This Week In Football

Tag: This week in football

  • Round 3, 2026

    Round 3, 2026

    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

    Round 2 of the season, so naturally four teams had a bye this weekend and there won’t be a full slate until Gather Round. The teams that get out onto the park though put on some great displays, only leaving us with two undefeated and three winless sides and half the competition sitting at 1-1.

    The Hawks, Dogs and Suns all firmed their premiership credentials displaying three distinct archetypes of wins that hearten the faithful: straightening your kicking for goal when it matters, wrestling back the lead late on in tough away conditions, and completely dispatching cellar dweller opposition.

    At the other end of the ladder the Giants, Bombers and Roos all had three variations of disappointing losses: the complete absurdity of losing 29 seconds of game time to the void and going on to lose by a single goal in a late charge, cementing yourself as wooden spoon favourites after being unable to fire a single shot against a fellow bottom four team, and giving up a five goal lead to a team you sold the reverse fixture hosting rights to.

    Finally in the middle of the pack, maybe now called the Wildcard Zone, Fremantle showed they learned how to hold onto the most dangerous lead in football: 5+ goals at QT.

    This week in football we have:

    Rescuing Footy

    Cody Atkinson

    Footy – or Australian Football to give it its government name – has been around a fair while. 

    But the game as created wasn’t perfect. The first rules were more a rough sketch than a considered masterpiece. 

    That’s not a shock – they were literally bashed out on a lazy arvo at the pub by whoever was keen enough to show up. Had they considered continuing through kick-ons they might have had something bulletproof on their hands, but c’est la vie.

    Since then there has been an obsession with fixing football. As something created broken, the obvious response has been to repair. When the little mark took over the game, they removed it from the rules. Holding the ball has been an issue for over a century, as has the throw. The shirt front is no more, and now the ground has a lot more lines than before.

    There are three general types of fixes that are generally enacted.

    The first is safety related changes, and are pretty essential for any sport to continue (i.e. no shirtfronts anymore). The second is loophole closing – think the little mark. That occurs where a team or teams exploit a poorly written law to reign supreme (and ruin the fun of the game).

    The third type is a bit more nebulous – it’s to make the game better. In recent years there have been several changes to attempt to improve the game. That’s also the case this year.

    That last type of change rumbled around my head when I read this tweet from the Herald Sun’s ‘Ralphy’.

    Imagine being a fly on the wall in those conversations. Imagine thinking that a bunch of journos with a questionable grip on the sport knew the levers on how to fix the sport.

    Most importantly – imagine thinking those trade-offs were something real.

    So is the game actually improved this year?

    It’s far too early to tell, but almost certainly not. 

    Most of the baseline numbers that indicate style are basically unchanged this year, especially when considering that early season (and year) footy is usually faster and higher scoring due to conditions. Most club analysts generally think that a month to six weeks is the earliest period you need before trends are analysed in a footy context – we aren’t close to there yet. Some even suggest to wait until after the league-wide bye. That’s because the bye is the main opportunity teams have to install new looks with extra time on the training track.

    As we’ve (Sean Lawson and I) have investigated in the past, most rule changes see a short term bump to scoring (or other relevant factors) before settling. Time is needed for the full impact.

    But let’s be bold and take one short term example anyway – mostly because of the consensus view that there has been a dramatic change. In Mateo’s latest One Percenters newsletter, he highlighted some numbers from TWIF’s own Emlyn Breese:

    Play on rates – often cited as the big outcome from “stand” – haven’t shifted dramatically. Likewise, transition of the ball from defensive 50 to attacking 50 is actually a touch down. Scoring from centre bounce is down as well. Scoring is up overall (see Lincoln’s piece for a discussion there), but the game looks (with the commentary on mute) largely the same as last year’s sport.

    Yet still most people would observe the opposite. They would see a game dramatically sped up, perhaps artificially so. So far that’s just not the case.

    A large chunk of this would be down to what we are watching for – a filter on how we watch the game through the narrow lens of the television screen. If we are looking for overlap run (and commentators likewise) then we will see it.

    This Russell Jackson piece is always worth re-reading on the latter issue.

    That addresses the “what” but not the “why”.

    So “why”? Why are these rule changes being made if not for the big two reasons above?

    Well, without detailed research, my best guess is to serve the nostalgia of journalists like Ralph and the footy administrators in charge. They want a game like the one they remembered growing up, with hormones racing through their veins. They want to see the loose, carefree, energetic footy that matched their outlook in life that the time – when things were as good as they would ever be.

    This absolute tune from Hot Tubs Time Machine probably explains it better than I ever could.

    People want goals, action, marks. They want bags of goals – journos in particular want this because it’s easy to write about. More importantly, they want to relive the heroes of their youth and what they did to make them so, well, heroic.

    Marcus from Hot Tubs unintentionally touches on one of the major factors in why we don’t – the professionalism of the sport. As the sport has become more of a going concern the tolerance for racism, sexism and homophobia has significantly reduced. 

    So too has the tolerance for losing, especially if your career depends on winning. That’s a reason why there has been such a rapid tactical evolution, alongside the impact of other sports. That drive for professionalism and improvement drives both aspects. Perhaps there’s a way to make the game as open as the 1980s or 1920s (yuck in both respects), but “stand”, ruck jumping, 6-6-6 and last touch out of bounds don’t scratch the surface.

    Unfortunately, the march of time is as unrelenting as the receding of the hairline up the scalp. If you actually go back and watch old football (as I often do) you’ll be quickly reminded how barely watchable it is. The conditions are often bad, the skills often lacking and the strategy oft rudimentary. It’s the emotions that are worth remembering, not the actual footy sometimes.

    But old footy is simpler to understand than the modern game – an output of the professionalism forced on the game, influenced by those who communicate it to the masses.

    That’s not really an issue – especially when more fans are watching the sport than ever before, and when more people are playing at a grassroots level. If the game was truly in dire straits these numbers would have dropped off.

    Footy always needs fixing, but maybe not in the way people have been thinking they need to.

    The Shifting Marking Market

    Jeremiah Brown

    Marks are a central component of the beautiful game of football. While there have been minor increases in marks per game over time, going back to 2012, the total number of marks per game have hovered between 88 through to 94 per game. Total marks have also remained quite stable as a ratio to disposals per game, shifting slightly from 24% up to around 25% post stand rule. 

    However, not all marks are created equal and it is important to look at different types of marks. In a game where the importance of maintaining possession and transitioning the ball quickly has exploded, the craft of getting open and providing an easy marking target out on a lead is a precious commodity that is growing in prominence this season. 

    With the caveat that it is extremely early, this season there is an interesting spike in the marks being taken on leads by teams. For the first time since 2014, teams are averaging more marks on leads than contested marks. This is partially because marks on leads are up to the highest they have been over the last 15 years, and partially because contested marks are at the lowest rate that they have been over the same period.

    The increased speed and openness of the game could be contributing to both factors. For contested marks per game, with the ball more in motion, there are fewer instances where players are looking to put the ball into contested situations. On the flipside, there is also increased space to lead into when the ball is moving quicker, creating more opportunities for players to lead effectively. 

    Even so, last year contested marks were still more common than marks on the lead. St Kilda and Sydney were the only teams that took more marks on the lead than contested marks. For both teams it was more about being poor at contested marking than being leaders at marks on leads, and both teams raided Carlton to try and improve their contested marking in the offseason.

    This year though the ratio of marks has flipped, and teams are taking more marks on the lead than they are taking contested marks. There are 12 teams averaging at least 10 marks on leads, a number which hasn’t been reached by a team since Collingwood did it in 2021. 

    Given the small sample size it’s hard to work out how much of Port Adelaide’s total up the top is due to a change in play style under Carr, and how much is due to totally dominating a poor Essendon defence this last weekend. Essendon conceded 7 marks on the lead to Mitch Georgiades alone, and is averaging 21 per game conceded to opponents. 

    Only two teams are getting more of the ball from contested marks than marks on the lead. Creating easier ball movement remains an issue for Carlton, who are one of the two teams continuing to get more from contested marks rather than marks on the lead. However, Sydney taking more contested marks is a bit of a surprise, given they were the worst in the competition at it in 2025.

    There are a few contributing factors for Sydney. The first factor this week was the loss of Gulden and Heeney, which certainly hurt both the run and the ball movement of the Swans. The other has been the relatively low output from star recruit Charlie Curnow. Sydney recruited Curnow to help provide aerial support and fill their need for a key forward, but following on from a down year last year, he continues to be down on his peak output, with his worst marking numbers since his rookie season in 2026. Curnow might look to the man from the other end of the field last week if he wants to return to form. 

    Last year the renaissance of Jack Gunston was one of the more surprising stories in football. Gunston has always had a knack for finding space and working to the right areas in the forward line. But last year’s resurgence came in part off the back of leading the competition in marks taken on the lead, with Gunston being the only player to average more than 2 per game. Gunston was able to translate his ability to find space into significant scoreboard impact, trailing only Jeremy Cameron in Goals per game last season.

    In the first few rounds Gunston has continued on from where he left off last season. He has been a joy to watch plying his trade in the front half of the ground, continually working himself into dangerous areas and testing the concentration of his defender. He was pivotal in the win against the Swans last week, and is once again second with 4.3 goals per game and averaging an impressive 2.7 marks on the lead per game. 

    Whether it is the stand rule, or just pulling insights from what worked last year for Hawthorn and Gunston, it seems teams are looking to get out on the lead more. It means that Gunston’s got a bit more company with 25 players who are averaging 2 or more marks on the lead so far. Those numbers will certainly come down as defences adapt to the increased speed that we have seen early in the season, and as Essendon’s porous defence improves from historically bad levels. However, the early numbers suggest a genuine shift in how teams are working and using space that it will be interesting to see if teams look to clamp down on in the coming weeks.

    The Early Season Spike in Scoring isn’t as Big as you Think it is

    Lincoln Tracy

    Earlier this week Jon Pierik wrote an article for The Age exploring whether the AFL’s latest batch of rule changes have bought about the desired effect and led to more scoring.

    “While not all teams have played three games, the bump in scoring is obvious,” Pierik wrote. “When comparing the average scores across the first three rounds of this season and last, there’s an increase of five points per team, to 90 points.”

    And that’s true, if you round up.

    If you compare the average team score across the first three rounds of this season compared to the first three rounds of last season (excluding the rescheduled Geelong/Brisbane and Gold Coast/Essendon games from Opening Round, as these weren’t played until Rounds 3 and 24, respectively), things have increased from 90.2 to 94.98.

