelan (the Best and Fairest in AFL Sydney is the Phelan Medal) and long term player and administrator Jack Dean may hear their names called in future years. 

There is also a solid case for the induction of Sir Doug Nicholls, who grew up in New South Wales. While his career was only 11 years long he was successful at both VFL and VFA levels, including representing the VFL and VFA sides in representative matches.

Queensland

The Queensland Hall of Fame only has two playing legend – Marcus Ashcroft. The premiership Lion already naturally sits in the national Hall for his exploits at AFL level. Many other Queenslanders also sit in the current national Hall of Fame, such as Jason Dunstall, Jason Akermanis and Michael Voss.

The lone QAFL-specific entry in the Hall of Fame comes, strangely enough, in the form of an umpire. Tom McArthur umpired 502 games from 1959 to 1985.

Dick Verdon has arguably the strongest case of the Queenlanders to stay up north to make the national Hall in coming years. 

Northern Territory

Neither territory yet has a truly standalone entry in the national Hall of Fame, though there are several players with ties which go unmentioned in the AFL website’s honours lists.

Curiously, Michael Graham’s long career with St Mary’s is listed alongside his Sturt career, but several other inductees like Maurice Rioli and Bill Dempsey do not have their games for St Mary’s and Darwin listed.

In the NT Hall of Fame, among the inaugural legends are two Indigenous Team of the Century players, Bill Dempsey and David Kantilla. They played for West Perth and South Adelaide respectively. Rather notably though, both spent substantial parts of their careers playing in the NTFL during the southern off-season. That’s something that’s rather unique to footy in the Top End, and would be worthy of note by a truly national Hall of Fame on cultural significance grounds alone.

There’s also a wide range of other notable NT players that merit consideration alongside Dempsey and Kantilla.

The ACT

Finally, let’s talk about the nation’s capital.

The most famous name in Canberra football is Alex Jesaulenko. Jezza played in Canberra until age 20, winning three senior premierships with Eastlake before making the move to Carlton, something that is (unsurprisingly) omitted from his Hall of Fame record. His story of migration and only taking up the game at age 14 is well known, but also significant is that he did this on the mere fringes of what could be reasonably considered football heartland. Jesalulenko also returned to Canberra to play and coach after his retirement.

Among several AFL Canberra Hall of Fame legends (and the strange omission of both James Hird and Jesaulenko) are two names I want to highlight as potential national Hall of Fame candidates based on Canberran exploits.

The first is Kevin “Cowboy” Neale. Neale was part of St Kilda’s only VFL premiership and played 256 games for them. He’s probably not quite in the frame for Hall of Fame honours on his St Kilda career alone, especially with the over representation of players from his era already.

However, his contributions to football in Canberra after this were also significant. While serving as captain-coach at Ainslie, he led the Tricolours to four flags in five years, kicking about a million goals in the process. 

He also led Canberra to this most storied of moments:

Against a VFL team featuring plenty of legitimate VFL talent such as Malcolm Blight, Merv Neagle, Robert Dipierdomenico, Francis Bourke, Michael Turner and Trevor Barker, Neale led a Canberra side also featuring Jesaulenko, to a hard fought win at Manuka Oval in July 1980.

If there’s one historical moment worth commemorating in a century of Canberra footy, it’s this moment, and captain-coach Neale was its architect.

The second name is Tony Wynd, who dominated football in the ACT in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a junior he was selected in national All-Australian sides from junior carnivals, he naturally won a stack of Mulrooney Medals in the ACTAFL and just generally seems to have been about the most dominant player on record in the league among those who never played VFL or similar football.

What else is notable, though, is that he was also playing to a level that got him selected to represent Australia in a tour of Ireland in 1987, though he subsequently broke his leg and missed out on the tour. As the AFL Canberra entry for his Legend status notes:

Injury prevented Tony from playing in the All-Australian Representative team which toured Ireland and the United States in 1987. His selection was widely recognised as he was one of very few players from outside the major Australian football league teams to ever be named in an All-Australian team.

Could Wynd have played successfully in a more credentialled competition in another state? Who knows? He appears never to have considered it. Wynd had a career in the ACT outside of football, working for ASADA’s predecessor, the ASDA and can be found in publications of the era promoting the anti-doping message.

This highlights a significant problem with trying to assess things like the Hall of Fame in an era before professionalisation and mass media. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the level of pay across senior football competitions would not have made chancing the move interstate a financially appealing prospect for someone already holding a well-paying job such as one in the public service. Indeed, the average AFL salary didn’t pass the average full-time male salary for workers in general until around 1991.

Wynd, then, represents something of the end of the unknowable hinterland of football talent – players plying their trade well outside the big leagues before professional money and recruiting made talent identification and recruitment all but inevitable. There are probably dozens of  former players out there like him from the pre-modern eras of football, who dazzled onlookers in their own leagues, but played out careers well beyond the spotlights in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.

AROUND THE GROUNDS

• Jason Lassey runs the indispensable Sports Industry AU resource, and has pulled together a look at the data showing the (off field) rise of the Suns, arguing against the popular beliefs about failure.
• Jasper Chellappah has updated draft power rankings, and as more scrutiny falls on the draft class as a whole, there are fewer tied players in the top ten. 
• On the draft, Fox Footy breathlessly reports on some more Academy shenanigans. This time, it’s the Saints who may be beneficiaries.
• Cal Twomey also has reported on the revival of the USA Combine for the Cat B rookies.