    (Pierik may have made a typo at the start of the article when saying the average for this season is 90 points – the figure towards the end of the story says 95.)

    But when I posted about seeing this story on X, fellow TWIFer Emlyn Breese weighed in with two very valid points.

    The first point was that with so few games played across the first three weeks of the season, it’s important to acknowledge that four of the six teams that have played three games (instead of two games, like the other 12 teams) are in the top five for average points scored at this point of the season.

    Gold Coast (384 points, three games, average of 128 per game) have the highest average score, ahead of Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs (339 points, three games, 113 per game), Fremantle (218 points, two games, 109 per game), and Sydney (318 points, three games, 106 per game).

    The second point is that it would be better to test whether scoring (and some of the other offensive metrics) have improved on last year by taking an average of the team averages, rather than simply dividing the total number of points scored by the number of teams that have played.

    Emlyn’s suggestion removes the bias of some teams playing more games than others by using an average of averages approach. This accounts for the fact that teams who have played more games will inflate the total number of points scored, which in turn will affect the overall average.

    So, let’s apply the average of averages method to the original question from the start of Pierik’s article: have the AFL’s rule changes worked?

    Using the latter approach, we can see that the average of each team’s points per game across the first three rounds of the season has increased from 91.86 last year to 93.40 this year – a year-on-year increase of just 1.67% (compared to the 5.22% increase seen in the former method). 

    The results from 2021 to 2023 are the same for both methods because the same number of games were played across the first three rounds. The somewhat contentious introduction of Opening Round in 2024 has meant teams have played an uneven number of games until later in the season. As a result, the average of averages method is more accurate.

    Inside 50s, which remained relatively consistent in Pierik’s analysis, do not change drastically using the average of averages method.

    It will be interesting to check in and see how scoring changes once teams play more games and are back on level footing with respect to games played. But in the meantime, it’s more accurate to say that the spike in early season scoring isn’t as large as everyone thinks it is.

    Tracking the Tracker

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    There’s been a lot of talk this week about the spate of hamstring injuries and whether this is due to the running loads taken on by teams. I wanted  to dive into the data that is available to us at a team level and see if we can corroborate some of what has been said.

    Firstly, this data is derived from the tracker found in the AFL App. It surfaces both team and individual data. Individual data however is only surfaced for the top five players for a given metric in any match. With that limitation it’s not really possible to get a proper season trend for any given player. They may run the same amount two weeks in a row, be captured in that top five one week, and be missing the next simply because five other players ran further.

    It’s also important to note that there are some games where there’s clearly been a GPS error so there are some weird outliers. I haven’t had the time to go through and weed them out unfortunately.

    The metrics we’ve got at our disposal are:

    • Total distance covered (metres)
    • Distance covered at high speed (18+ km/h) (metres)
    • Number of sprints (Occasions running above 24km/h for at least 1 second)
    • Number of repeat sprints (Total sprints within 60 seconds of each other)
    • Average speed of movement while team is in possession of the ball (m/s)
    • Average speed of movement while opposition is in possession of the ball (m/s)

    For a start we’ll look at the raw figures.

    open chart

    We can see that across our 6 metrics things have either plateaued or slightly decreased from last year.

    However, as Cody and Lincoln have each written about this week March football is not indicative of a full season. What happens if we restrict our focus and look at just games played in March?

    open chart

    We can see a modest increase. It’s not earth shattering, but if players are already loaded up to capacity every bit on top of that will have a greater impact.

    If the metrics change substantially during a season, what does that actually look like?

    open chart

    We can see that pretty consistently distance covered at high speeds starts slow and peaks mid-late season. Sprints over the past three seasons have also climbed from a low base. Other metrics have a more limited variation and it’s harder to determine a trend as opposed to just noise.

    Given we’re starting from a higher base it will be interesting to see if and where the high intensity metrics peak this season and what impact that has.

    It’s also worth considering what these metrics actually mean for winning and losing.

    open chart

    The eye test tells us that for most metrics there doesn’t appear to be much of a link. This is backed up by a quick spearman correlation coefficient. This isn’t too surprising, different game styles require different running loads so the lack of strong overall trends makes sense.

    The exceptions are teams that win tend to run slower on offense and faster on defense.

    If we look at team by team we might be able to find some more interesting features.

    open chart

    Since we’re going off a smaller population size (70 – 80 per team as opposed to 800 games across the entire league) we’d need to see stronger correlations to take note of them. This is admittedly pretty rudimentary analysis, but a ballpark figure would be that we should start to take notice at above 0.25 (or below -0.25, with negative values indicating a positive differential is correlated with losing).

    Sprint differentials for a number of teams start to climb into meaningful territory. Melbourne and Essendon also benefit from a high repeat sprint differential.

    Brisbane’s wins are correlated with distance covered (both high speed and total) more than other teams, while Collingwood are edging a meaningful correlation to total distance covered.

    A final thing we can look at is the profiles of individual teams quarter by quarter.

    open chart

    We should note that the running a team does is very dependent on the context of a game, but we can still note a few interesting observations (from a small sample size):

    • As you would expect, across most metrics most teams workload drops off during a game – players tire out and run less or run slower.
    • Fremantle’s speed on attack has risen through the game, as have Carlton and the Giants to lesser extents.
    • Port Adelaide’s speed with and without the ball falls off a cliff in the second half, Carlton’s speed on defence has cratered in the third term and recovered slightly in term 4 – but still is in stark contrast to their speed attacking.
    • A few teams have a secondary peak in Q3 after the long break, Adelaide and Sydney fairly pronounced in this for distance total and distance high speed.
    • Carlton have the reverse of the typical profile for repeat sprints – peaking in Q2 and Q4
    • Essendon and Port are done by Q4 and this is most evident in the sprint figures – averaging almost 10 fewer sprints than the next lowest team for the quarter.

    Setting Up The Board

    Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

    Thursday night’s Hawthorn vs Sydney clash was my first opportunity to attend a live game this season, but more importantly it was my five-month-old son’s first opportunity to attend a live men’s game ever. Sat up in the fourth tier just to the south-side of the punt road end, he let the full breadth and majesty of the MCG wash over him and listened patiently while I explained how both teams set up their structures on each line to best exploit their own strengths and their opponent’s weaknesses.

    The first step in a long journey

    I explained to him that aside from the sense of community, the energy of the crowd and the feeling of being part of something bigger than just yourself, one of the reasons I’ll always prefer attending games live is the ability to all 36 players at once and how they’ve been organised. 

    The Sydney Setup

    I never completely resign myself to losing before a game’s begun but when Sarah Black confirmed Heeney’s absence, meaning the Swans would play for the first time since the end of 2020 without him or Errol Gulden in the side, I lowered my expectations. When a player is removed from the top of the talent pyramid you don’t just wipe however many potential points off the scoreboard like a tower getting shorter; the effect cascades downwards throughout the playing group. “Who can fill their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling the roles of the people filling their roles?” reverberating ad nauseum throughout the list.

    After a season that felt like building and repairing a plane while it’s in the air, Cox understandably opted for stability. Caiden Cleary and Corey Warner would come in to provide general forward presence and stoppage support, Justin McInerney would move closer inside the contest, but he wasn’t ready to shift other major pillars like Callum Mills on-ball from his defensive position. While nobody besides Brodie Grundy had attended more than 70% of CBAs throughout the first two games, this matchup saw a much tighter rotation of Rowbottom, Warner and McInerney all getting 70% each with nobody else attending more than a third.

    Knowing the deliveries wouldn’t be as clean or as frequent as they normally enjoy, the Swans forwards were spread in a way that tried to maximise their 1v1 capabilities. When setting up for a mid arc stoppage they’d typically form into a 1-2-1 wide diamond formation: a player one-out in the goal square (typically Curnow), a skinny side tall in the pocket ready to come in and overlap (typically McDonald), a fat side general forward playing a rest defence role to cut off the Hawks’ counter attack should they try to switch the play (typically Lloyd), and a final tall one kick out from the stoppage ready to wrestle under a floating dump kick (typically Amartey). 

    While this setup worked well for periods, its efficacy quickly waned as they were forced into long dump kicks that lacked the precision of Gulden, or ground-level follow up of Heeney. Many kicks came from long range and wide angles trying to find a target in the central corridor that Hawthorn quickly mopped up. 

    Sydney kicks inside 50 to a direct turnover via Emlyn Breese

    When Sydney were able to retain possession from these entries were the shorter, more controlled kicks from the corridor in instances where the talls could halve the aerial contests for players like Papley and Rosas Jnr to run onto. 

    Sydney kicks inside 50 to non-mark/free retention via Emlyn Breese

    While hindsight is 20/20 and most things are easier said than done, it seems clear now that what the Swans lacked was the composure to create more of these situations rather than bombing in hope. 

    The Hawthorn Setup

    Even with their undeniable scoring power, the Hawthorn forward line isn’t one that’s typically thought of as having an overwhelming amount of tall talent. Despite this they’re currently a top four team for marks inside 50, in both the total number and relative to the amount of entries they generate. 

    Their ability to maximise the output of their forwards, many of whom are still young or have been moved on by other clubs, comes from a system built on emphasising their individual strengths.

    Unlike Sydney’s diamond formation with their four forwards all ready to use their size and strength, Hawthorn choose to line up in something closer to a 1-3 T-shape for mid-arc stoppages. One isolated deep tall, and then a line of three others closer to the source with acres of space behind them. Unlike a lot of other sides, including their opponents on the night, that would have their tallest target as the one out the Hawks were at their best when Mabior Chol was further up the field and Jack Gunston running out of the goal square. The Hawks rely on footspeed and beating their opponents horizontally to create uncontested marks, and deployed like this they were able to create set shot opportunities from every angle. 

    Hawthorn kicks inside 50 to a mark/free via Emlyn Breese.

    Even though the winning goal came from a moment of brilliance with Gunston kicking across his body at a stoppage, they were a mirror image of the Swans – at their best when creating an uncongested forward line to take marks on the lead. Cox was eventually able to clog up some of this space by conceding an extra at stoppages to let Mills wander loose in defensive 50, but without their usual on-ball talent to cover this deficiency in manpower the Hawks were able to score on volume rather than quality of entries.

    This ability to spread and stretch their opponents across the entire width of the MCG is all about putting their players in positions to succeed. During his one year stay in Brisbane, Jack Gunston’s shots and goal tallies hit career lows alongside his marks on the lead; now he’s hitting career highs in what should be his twilight years. In fact, no Hawthorn player was in the top 20 for offensive 1v1 contests in 2025, but had two in the top 20 for marks inside 50 including Gunston leading the league.

    Controlling the Controllables

    It’s impossible to ever completely unpick exactly what parts of a team’s performance can be attributed to a coach’s tactical system, innate talent of the players or their skill execution on the day. 

    Sam Mitchell’s decision to move Barrass onto Curnow in the second half worked well not least of all because Tom Barrass is a brilliant player, but it was close to not having mattered because of a double swing in each team’s scoring against expectation.

    While footy pedants like myself love getting into long arguments distinguishing who is each club’s best player, who’s their most important, and whether or not they’re the same person, the only two possible answers to either of those questions for Sydney were both unavailable to Dean Cox. While it’s far from a guarantee the Swans would have flipped the result had they played, it’s impossible to imagine they wouldn’t have performed better. 

    Coaches though are in the business of controlling the controllables. Much to their dismay players aren’t chess pieces that will be reliably available performing identical functions week in week out, and so the best coaches are the ones who can identify what’s within the range of possibilities and adapt to what their players are offering them on the day.

    I don’t know if my boy fully understood any of this, but he seemed to enjoy himself all the same.

    Around the Grounds

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  • Round 1, 2026

    Round 1, 2026

    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.

    This Week in Football we have:

    Winning and Using the Footy

    Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

    Bill James, the baseball analyst whose data driven approach shaped modern baseball, once said about analytics

    If you have a metric that never matches up with the eye test, it’s probably wrong. And if it never surprises you, it’s probably useless. But if four out of five times it tells you what you know, and one out of five it surprises you, you might have something.

    Despite being the default sort option for the league, AFL Fantasy points leave me completely cold, and most of the basic counting statistics like disposals and metres gained aren’t more revealing than simply watching the game. Equity-based Player Ratings have always intrigued me because of that one time in five however. For 2026, friend of TWIF and in my opinion the greatest resource available to footy fans, Wheelo Ratings, has estimations of each player’s Rating Points gained from equity in both ball winning and ball using actions.

    A Brief Explanation of Equity

    In its simplest terms, equity measures each player’s impact on the game by attempting to extrapolate their actions on the ball to potential points on the board. Inspired by Expected Points Added in American Football, it looks at a given situation on the field and gives it a value based on the average next score, with opposition scoring being assigned negative values. Ball winning is measured by wrangling possession off the opposition, and ball use is measured by both progressing the movement towards goal while retaining possession.

    How the exact numbers are arrived at defies simple explanation, and while a full breakdown can be found in the AFL’s official Player Ratings document, it suffices to say that winning possession and clean use is rewarded more heavily (as well as losing possession or poor disposal punished more severely) at the extreme ends of the ground where scoring is more likely to occur. 

    For an example of what this looks like across a game, we can refer to Wheelo Ratings’ breakdown of Christian Petracca’s Opening Round performance for Gold Coast, which incidentally was his highest rated game on record.

    The vast majority of actions only have an incremental contribution to his running total, most less than one full point of equity per action. His three goals however contributed more to his overall score than all of his ball winning actions combined, because they turned good field position into tangible points on the board. 

    With that in mind we can begin to explore who’s moving the the needle the most for their teams.

    The Winners

    Analysing the best ball winners follows a strong, largely predictable trendline.

    In the top left we find the low volume but high impact key position players, with the standouts being a handful of exceptional aerial-contest winning forwards. Ben King’s propensity to stay firmly within one kick of the goals impacted his ability to get his hands on the ball (6.1 of his 7.5 possessions per game for 2025 were in the attacking 50), but he made his limited opportunities to influence the game count during the Suns’ first ever top-8 season.

    As we look across to the high-volume possession winners the level of impact predictably begins to wane. To be able to get hands on the Sherrin upwards of two dozen times every game, a player has to chase and overlap through the inter-arc sections of the ground where equity values transitioning the footy towards dangerous areas more than just holding onto it. While there are a couple of exceptional players like Fremantle’s Caleb Serong and GWS’ Tom Green who are able to find the ball at a staggeringly high rate both in dispute and from a teammate, the majority of players far to the right on this chart are the outside runners. Players whose key talents are their acceleration and ability to read the play two seconds ahead, so that they can receive the footy in time and space after their teammates have secured it.

    In the middle of the pack we see that scarce group of rucks who show what the position can give at its best. A true hybrid position that provides the aerial duel winning ability of a key position tall, and aerobic capacity and constance presence of on-ball players. Due to the scarcity of athletes who can provide both that football talent while meeting the height requirement, a lot of the names pulling away from the trendline are the same ones you’d expect to see any time this decade; Darcy Cameron leaning more towards the key position marking side, Brodie Grundy playing more like a tall on-baller, and Max Gawn out on his own on his way to an eighth All-Australian Jacket. It’s all well and good to win the footy however, but arguably much more important is how it’s used.

    The Users

    The spread of volume and impact per action is much wider when it comes time to put hand or boot to ball. 

    Per Bill James’ earlier piece of wisdom, you can still easily find the four things you already know to be true: Nick Watson’s ability to tear the game open on less than a dozen disposals is strongly reminiscent of Cyril Rioli at his peak, Marcus Bontempelli is one of the most complete players in the league, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera is overdue a reclassification to midfielder, and even the best ball winning rucks aren’t or shouldn’t be trusted to do much more than a lateral handball. 

    The real intrigue of course is in the fifth thing that surprises you. 

    Coming into 2026 Harry Sheezel is in a very similar position to his contemporaries Wanganeen-Milera and Daicos. A high draft pick who first found his way into the senior side on the half-back flank for his kicking and overlap running ability, shifted now not only into the engine room but being trusted with the bulk of responsibility for his team’s ball movement. All three players led their clubs for handballs received and disposals last year, but where the latter two were also club leaders in ball use equity Sheezel was only fourth off the bottom at North Melbourne, narrowly beating an overall negative score.

    Where equity measures can get tricky is trying to disentangle exactly how to distribute responsibility for action and outcome. Sheezel is obviously responsible for his own decision making and skills execution, but equity measures put the full weight of the difference on the disposing player except in the case of marks on the lead where it’s split between teammates. North Melbourne ranked 14th for marks in 2025 and 17th for marks on a lead; when they have the ball they’re not working to create space and keep clean possession like Brisbane, or surging and overlapping like GWS. This is a major contributor to why less than half of Sheezel’s 352 metres gained per game are retained by a teammate. 

    He’s far from the only player in a similar situation – Bailey Smith will need to be more damaging with the possession fed to him if Geelong are going to keep him as the primary first receiver in transition – but he does stand out as having the lowest ball use equity from anyone with at least 25 disposals per game in 2025. While his skills, and hopefully level of talent around him, will continue to develop as North Melbourne climb their way off the bottom of the ladder, something will have to drastically change for him to get to the levels shown by Wanganeen-Milera and Daicos, who’ve both been floated as the possible best player in the competition. 

    What it Means for Teams

    Looking at 2025’s numbers gives a strong profile for each team in attack

    …and defence

    The Bulldogs tore teams, particularly in the bottom half, apart with their possession and movement but were about average running the other way; Carlton were a top four team around the inside layer of stoppages, but couldn’t attack efficiently or put up resistance post-clearance; Brisbane never profiled as more than an above average team until they had to turn it on for September; and West Coast were simply bad at everything. 

    Overall, however, most of the efficacy of the metric is found in identifying those outlying players  for their team or the opposition. If you know it’ll be hard to get around the brick wall Max Gawn builds in defensive midfield, but that he’s liable to give it right back if he tries to kick it, you can spend the week ahead of playing Melbourne focused on your rest defence. 

    There are obvious limitations to equity and what it captures – it’s totally blind to off-ball movement and actions outside of the immediate moment – but it’s extremely good at doing what it’s trying to do, and it’s always helpful to have another tool in the toolbox. 

    Greener Pastures

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

    We’re 5 games into the season so there isn’t a huge amount we can draw on in terms of trends and patterns. As a result I’m zooming in a bit more than usual for the week.

    Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver departed Melbourne in very different ways. Petracca came at a premium for the Suns. They ultimately handed over three first round picks and took on the entirety of his sizable salary.

    The Giants got Clayton Oliver marked down for clearance. Despite being one of only two players to win the AFLCA MVP award multiple times (Gary Ablett the other), Melbourne got just a future third round pick as well as the privilege of paying him a sizeable amount to play against them.

    The on-field context for the two in their debut games for their new clubs was also very different. Petracca entered a team which, while missing the reigning Brownlow medalist Matt Rowell, was still absolutely stacked with powerful and talented midfielders.

    Oliver on the other hand found himself no longer a nice bonus or a speculative trade, but a vital replacement. Tom Green was out for the season with an ACL, while Toby Bedford and Josh Kelly were also set to miss time. Brent Daniels, who potentially would have taken a bigger midfield share given those outs was also missing.

    Oliver had the equal highest centre bounce attendances for the Giants, while Petracca continued a trend that had started at Melbourne of being used increasingly as a forward who rotates through the midfield, rather than the reverse.

    Using some new stats surfaced on WheeloRatings we can dig a bit deeper. Andrew Whelan has recreated the player rating point methodology to be able to separate the value a player creates through winning the ball and using the ball, as well as in pre-clearance and post-clearance situations.

    The main criticism of Petracca has been that while he is excellent at winning the ball, and can have moments of brilliance, he doesn’t always make the best use of it. For every bullet to a forward’s advantage there’s a handful of high forward 50 entries that are easy to counter. For every dribbler from the Perth pocket there’s more than a handful of very gettable set shots that fade wide.

    On the goal kicking front Petracca’s game was his 4th most accurate from 2021 onwards (when we have the data to calculate expected score). He kicked 3 goals from 3 shots, against an expected score of 9.8 – scoring 2.7 points above what the average player would expect to. From 2021 through 2025 he was averaging 0.41 points per shot below the league standard.

    He also generated 72% of his equity from using the ball (as opposed to winning the ball) with only Round 9 2024 against Carlton being higher (84%). This comes back down a little if we exclude his goal kicking but still is the 6th highest of the 111 games we have.

    To put it another way, Petracca generated a total of 24.4 equity points through his ball use. His next highest game is 18.5. He has more games where he generated negative equity from ball use (19) than where he generated 10 or more points from it (18). It’s opening round, it’s a one game sample size, but if this is the new Christian Petracca three first round picks may have been unders for him.

    Who else has gone up a level joining a new club?

    We may be getting slightly ahead of ourselves here. After all, Petracca won’t be fronting up against easy beats like last year’s grand finalists every week. If he continues at this kind of pace though he’d be well in the conversation for end of year awards. What kind of company would he be in?

    Winning individual honours in your first year at a new club is a relatively rare occurrence.

    Only four Brownlow winners have done it. Ian Stewart won his third medal the year he moved to Richmond from St Kilda in 1971. Greg Williams won the first of his two Brownlows in 1986 having moved to Sydney from Geelong. Brian Wilson won was victorious in 1982 with Melbourne having left St Kilda. Finally, Patrick Dangerfield’s first year with the Cats saw him win the 2016 Brownlow.

    The AFL Coaches Association Most Valuable Player Award has only been awarded since 2003. Two players have won it the year they moved to a new club – both with Geelong. Bailey Smith last year and Patrick Dangerfield in 2016.

    The AFL Players Association Most Valuable Player Award was first awarded in 1982. Just once has a new arrival won it and yes, once again, it is that man from Mogg’s Creek.

    Dangerfield’s 2016 debut with the Cats is one of only four seasons that has captured the Brownlow, Coaches Association award, and Players Association award. The other three being Lachie Neale in 2020 (a year after he transferred to the Lions), Martin in 2017 (which also saw him claim the Norm Smith medal), and Ablett in 2009.

    If we lower the bar just a notch we can look at players that achieved their career best season after swapping to a new club. I’m using average rating points across the season as the basis of this and excluded players who debuted prior to 2012 (2012 being the earliest rating point data I have, so the earliest I can be certain it actually was a personal best). I’ve also only considered averages from seasons where a player has played at least 10 games.

    Last year saw James Peatling, John Noble, Jaxon Prior, Matthew Kennedy, Francis Evans, and Bailey Smith all set new PBs for average player rating at a new club. Matthew Kennedy was the most experienced to do so, doing it in his 10th season playing.

    While he’s certainly not old, relatively few players lift the bar again as far into a career as Petracca. This is his 11th season playing (12th in the AFL system if including his first year missed due to an ACL injury). There have only been 8 instances (again in our sample size of careers starting from 2012 and onwards) where a player has set a new season average PB in their 11th season or later – Lachie Neale in 2024, the Bont in 2024 and 2025, Jack Crisp 2022, Aidan Corr 2023, Nick Vlastuin 2023, Patrick Crippps 2024, and Bailey Dale 2025. Christian’s level of professionalism puts him in good stead, but the odds are still against him. Given Melbourne hold the Suns first round pick this year, I’m hoping that whatever success he has isn’t accompanied by team success (at least not this year).

    Looking to the End of the Bench

    Jeremiah Brown / @JeremiahTBrown

    As a bloke who has spent most of his life being pretty unfit and frankly incapable of running out a full match of whatever sport I play, I was very interested in how clubs used the extra spot on the bench this last weekend. To work that out I looked at the players with time on ground below 61%, excluding those who were injured. There were a few different archetypes that teams went with in terms of how they used the final spot(s) on their bench, to varying levels of success. 

    The main grouping was midfielders who played a reduced game time, with Collingwood (Pendlebury), Sydney (Sheldrick), Gold Coast (Davies), Geelong (Clark), the Western Bulldogs (Davidson), St Kilda (Macrae), and GWS (Rowston) all using the spot through the back end of their mid/wing rotations. 

    Despite playing only 55% of game time Pendlebury was a major factor in the Pies win over St Kilda, particularly forward of the ball with 10 score involvements and 5 goal assists (no one else had more than 1 in the game). Most teams don’t have a players with the talent and football IQ of Pendlebury sitting there ready to play in a reduced minutes role, but one wonders if there are more players who could benefit from a less is more approach – either to manage injury risk and load across the season, or because they might be of greater benefit later in quarters as defensive structures start to break down. Will we see Dangerfield in this type of role, with a regular souvlaki on the bench? Much to consider.

    Out of the other approaches, Carlton (Reidy) and Brisbane (Zakostelsky) adopted the tall boy method, using the final spot on an extra ruck and keeping the time on ground for the main ruck down as well. 

    Sadly for the prospects of low gametime big plodders like myself, Carlton didn’t get much out of their second ruck, with Reidy the lowest ranked player in the low TOG% crew. He was ok at the ruck contests, winning 17 out of 32, but only 2 of those 17 went to his teammate’s advantage. Given that Hudson O’Keefe has replaced Reidy this week in Carlton’s squad, they may want more versatility from the second ruck that they are using this week. It will be interesting to see if Brisbane persists with the second ruck option, as Zakostelsky at least managed to hit the scoreboard with an early goal. However, with the Dogs running over the top of Brisbane, the Lions may be wishing they had someone who could have contributed more run to the match post-clearance. 

    The Swans (Papley), and Hawthorn (Maginness) also had a low % spot in their forward rotations. For the Hawks, Finn Maginness only played 56% TOG, which seems to be something of a continuation with how Hawthorn has used the sub in previous years; Maginness was the starting substitute 10 times, including 3 of the last 5 matches he played last season. The result was relatively ineffective – Maginness only managed to have 8 disposals, 6 pressure acts and a single tackle for the match. 

    Another notable usage of the low time on ground player was the way that Sydney brought in an underdone star in Papley, who only played 57% of game time. While he didn’t have a big game overall, he had 5 score involvements for the match and produced a much needed spark when injected into the game late in the first quarter. 

    As we move through the season we might see more of this approach blending with the way Pendlebury was used for Collingwood, and which we may see happening more throughout the season as the inevitable cycle of injuries and return from injuries starts to occur. I will be interested to see if there become players who persist as short (time on ground) kings, and whether some positions end up looking like they are not as viable (like the second ruck only type might be).

    Around the Grounds

  • Finals Week 1, 2025

    Finals Week 1, 2025

    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

    After what feels like near endless football, the men’s AFL finals are finally upon us. The game has successfully made it’s way to another finals series almost untouched.

    With the exception of the introduction of a video boundary review system. In response to making 48 errors over 7,500 boundary decisions (or an error rate of 0.64%), the AFL has decided to unilaterally introduce the video review of boundary decisions in finals.

    It’s unlikely to have a significant impact on how the finals will play out, and the review may not even be used in anger through the last month. However, there is something odd about introducing new rules for the finals without prior testing inside of the season to look for secondary impacts.

    Or: why now?

    This week (and for the rest of the finals) TWIF will look at each men’s final and preview what might turn each game. Our own James Ives has created “opposition analysis” style dashboards that provide a brief overview of how each side has played through the year and how they can be beaten.

    This Week In Football we have:

    Adelaide v Collingwood Preview

    Words – Joe Cordy . Image – James Ives.

    Since the beginning of the 16-team era in 1995, there have been 15 instances of teams playing each other in the last two weeks of the Home & Away Season and then immediately again in the first week of finals. Adelaide and Collingwood’s Qualifying Final will be the first of the 2020s however, and the first time either club finds itself in such a situation since 1995. 

    While a trip away to the minor premiers is a daunting task for anyone, Collingwood will be coming into it with the knowledge that they’ve already knocked off Adelaide once, and came excruciatingly close to completing the double in a game they won the Inside-50 count by 34. If they can recreate a similar volume of entries, it becomes a straightforward task of figuring out how to take advantage of them. 

    The most obvious answer is to incorporate the 211cm Mason Cox, who’s been brought into the side following the injury to Dan McStay, but it seems unlikely the 34 year old American is still up to the level. He’s only recorded 3 or more marks twice in the 2025 season, and only neither of his two in Collingwood’s round 10 victory against Adelaide came inside-50. A much more likely route to victory for Craig Macrae’s side is spreading the space at Adelaide Oval as much as possible to create uncontested marks inside 50, getting the ball into the hands of Elliott and Membrey who are both enjoying massively accurate seasons in front of goal. 

    For their opponents a much more difficult problem stands between them and a home preliminary final: how to execute their slingshot footy without Izak Rankine. A large part of what makes Adelaide so effective in games they lose the territory battle (currently sitting on a 6-3 record in 2025 when recording less inside-50s than their opponent) is their propensity to flood their D50, and then attack on the rebound with isolated tall forwards, elite kicks and sheer pace. 

    They’ll still have their pair of All Australians in Jordan Dawson and Riley Thilthorpe available in the early and finishing parts of these chains of possession, but Rankine created a connective tissue between midfield and forward areas that’s not easily replicated by others. In their first game following his suspension for using a homophobic slur, they were nearly caught out by perennial cellar dwellers North Melbourne. Even with two more weeks to recuperate and plan around Rankine’s absence, it may prove even more impactful against elite opposition.

    Neither of the two sides are coming into the clash near full health or their best form. While the deciding factor could come from one or two moments of individual brilliance from the remaining stars on either side, it seems more likely it will be found in which of the two coaching groups better adapts their gameplan to compensate for the absence of key figures. 

    Geelong v Brisbane Preview

    Words – Sean Lawson . Image – James Ives

    Brisbane have already beaten Geelong twice this year, including a comprehensive defeat at Kardinia Park in June. In both games, Brisbane have been able to get their possession and marking game going, moreso than the Cats. These two teams take the highest number of marks per game in 2025, with the Cats also the best marking side inside 50.

    The difference at Kardinia was a combination of Geelong’s well below par goalkicking and Brisbane’s ability to transition on the Cats. A full third of the Lions defensive half chains went inside 50 – roughly average for the season as a whole for them, so holding up against strong opponents on their idiosyncratic home deck is a big positive.

    A fun element to watch will be the midfield matchups byplay. Last time around, Lachie Neale was relatively well curbed and the Lions found success through others, especially as they looked to make Bailey Smith accountable with a Hugh McLuggage matchup, while the Cats tried to work their defensive midfielder Mark O’Connor onto him instead.The confusion this created led to a number of solid clearance opportunities for Brisbane, and surely Geelong will have something different up their sleeve this time around.

    GWS v Hawthorn Preview

    Words – Cody Atkinson . Image – James Ives

    Hawthorn and GWS might not be footballing twins, but there’s parts of each side’s game that might cause you to do a double take every now and again.

    There’s some elements that look similar. Both like to throw at least an extra behind the ball. Both sides look their best when they transition up the ground with some pace.

    Neither side focuses on winning raw numbers of clearances, instead focusing on the stoppage rebound. When both sides win the ball from stoppage, they tend to put more points on the scoreboard than most sides.

    Both sides tend to deploy a very tall set up in the forward line, boasting relatively mobile key position players that can cover pressure gaps.

    But there are some differences at play.

    Hawthorn places more pressure on the ball when they don’t have it, while GWS tends to protect valuable space and folds back a bit more readily. GWS tackles slightly more than Hawthorn, while the Hawks hold space and block escape routes for the opposition.

    The Hawks also tend to prioritise raw territory a little more than the Giants, with the Sam Taylor led backline allowing the Giants to soak up repeated entries at will.

    Both teams can occasionally look mercurial to the outside, or flaky to critics. They are both prone to putting runs of goals on the scoreboard, or allowing them going the other way. Part of this is down to both sides’ brands of footy.

    The last two times these sides played saw these intense swings. In round 4 this year GWS got out to a 35 point lead in the first quarter before Hawthorn wiped out the advantage by halftime. The Hawks held on narrowly there, but it was a close encounter.

    In round 22 last year Hawthorn took a 28 point lead into the last quarter before getting run down by an increasingly urgent Giants side.

    There might be some fireworks in this match.

    Fremantle v GC preview

    Words – Jack Turner. Image – James Ives.

    Fremantle and Gold Coast enter the finals as the two least experienced teams and the two regarded as least likely to win the flag. Each boast a talismanic veteran and former captain who is set to retire upon their next loss. Fremantle is looking for the fairytale finish for Nat Fyfe and the Suns for David Swallow. Both men needing to at least make a preliminary final to reach 250 games before retiring.

    Fremantle have been somewhat of an enigma this year, with inspiring wins against Collingwood, the Suns, and Adelaide, countered by confusing and disheartening losses thumpings at the hands of Geelong, St Kildaand Brisbane, and an equally perplexing close away loss against Melbourne. 

    The Dockers’ best football is fast and highly skilled, utilising the outside run of Shai Bolton and Murphy Reid to create scores, the utility of Luke Jackson in their divisive two rucks setup, and their well drilled midfield group to make them the second strongest centre clearance team in the finals this year – behind only their opposition in the Suns. 

    Early in the season, the Suns looked as if they were destined to be a team that beat up on lowly opponents but couldn’t stand the heat when it came to the big boys – with the exception of a controversial win against Adelaide in Round 4 – but this proved not to be the case. They won games post bye – a time they have been historically poor – against Collingwood and Brisbane to sure up their spot in the finals, and despite a loss against an inspired Port Adelaide side in Hinkley and Boak’s farewell match Gold Coast dished out the biggest win in their club history to wrap the season, confirming their first ever finals berth.

    The last time these two teams met, Fremantle proved too strong, winning out by just 11 points in a seesawing contest in the wet, where the Suns surged back to within a goal with just minutes to go. If you’re a believer in xScore – or even someone who likes using it as a tool – then it makes this matchup even more interesting to know that Gold Coast won on xScore by four points the last time they met, with a 15 point turnaround from the actual scoreboard. 

    Keep an eye out not only for the obvious matchups between these two midfields, as names like Serong, Anderson, Brayshaw and Rowell go head to head, but also on Alex Pearce lining up on Ben King, and Sam Collins trying to outmuscle the goliath that is Patrick Voss. That may well be where this game is won and lost. Harris Andrews recently took Voss out of the game and disrupted Fremantle’s forays forward, and we saw Sam Taylor force Ben King high up the ground, ruining Gold Coast’s structure inside 50.

    Will either team go all the way? Can either retiring veteran prove to be the spark or motivation their teammates need to find that extra level? Only one team can keep the fairytale alive, and we will know which it is by 9pm AWST on Saturday night.

    The AFLW’s Scoring Boom

    Joe Cordy

    When the final siren went on Gold Coast vs Sydney, the Swans’ 103 points was the third highest score in the competition’s history, and only the fourth to reach triple digits.

    Eight days and fourteen games later, it’s not even on the podium for the 2025 season. 

    It was knocked out of the bronze spot for all-time scores on the same day by Brisbane’s 35-105 victory over Walyalup, before Yartapulti’s 108-40 game against Gold Coast and the Kangaroos’ 14-114 demolition of Walyalup each set a new gold standard less than 24 hours apart. 

    The Kangaroos’ win was so comprehensive they set three other scoring records: the longest single game goal-streak in AFLW history (15), the highest margin in league history, and the first game to ever record a 100-point margin.

    These four games are part of a wider trend of increased scoring across the AFLW. The league has gone through several massively impactful transformations in its first nine seasons, both planned and unplanned, but despite some volatile year to year variance scoring per game has generally trended upwards.

    While the lack of location data prior to the 2025 season precludes anyone making an xScore model for the AFLW, a rough approximation of it from points per shot shows that accuracy has remained reasonably stable across the league’s lifetime, typically hovering just under three points per shot.

    The bigger indicator in the rise of scoring has come from volume, rather than quality or execution, of looks at the goal.

    The 2025 average of 14.5 per game is over a whole shot higher than the previous high watermark set in 2023, and thus far six of the eight highest volume shooting teams in league history have all come about this season.

    While this is obviously going to regress back towards the mean as the sample size grows and the good teams play more against each other than bottom of the ladder opposition, it does match the eye test of the dangerous teams looking more co-ordinated than ever. 

    Gemma Bastiani on Deep Dive broke down how Sydney work as one to create space, thinking two and three disposals ahead in the chain to support each other and pull apart opposition defences. It’s a level of tactical sophistication and cohesion that’s only been able to be achieved with significantly longer pre-seasons and contact hours with the club, which itself is downwind of salaries making footy viable as a full-time career. 

    In 2023 the AFLPA signed the first ever joint Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the players of the men’s and women’s competitions. The joint bargaining power led to a breadth of changes for the AFLW, but the most important was the staggering increase in guaranteed payments for each player. 

    The AFLW doesn’t have a salary cap, instead opting for a tiered structure where clubs can offer two Tier 1 contracts, six Tier 2 and Tier 3 contracts, and sixteen Tier 4 contracts. Until 2022, the Tier 4 contracts that made up the bulk of any club’s list were below the tax-free threshold in Australia. Immediately following the joint CBA, Tier 4 contracts became worth more than Tier 1 contracts the year before by over $14,000.

    While this was still only marginally above minimum wage for full-time work in 2023, 2025 has seen a significant jump within the five-year lifespan of the CBA. Tier 4 contracts are now competitive with starting salaries in most industries, and Tier 1 contracts for each club’s best and brightest have now reached six figures for the first time. 

    Unsurprisingly, giving all players enough financial security to focus on footy as a full-time profession has given them a strong base to build off for the season, and their newfound fitness and preparation time as groups has created the best footy the competition’s ever seen.

    The Race to 100 AFLW Goals

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

    We’re in the tenth season of the AFLW and there’s a solid chance this is the season we see someone break the 100 career goals barrier.

    The increase in scoring, as Joe talks about above, has lead to individual players kicking more goals.

    There are four players who, if they maintain their current 2025 goals average for the rest of the season would hit 100 goals before finals.

    We should place an asterisk on Jasmine Garner though, as she’s set to miss two to three weeks through injury so would need to pick up a couple of goals when she returns.

    How did we get here?

    There have been a total of 8 players who have held the careers goals record at some point, either jointly or by themselves. From Lauren Arnell sharing it for three minutes in game 1 of season 1, to Darcy Vescio holding it a combined three and a half years.

    It is a seriously accomplished list. Darcy Vescio, Erin Phillips, Tayla Harris, and Jasmine Garner are among the most recognizable players in the competition’s history. 

    Kate Hore is a club captain, premiership player, and three-time All Australian. Danielle Ponter was a key part of Adelaide’s 2019 and 2022 premierships, while Jess Wuetschner is one of the most dangerous small forwards the league has seen. 

    Lauren Arnell isn’t notable as a goalkicker but is a premiership player, three-time all Australian, and the first AFLW player to go from playing in the league to coaching in it.

    Here’s the progression of those eight players goalkicking tallies – goal by goal, minute by minute.

    There’s also some worth in seeing who had the goalkicking title and for how long.

    If there was a favourite right now for who’s going to get to 100 goals first, Kate Hore seems like an easy choice. Whoever it is it will be a moment for the whole competition to celebrate.

  • Pre-finals Bye and AFLW Round 3 2025

    Pre-finals Bye and AFLW Round 3 2025

    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

    Finally, a break.

    For the last 24 weeks there has been end to end men’s football. This is the last pause in that competition before the race for finals heats up.

    This is the last moment of calm before the storm, before the stakes get raised.

    Meanwhile, the AFLW season hits starts to hit full stride with clear air for the league to bathe in. The footy is good – probably better than it ever has been before. If you’ve got a hankering for footy, get to a game this weekend (or flick on the TV).

    This week in football we have:

    The TWIF MVP

    Adrian Polykandrites | fromthetopdeck.com | @fromthe_topdeck 

    The home-and-away season is done and dusted, which means it’s both finals time, and awards season. 

    On Thursday night, Nick Daicos was named MVP by his peers, while Noah Anderson and Bailey Smith were joint winners of the coaches award. In a few weeks the league will crown another Brownlow medallist (or multiple). There’s also a bunch of awards handed out by some of the major media companies that cover the game.

    And while they all carry a certain level of prestige, they’re also a bit eye of the beholder in terms of how much they mean.

    While it’s ingrained in footy to use weekly votes to decide most of those awards, there’s the inherent problem that not all best-on-ground performances are created equal, but the votes don’t know that and can’t distinguish.

    When done well, the best awards serve as something of a time capsule. They (should) tell us who mattered most in any given season.

    The This Week In Football gang has had a crack at determining who that should be for 2025. 

    Following NBA MVP voting rules, each voter named their five best players for the season. The top player received 10 points, seven points for second, five for third, three for fourth and one for fifth.

    Without further ado …

    13th – 1 vote: Matt Rowell, Sam Taylor and Max Gawn

    Three very different players each received one fifth-placed vote. 

    Emlyn Breese said of Gawn: “There are few players I’ve ever seen who have the capacity to shape a game and do so regularly as Gawn still does.”

    While James Ives thought the GWS key back was worthy: “By far the best interceptor in the competition. And while GWS get a high volume of numbers back to support, I’m not sure they can get away with their style of play without Taylor.”

    12th – 2 votes: Caleb Serong

    “It’s almost a 15-way toss up at this point. You can make a good argument for Pickett, Taylor, Green and less convincing but still solid for another dozen. Serong has been impressive, shook tags and stood up when it’s mattered most for a success-struck side.” – Cody Atkinson

    11th – 3 votes: Luke Jackson

    Ryan Buckland had the Fremantle big man fourth on his ballot: “Can’t help but think without his versatility and skill the Dockers would not be in the position they are in. Underrated aspect to his game: he allows Fremantle to play Sean Darcy as a pure ruck which allows ~him~ to be the best he can be.”

    10th – 5 votes: Kysaiah Pickett

    Joe Cordy gave the Demon his third-place vote for a “Career season as the best mid-forward in the game, keeping his level while the team falls apart around him.”

    Ninth – 6 votes: Bailey Smith

    The new Cat and now coaches award winner received fourth-place votes from two contributors.

    The Back Pocket’s Jack Turner was one of them: “Has genuinely transformed Geelong’s midfield and run.”

    Seventh – 7 votes: Sam Darcy and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera

    Two players from the 2021 draft who had breakout seasons, with Wanganeen-Milera earning his first All Australian blazer on Thursday night.

    The Saint featured on three ballots with Emlyn Breese voting him third – “I think he’s the model of what you want in a footballer right now.” – and two other voters placing him fifth. 

    James had Darcy second on his ballot: “His contested marking is unparalleled. You only have to look at Naughton’s numbers with and without Darcy to see his impact. Nullifying Darcy goes a long way to nullifying the Dogs.”

    Sixth – 15 votes: Harris Andrews

    James thought the Brisbane key defender worthy of maximum votes: “He’s the best two-way key defender in the competition and his ball use is severely underrated and critical to what Brisbane do.”

    Fifth – 20 votes: Nick Daicos

    I had Daicos fourth on my ballot – he’s the beating heart of a top-four side – while two others had him third. Ryan, however, had him as the season’s second most valuable player: “ Even in probably his most disappointing year to date … Daicos still managed to be the electrical rhythm that reanimated an otherwise corpse-like Collingwood side.”

    Fourth – 29 votes: Noah Anderson

    I was one of three voters to have the Suns’ skipper third on my ballot. He’s one of the most complete players in footy. 

    “It still feels like he doesn’t get talked about enough for how good he is,” said Emlyn, who had Anderson second. 

    Third – 30 votes: Jeremy Cameron

    I had the Geelong superstar second. The Cats are stacked, but Cameron raises their ceiling more than any other player on their list. He’s the biggest reason they’re the team to beat over the next month.

    Cody had Cameron first – “The most important player in probably the most complete team. Was asked to do far more than his position suggests. Didn’t miss a game which also helps.” – as did Joe.

    Second – 49 votes: Jordan Dawson

    I was one of two voters to have Dawson at the top of my ballot. The Adelaide skipper made a habit of stepping up in big moments in leading the Crows to the minor premiership. There might be only one onballer more well-rounded. 

    Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo had Dawson second, but had similar praise: “He’s the captain (and best player) for the side that just completed the largest single-season rise up the ladder in AFL history. Consistently produces his best football in the most important moments.”

    First – 58 votes: Marcus Bontempelli

    The Dogs’ skipper will be watching the finals, but that didn’t stop four voters putting him at the top of their ballot. I had Bontempelli fifth, while only one voter left him off entirely.

    Voters were similarly aligned as to why the seven-time All Australian should get top votes, but Ryan perhaps summed it up best: “This guy is still so obviously the only answer to the question of, ‘If you could pick any player in the league for your team, who would you pick?’ There’s a gulf between him and the rest.”

    Who was the biggest All Australian snub?

    Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | TheBackPocketAU

    While we are only at the squad stage at the moment, there are already some players who fans are shocked to see have been left out. But who were the biggest snubs from this squad of 44 – 22 of whom are set to receive new or updated blazers tonight.

    Of the 44 player squad, 28 have never made an All Australian team, meaning at least 10 players will receive an All Australian blazer for the first time. Some of the more surprising players to miss out are also yet to receive an All Australian selection.

    While there are cases to be made for nearly a dozen players to be very unlucky, we’ve narrowed it down to three big misses. For any stats referenced below, they will include only players who have played 16 or more games, as this seems to be the unofficial cutoff point for All Australian selection guidelines.

    Callum Wilkie – St Kilda

    Callum Wilkie received his first and only All Australian blazer in 2023, and was arguably unlucky to miss out on both squad and team last year. In both 2023 and 2024, Wilkie was supported down back by Josh Battle, who left as a free agent to play at Hawthorn this season, and was instead supported by the much less seasoned – though still serviceable – Anthony Caminiti.

    Amongst eligible key defenders, Callum Wilkie has the third highest Player Rating, the second most Coaches Votes, and of players averaging 2+ Contested Defensive 1v1s he has the 7th best record. He is behind only Harris Andrews for kicking retention rating amongst key defenders, and inside the top 10 for threat rating amongst the same group. He has also taken more marks than any player in the competition in 2025.

    There are only two players averaging 15 disposals, have a less than 25% CDOOO loss rate (2+ avg) and have received 30+ coaches votes in 2025. One is Callum Wilkie. The other is his former teammate and 2025 AA squad member Josh Battle.

    Oliver Dempsey – Geelong

    This one is a little more complicated than the other two I’m going to write about here, because there is a fair argument to be made that Dempsey clearly has not been in the best 40 players in the AFL this season. But I think it’s also fair to say that players like Lachie Ash, Sam Collins and Josh Worrell wouldn’t fit that criteria either, and have been selected based on their position.

    And this is where we face the All Australian team’s biggest issue in recent years head on; the All Australian team simply refuses to pick genuine wings in the team, and this year that seems to be true for the squad. Not a single midfielder in the team has a Centre Bounce Attendance percentage of less than 50% – with the exception of Wanganeen-Milera, who was used as a half-back for much of the year. The main candidates are outside midfielders such as Bailey Smith, Finn Callaghan or Nick Daicos, but none of these players are wings; they are centre bounce specialists. Rovers and receivers.

    Of players listed as a midfielder who have attended less than 25% off their team’s CBA’s, Ollie Dempsey has the second highest Player Rating, the most goals, the third highest contested possessions, the most score involvements, the third highest goal assists and has the fourth highest threat rating per kick.

    Football is a much more complicated game than it once was, but with the introduction of the 6-6-6 rule, and available starting position and matchup data; it should be easy enough for selectors to add players to the squad from a list of genuine wingers.

    Aaron Naughton – Western Bulldogs

    I have saved perhaps the most egregious snub – and maybe the one I am most baffled by – until last. Many are quick to point out that Aaron Naughton started the season off slowly from a goals perspective, but he was still averaging 6.5 score involvements across his first ten games – a figure that would see him in the top 10 key forwards had it continued for the whole season.

    Another critique is that his form improved once Sam Darcy came back from injury, but I think it’s fair to say that most key forwards clearly struggle without a genuine foil, including the others who have been nominated this year.

    Over the season, Aaron Naughton amassed an impressive 60 goals – especially impressive as he had Sam Darcy in there with him kick 48 in the same year – finishing fourth in the Coleman medal, just two goals behind third. He finished behind only Jeremy Cameron and Mitch Georgiades for marks inside 50 and behind only Jeremy Cameron for score involvements by a key forward – finishing 8th overall in this stat.

    Furthermore, of the players who kicked more than 50 goals this season, he led the way for the most score involvements that weren’t from a shot on goal that he took, bringing his teammates into the game just as often as scoring himself.

    The full list of players with 50 goals and 150 score involvements in 2025 is as follows: Jeremy Cameron, Aaron Naughton, Riley Thilthorpe, Jack Gunston.

    The AFLW meta shaping up

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

    Note: this article is published during AFLW indigenous round. I have used the names six teams have adopted for the duration of the round. You can read more about indigenous round and those teams here: https://www.afl.com.au/aflw/indigenous/clubs

    As a Narrm (Melbourne) supporter it should surprise no-one that I have been absolutely hanging out for the Women’s season. It’s still obviously really early, so the focus will mostly be on the teams that appear to be separating from the pack two rounds in.

    As per last week, I’m still building a lot of this data gathering infrastructure as I go, so I’ll have more time to dive into what it tells us as that settles in later in the season.

    First I wanted to build upon my very brief look at scoring shots in AFLW last week.

    Sydney and Melbourne have very similar profiles for where their scores are being generated and conceded – big positive turnover differentials, and a healthy stoppage differential.

    Essendon share a similar, but lesser, turnover differential but they’ve actually got a negative differential on stoppage scoring shots.

    Where it gets really interesting though is the Kangaroos. Of their 33 scores they’ve generated 28 of them from turnover, 2 from centre bounces, and just 3 from other stoppages. More broadly, they’re actually in the negative for clearance differential (-0.5 per game). This is a stark difference to the other undefeated sides who make up the 4 best clearance differentials range from +10 (Hawthorn) to +4.5 (Sydney).

    Where the Roos are leading the competition is generating turnovers (1st at +9/game) and uncontested possessions.

    The Kangaroos have had 55.5 more uncontested possessions per game than their opponents, with Sydney and Narrm inches behind at +55. The next best is Brisbane a massive step back with 19.5. To me there’s a clear meta forming around uncontested possession, and I think success will be driven by harnessing or countering it.

    For Narrm this is something of a return to past success. In their flag-winning season 7 campaign they recorded twice the uncontested possession differential of the next best team.

    Even among the three leaders there are significant differences though. Sydney and North are finding a lot more uncontested marks, each about 20% above the league average. They’re also two of the top three teams for retaining uncontested possession from a kick (the third being Kuwarna (Adelaide)). Narrm by comparison find themselves in the bottom 6 for kick retention.

    Accordingly, Narrm are below league average in uncontested marks, despite leading the league in possession differential. Where Narrm do stand out is their handball use and pressure. 46% of the Demon’s disposals are by hand, compared to a league average of 39%. Sydney are at league average while the Roos are slightly below.  Their handball receives are 15% above the next best (Sydney) and 50% above the league average.

    Narrm are also leading the league for opposition disposals per tackle. With the stricter interpretation on holding the ball, a combination of quick hands to release and tackling pressure on the opposition bodes well for them.

    One other thing I found in my travels leads me to giving a shout out to Georgie Cleaver. Waalitj Marawar (West Coast) have some real problems structurally, conceding a mark inside 50 from 36% of their opponent’s entries. But, they’ve had 17 defensive one-on-ones and are yet to lose one. This is led by Cleaver who is 0 from 7. If they can sort out some of the structures they’ve potentially got an elite pillar to build around and she’s only 20.

    Estimating score assists

    Andrew Whelan / WheeloRatings.com

    Following on from last week’s article on score involvements and score launches, this article will explore score assists.

    While there’s no publicly available data on score assists, I wanted to investigate if they could be estimated using available data on goal assists. As score assists include goal assists, we only need to estimate behind assists.

    Firstly, here is the definition from the Champion Data glossary:

    • Score assist: Creating a score by getting the ball to a teammate either via a disposal, knock-on, ground kick or hitout, or by winning a free kick before the advantage is paid to the goal scorer.

    The definition makes no mention of disposal effectiveness or the intent of the player getting the ball to their teammate. Champion Data provides an example on their FAQs page which tells us that if the player’s intent was a shot at goal but the kick fell short and went to a teammate who scored, this would be treated as an ineffective kick and would not be counted as a score assist.

    As such, the definition only tells us that a score assist is limited to disposals, knock-ons, hitouts, and free kicks, but doesn’t provide enough detail about the specific circumstances that result in an assist being credited.

    What does the data on goal assists tell us?

    Using data on goal assists since the start of 2021, we can determine how often a goal assist is credited based on how the goalscorer gained possession and the effectiveness of the prior disposal.

    If we were to credit an assist for all goals above the line and none below, we would be correct for ~94% of goals. This gives us a reasonably reliable methodology for estimating behind assists, which we can combine with actual goal assists to estimate total score assists.

    Score assist analysis

    Hugh McCluggage leads the competition with 54 score assists this season, with a clear lead over Brad Close, Ed Richards and Marcus Bontempelli. Richards leads the goal assists with his teammates kicking 35 goals and only eight behinds from his assists. In contrast, McCluggage’s teammates have kicked 22 goals and 32 behinds from his assists, with all three of his score assists on Sunday being behinds.

    McCluggage is approaching Gryan Miers’ 61 score assists in 2023 with at least two finals to come. This was mentioned on the ESPN Footy Podcast a few weeks ago, and Champion Data’s count of score assists for McCluggage this season and Miers in 2023 were consistent with these estimated counts.

    Here are all players with 30+ score assists in a season since 2021.

    Jeremy Cameron and Brad Close have combined for the most scores (52) over the last five seasons, with Close assisting Cameron for 40 scores and Cameron reciprocating 13 times. Aaron Naughton (39) and Marcus Bontempelli (12) have combined for 51 scores.

    Aaron Naughton (12) and Ed Richards (2) have combined for the most scores this season, closely followed by Jeremy Cameron (12) and Brad Close (1), and Jeremy Cameron (11) and Shaun Mannagh (2).

    More on the best and worst sport cities

    This week for the ABC Cody and I ran a piece looking over the terrible sporting history of the booming city of Gold Coast. As a spoiler, the Suns did indeed break their finals drought with a win over Essendon, which means they slightly improved the city’s nation-worst record of elite men’s football teams making finals in just 13% of the seasons they compete in (it’s now 15%).

    Using all the data compiled for that article – namely finals rates reached by teams based on each city since 1987 – here’s a look comparing cities more broadly.

    First up the Central Coast turns out to be the most successful sporting city in pure percentage terms. That’s thanks to the very successful Mariners winning three championships and making finals most of the time,

    The Mariners are just one regional success story in Australia, with most regional cities other than Gold Coast have at least one club making fans happy. These include the Cats in Geelong, the Sunshine Coast Lightning, the JackJumpers in Hobart, the Illawarra Hawks in Wollongong, and WNBL teams the Fire and Spirit in Townsville and Bendigo respectively.

    Among the “big 5” cities, it’s Adelaide just barely ahead of Brisbane as the top sporting city.

    Here’s a breakdown of the win rates for teams in each city with at least ten seasons under their belt, showing how Adelaide’s all-round selection of decent teams makes them a solid showing in nearly any sport.

    Some of the most successful teams in the country of course lead their cities’ records, including the Sydney FC women’s team, the Melbourne Storm, and of course the frankly astonishing success (missing finals once in 4 decades) of the Wildcats.

    When it comes to the title of best major sporting city, though, individual dominant teams like the Wildcats just don’t quite compensate for struggles in other sports out west, like soccer, rugby, and Dockering.

    Adelaide performs well comparatively in women’s sport, too, which leads us to another breakdown of these records:

    Looking at cities by gender, we can see that mostly due to the Titans women, Gold Coast is faring notably better in women’s sport than in men’s. It may be too soon to say for sure, but there’s incipient signs that the Gold Coast sporting curse may be a single gender affair.

    The city of Geelong have had the best record of success in men’s sport, much more because of the regular Cats of the AFL than the Supercats of the NBL.

    Among the big 5 cities, Perth is lagging in women’s sport performance, perhaps a result of the tyranny of distance impacting harder in the generally less well funded and resourced world of women’s sport.

    Perhaps surprisingly, Canberra is the city with the largest negative gap between women’s and men’s clubs performance, with Canberra indeed having the second lowest women’s sport success rate after Newcastle.

    On the surface this is surprising, given that Canberra is a progressive city with a strong record of supporting women’s sport. Indeed, Canberra is the only multi-team city which has hosted more seasons of elite women’s sport than men’s.

    Many of those numerous women’s seasons are of course the reason for the gap, however. Teams like the Capitals (9 titles) and Canberra United (2 titles) have great legacies of success as standalone teams in cities without men’s counterparts in their sport. However, both have also spent extended periods missing finals in between golden periods.

    Canberra also, for several decades, hosted a mostly forgotten second WNBL team, the Australian Institute of Sport, which was a development side made up of youngsters and basically only made finals when Lauren Jackson was leading them to a title.

    Around the Grounds

    • Marnie Vinall reports for ABC on what Mitch Brown’s announcement means to queer fans.
    • It is very funny that the AFL Coaches Association awarded a “best young player” award to a 28-year old.
    • On Sarah Burt and Georgie Parker’s podcast AFLW Weekly, Georgie worries for the way AFLW salaries, newly outpacing Super Netball pay, are beginning to lure star players across and hurt a well established traditional sport.

  • Round 23, 2025

    Round 23, 2025

    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

    There’s hype, then there’s this.

    Friend of TWIF Len Phillips found one of the weirder articles written on a AFL club website in recent years. Here’s a sample of it:

    TWIF can’t link you to the whole article because it has been nuked from the Lions website this morning. It is a wild ride of alleged bias and player acclamation. Luckily, it has been archived here.

    The article is somewhat emblematic of the race for AFL awards at the end of the year. In order to win many of the major panel-decided awards, clubs develop packs of support for nominated players. It’s arms length, but to best support the interests of fans and their players, clubs have to do a job in selling the strengths of each player.

    But that article is beyond that – a few steps past that line.

    Peter Blucher wrote that article, and one with a very similar tone about the snubbing of Harris Andrews from the All Australian team.

    That name may sound familiar to diehard, slightly older footy fans. The AFL Queensland Hall of Famer has had a long involvement in the game, from journalist to club media manager and finally player agent.

    It’s that last stop that was the one that drew the most public attention. In 2013 Blucher was suspended for a year for his involvement in the Kurt Tippett scandal, which caused Tippett to be suspended for half a season as well.

    That case was the linchpin on a crackdown on the behaviour of agents as well, although the actual face used for the crackdown was that of Ricky Nixon.

    It also wasn’t the last time his behaviour was questioned. In 2015 GWS asked for an investigation into his conduct relating to a hip operation on Adam Treloar around the time he was traded to Collingwood.

    A few years on, The Age’s Daniel Cherny broke the story around the alleged reasons around Joel Wilkinson’s failed return to the AFL. Blucher also features prominently in that one.

    This is all somewhat a distraction from the real issue – namely whether Ashcroft is in the mix for the Rising Star. Time will tell if that blank website can sway the voting panel.

    This week in football we have:

    How each AFLW side has been constructed

    Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

    With Season 10 of the AFLW launching this week I wanted to have a look at how the 18 squads for 2025 have come together.

    There are 22 players still with their original Season 1 clubs, and each of the founding clubs has at least one original player – Adelaide having the most with 5.

    Carlton have made the most new additions for Season 10 with 10 new players – only one of whom comes from a previous club (Tara Bohana having played 31 games for Gold Coast).

    Brisbane have made the fewest changes with just three additions to their list – Neasa Dooley, Lilly Baker, and Claudia Wright all new to the AFLW.

    Melbourne have the most homegrown talent with 27, while Richmond and Essendon have the most players with prior club experience at 17.

    Essendon and Carlton both enter the season with 10 players yet to play a game for the club (Sophie McKay, Poppie Scholz, and Tara Bohana all played in the opening match of the season, so Carlton are already down to 7 uncapped players).

    AFLW State(s) of Origin

    Sean Lawson

    This is not an article about state of origin football, but rather a bit of a chart dump about where the current players in the two AFL leagues come from.

    So to start with, here’s how that looks. Thanks to Emlyn for supplying AFLW data to which I applied states of origin, while the AFLM data is slightly edited state of origin data from Fanfooty. 

    The most notable difference between the two leagues is that Queensland is, pretty simply, not a development state in the women’s game. There’s almost as many Queenslanders as Western Australians in the AFLW, buut there’s nerly 4 times as many Western Australians in the men’s league. 

    Queensland is not a part of the “Allies” at the girls’ under 18s championships but competes solo, finishing second in the standings this year.

    NSW and the ACT are also relatively better represented in the women’s game, which is in line with higher participation rates in adult women’s footy in the northern states.

    Western Australia’s relative lag is interesting here, and this may paint a picture of a relatively struggling women’s game out west. I noted with interest an interview with Canberran Swans player Lexi Hamilton, who described their recent star Western Australian recruit Zippy Fish as “raw” in coming from Perth instead of the development pathways in Victoria.

    The stronger women’s presence in NSW is especially the visible with regards to players from the north of the Barassi Line. A majority of male NSW AFL players (27 of 44) are from the south and west of the state, in line with the traditional strength of the Riverina and Murray regions and centres like Albury and Wagga. 

    By contrast, a large majority of NSW women in the AFLW (30 of 38) are from Sydney, or otherwise coastal or northern NSW. Riverina women’s football has been less developed until recently compared to, say, AFL Canberra, and most current AFLW players from southern NSW were recruited through intermediary periods playing in Canberra or Sydney.

    Unsurprisingly, the big states who play lots of football produce the most players, and when we convert over to per capita terms, the usual suspects predominate.

    Northern and southern NSW are shown separately here to give an indication of that traditional productivity below the Barassi line, where the Murray region is every bit as productive in men’s footy as Victoria itself.

    Also notable here is Ireland, not a state of Australia, because the roughly 7 million people in Ireland currently have produced the same number of current AFLW players (38) as the similarly sized New South Wales.

    With such a lopsided talent balance across the country, one of the big points of difference for clubs is how many locally recruited players they have. 

    Overall, AFLW squads are generally from closer to home, which is a product of the state-based drafting across the history of the league until last season, where clubs often could not recruit interstate players at all. The lower payscale and short contract periods also made making long distance moves less feasible until very recently when pay (now 60k to 100k in four tiers) started to get into “living wage” territory.

    Only three clubs – Hawthorn, Essendon and Geelong, have a more local squad in the men’s competition than the women’s and the Hawks stand out for having the highest percentage of Victorian players in both the AFLW and the M.

    In line with Queensland’s much stronger women’s footy presence, the situation for Brisbane is completely inverted between the two teams, with one of the highest local content factors on its women’s team and one of the lowest in the men’s.

    In the AFLM, every Victorian club has more locally recruited players than every non-Victorian club, and the four clubs in NSW and Queensland all found over 70% of their playing lists in other states.

    On the AFLW side, North have the most international players, but with a strong Irish contingent taking professional opportunities on our shores, only four clubs lack any overseas players at all.

    Essendon has the most Tasmanians right now, with the likes of Ellyse Gamble and Daria Bannister probably on the phonecall list for the Devils in a couple of years.

    Away from their home states, Port Adelaide is a hotspot for Western Australians like Gemma Houghton and Abbey Dowrick, St Kilda has a contingent of Queenslanders including Jesse Wardlaw, and Richmond has a number of NSW/ACT players

    In the AFLM, both Carlton and Collingwood have lots of South Australians and the Dees, Dogs and Kangaroos all have 8 Western Australians. The Crows, partly with their Broken Hill connection, have the most NSW players away from Sydney.

    Finally, on the types of players recruited from different states, it turns out clubs are more interested in scrounging up talls from non-traditional markets such as Queensland, with over a fifth of all Queensland players being of the two metre variety, compared to 11% in the league as a whole.

    Men over 200cm tall are exceptionally rare and sought after by all sports. The AFL has pursued entire pathways in US college sport just to source more meat for the ruck grinder. 

    Oddly enough, South Australia has 17 men over 2m tall playing in the AFL compared to the larger Western Australia having just 11. TWIF’s own Joe Cordy has proffered the theory that the constantly successful Perth Wildcats are monopolising Western Australia’s limited supply of tall buggers, leaving the AFL coming up a bit short, and I am not going to argue with this assessment.

    King’s working forward in different ways

    Cody Atkinson

    There’s been a bit of a debate occurring through different parts of the footy community, particularly the one existing online and in talkback spaces. It centres around Ben King and what makes a forward valuable.

    Firstly, a tweet in minimal context (and a shout out to ESPN and what they do in the footy space – this isn’t intended as criticism or shade, just an example).

    This is indicative of the thinking – if a forward like King is just getting shots on goal and providing nothing else by foot, is he doing enough to be considered valuable. Are Gold Coast getting enough off a player as dynamic as King if all he is doing is getting shots on goal?

    This hits at an issue that Sean Lawson and I have explored in part before, but in relatively disparate ways – the lack of homogeneity of jobs across the ground, and the hidden parts that make players valuable.

    In short, not all tall forwards in a team are asked to play the same role, and not all tall forwards across the league are tasked to do the same thing. 

    In fact, it’s a question that we’ve asked AFL coaches over the past five years. Almost universally, it’s not goals or marks that matter the most, but instead playing the team role and competing. Here’s Dean Cox explaining what’s important from earlier this year:

    No – the competing part and getting the ball to ground (is the most important). So say a player takes two or three contested marks in a game – it’s a pretty good game you know. But the difference between not losing them or at least having them is really important because we want you to get the ball to ground. 

    “You want to be dangerous in the air and at ground level. The forwards are aware that it’s not just about their contested marks they take, it’s about how many times the opposition take it on us and we don’t get an opportunity to get inside and score from that.

    Without being in the huddle with Hardwick, there’s a fair indication that the job being asked of King is very different to that of other key forwards. Hardwick’s teams, whether yellow and black or red and red, have tended to anchor players deep to stretch defences.

    As footy has evolved it has become increasingly congested – vertical spacing forces defences to either leave dangerous players unattended or leave room for dashing runs and leads. Richmond used to isolate Martin, Riewoldt and Lynch, while King and Long seem to be the main options on the Coast so far.

    This chart shows the top 20 goalkickers this year in terms of total marks and the average distance from goal that their marks were taken. You’ll note that King is almost 30m per mark closer to goal than a player like Riley Thilthorpe. It’s a similar story when you break it down by contested marks too – King does his work deep, as he is asked. He’s also been one of the best talls at winning ground balls inside 50 – of that list of 20, only Jack Higgins has won more per game.

    He’s also one of the most clearly targeted inside 50 this year. Only Mitch Georgiades has been targeted more in total (noting potential issues with the data). When they’ve kicked it towards King when going inside 50, the Suns have been able to rack up 326 points – the most of any respective forward/team relationship in the league. This has come at the cost of raw efficiency, but sometimes there’s a place for raw volume as well.

    King is doing those little things right – maintaining space, providing a contest, preventing rebounds. Beyond his actual goal totals, he’s providing that focal point necessary for the Suns to start actually climbing up the ladder. We know that King can play higher up the ground and contribute more, as he’s done it before. But that’s (likely) not the job in front of him right now.

    The shift appears to have worked for the Suns. They’ve gone from having the second worst rate of generating scoring shots per inside 50 to ninth in the league. They’ve also gone from being one of the worst sides at allowing sides to march from their defensive 50 to attacking 50 to one of the better teams. The Suns are also generating the deepest contested marks of any side on average of any team, providing a clear indication of how they try to attack the field and protect on the way back.

    So let’s loop back to the question above – is King doing enough? The natural reaction might be no. But given how much better the Suns have been going forward (and the role he has played) the answer is likely yes. 

    More precisely, due to the difficulty of assessing how players are actually operating in different systems and how they contribute to success, we probably can’t get closer than “maybe”.

    Which would be the second most unsatisfying way to finish the article.

    The adjustment that could win the Western Bulldogs the Flag

    James Ives

    As the top nine AFL clubs prepare for one of the most even finals series in recent memory, the smallest improvements can be the difference between a first-week exit and a place in the Grand Final.

    At this stage of the season, dramatic transformations are rare. You are what you are. Health remains the most obvious factor in any late-season surge, but more subtle edges can be found in detailed opposition analysis, targeted role tweaks, and exploiting specific matchups.

    For the Western Bulldogs, their weaknesses are there for all to see. Opponents can exploit matchups in their backline, and their aggressive press leaves them vulnerable in transition.

    Luke Beveridge has experimented with solutions, such as redeploying their spare across different lines and adjusting the way they use their wings, but the problem is stubborn enough that some fans have resigned themselves to hoping the Dogs can simply out-attack their opposition.

    But perhaps the answer is simpler than it seems… 

    A small role adjustment for one of the AFL’s elite rucks, inspired by Collingwood’s use of Darcy Cameron.

    Tim English is far from a defensive liability. He averages 2.8 intercept possessions per game (6th among rucks) and 1.4 intercept marks (4th). He’s also kicked 13 goals this season, ranking 2nd in total goals for ruckmen. The issue isn’t what English lacks, it’s that he’s too balanced.

    The Bulldogs’ real problems lie in defence and transition. They don’t need their ruck drifting inside 50 to compete with Aaron Naughton and Sam Darcy. They don’t need him functioning as an extra midfielder on the spread. They need him prioritising defensive positioning and lending consistent support to an underweight backline.

    Cameron offers the blueprint. He positions himself behind the ball at all costs, rarely caught in between his opponent and his defensive responsibilities. This often places him in prime spots to intercept on the flanks and across defensive 50. English, by contrast, tends to generate most of his intercepts deeper inside defensive 50 or along the back flanks. Less proactive, more reactive.

    Possession heatmaps tell the same story. English gathers 14% of his disposals inside forward 50 and shows a higher concentration through the corridor compared to Cameron

    His mobility makes him a genuine asset around the ground, capable of presenting as an option forward or tracking back to defend. It’s his greatest weapon. But when deployed more like a pseudo-midfielder than a pseudo-key defender, it can create problems. 

    Take a look at this Melbourne transition on the weekend. After losing a post-clearance ground ball, Melbourne transition through the wing. English works back to support but is pinned to the boundary after an aggressive back-45 lead from Tom Sparrow. As Jack Viney is held up, English stays pinned to the boundary instead of switching and repositioning himself into the dangerous space. Viney attacks the hotspot, drawing the Bulldogs’ defenders towards Max Gawn, and Melbourne have just enough coverage to crumb and score through Harrison Petty.

    In finals, where margins are extremely fine, the Dogs can’t continue to be exposed inside defensive 50. By adjusting English’s role to mirror Cameron’s, sacrificing some forward forays for consistent defensive positioning, the Bulldogs could address their most glaring weakness without overhauling their system. In a finals series this even, that single tweak might just be the difference between another year of frustration and winning the flag.

    Around the grounds

    • Here’s another plug for the W Download podcast by Sarah Black and Gemma Bastiani, which now has all 18 teams previewed in its recent back catalogue. A must to know what to expect  from each team  this season.
    • Ever see a scorpion kick goal kicked by a player jumping for a hanger? Now you have.
    • On The Shinboner, Ricky Mangidis breaks down how Collingwood have used Dan Houston away from his former role, Carlton’s two gameplans, and Geelong’s use of the Jeremy Cameron attention.
    • The latest Footy A2Z video is about how the rules of the game looked back in 1859. Footy A2Z is a youtube channel with simple informative animated videos about the game’s history and mechanics.
    • Squiggle Football is out! This is author and footy analyst Max Barry’s AFL deckbuilding football management roguelike and it’s pretty good.
  • Round 15, 2025

    Round 15, 2025

    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.

    ‘The statement she made is in its narrow sense true, but also in a broader sense impossible, it defies history and the future at the same time, it asks us to challenge our own senses of what is expected of us in life, and isn’t that the beating core of football? After the break we return to ORIGIN’

    — Liam Hogan (@liamhogan.id.au) 2025-06-11T06:19:16.459Z

    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