This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.
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Before the Bounce
Sometimes good moments in footy are good.
Sometimes they come on the field, but there’s the rare off-field moment that raises a smile.
Trigger warning for Demons fans.
The utter insanity of the St Kilda comeback against Melbourne has to be seen to be believed. For all bar the most one-eyed of Melbourne fans it’s an example of footy at its electrifying best.
That led to one of the better off-field moments of the season too.
Lyon. Nas. Pub. Shoulders.
There’s going to be a lot written on the future of St Kilda, Ross Lyon, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and physiotherapy treatments for men in their late 50s lifting other men on their shoulders, but sometimes you just need to enjoy the game as it comes.
This week in football we have:
Winning the close ones
Joe Cordy
After a bumpy start to Craig McRae’s first season at the helm of Collingwood that saw them struggle to a 4-5 record, success quickly followed. The Pies stormed home in the back half of the season, winning 12 of their last 13 home & away games to secure a top four spot with the lowest percentage since North Melbourne in 2007.
What was truly remarkable about the run wasn’t the stark change in fortune, it was the trend that would come to be the defining factor of McRae’s tenure thus far: his side had a preternatural ability to win close games.
In what must’ve felt like cruel irony, it all came apart in September. Collingwood lost to both of the eventual grand finalists by single goal margins.
Season over.
What seemed at the time like the beginning of a regression to the mean failed to materialise the next season however. Collingwood finished 8-1 in single-digit margin games, all culminating in the lowest combined margin from any premiership side to win three finals.
Even as their premiership defence fell apart due to an injury crisis that saw them miss the top 8 the next year, their record in close games held mostly steady (albeit allowing a couple of draws and just barely non-qualifying losses through the gates).
Following their six-point loss to Gold Coast away and subsequent one-point loss to Fremantle at home, 2025 became the first time that this era of Collingwood have ever had a losing record across a season in games decided by a single kick.
Some analysts of the game would tell you this was bound to happen eventually. There’s plenty of evidence that on a long enough timeframe, any team’s record in such games will regress towards a 50/50 W-L split, and that the results of such games are “mostly luck.”
Football, though, is first and foremost a game of skill. While there’s always variance game to game and moment to moment in how well a given player or team executes those skills, as well as elements completely out of your control, you can control enough to tip the scales in your favour.
What McRae and his coaching staff have identified and drilled into the team is the effects of chaos and control in close-game scenarios; namely, how much variance you let into the game.
When Collingwood are chasing a lead late they want to play as open and expansive as possible, even to the point of counterintuitiveness.
Time is the enemy, and so congestion and stoppages must be avoided at all costs, even if it means letting the ball spill out of a tackle. You’re more likely to win back clean possession in open play than a stoppage, and if you’re going to lose anyway it doesn’t make much difference if it’s by one goal or two.
Conversely, when Collingwood are aiming to defend such a lead, they want to reduce the variance by restricting the amount of football that can possibly happen.
Time is the enemy, and so congestion and stoppages are the best way to kill it. Search for the boundary, eschew first possession at stoppages so that you can descend on your opponents when they win it, and either continue to clog up the game or win possession back via free kick.
The principles of it are simple, but nothing comes easily after being physically and mentally drained by running a dozen kilometres and making thousands of small decisions in a brief 2-3 hour window.
The importance of keeping your clarity of mind was arguably never clearer than during the last ten seconds of Round 20, when Melbourne had lost sight of their rotations so badly they gave away game-defining 6-6-6 free kick, while St Kilda’s star ruck and midfielder coordinated a set play to create an uncontested marking opportunity inside forward-50.
However, Collingwood’s edge in this area has started disappearing. Not due to fatigue or absentmindedness, but opponents copying their homework. Some of the earlier adopters have looked pretty inelegant, like Sam Draper diving onto the footy and seeming to dare the umpire to call him out on it.
Collingwood’s recent match against Fremantle must’ve felt like looking into a mirror.
While they tried to open up space and get the ball forward by any means available, they faced a team running McRae’s “kill the game” playbook almost to perfection: pinning the ball at arm’s length to create stoppages without dragging it in, hanging off opponents and conceding first possession in order to wrap them up, handballing along the ground to keep the game congested, even descending on their own grounded teammates to make sure the ball doesn’t go anywhere they don’t want it to.
It was a genuine masterclass on both sides of the equation, but more importantly it was the clearest example that the tactical niche McRae has carved out for himself is quickly vanishing.
Collingwood will still have a massive edge in these situations against disorganised, flustered opponents, but they’re unlikely to ever put up records like 8-1 in these situations again. It’ll probably look like a run of bad luck.
How about a 186cm Full Forward?
Cody Atkinson
Are we ready for Jake Melksham, key position forward?
Well it doesn’t really matter if we are ready or not – the time is here.
But how did we get here – whatever this place is?
When this TWIF correspondent watched the surprisingly enjoyable Carlton/Melbourne game at the MCG in round 19, something slightly peculiar stood out. No points for the guess here – it’s how Carlton responded to how Melbourne were using Jake Melksham.
The Demons planted the former Bomber deep in the forward line – often as the closest forward to goal. That’s not particularly unusual across the league. Many sides throw a smaller option deep towards goal to throw the traditional defensive set up off kilter. Charlie Cameron played that role regularly for Brisbane’s most dangerous forward lines, for example.
Usually this attempt succeeds, and the tall defender usually assigned the deep anchor role is forced up the ground to follow taller timber. In theory it diminishes the ability of the attacking side to take contested grabs inside 50, but it helps generate space and cause disruptions.
Melksham has also been one of two dangerous forwards for the Demons all year – alongside Pickett. Fritsch has had his moments, but the stocks have been pretty bare this year.
As alluded to above, Carlton didn’t respond in the usual way. They didn’t stick a small or medium sized defender on Melksham. Instead, they tasked All Australian key position defender Jacob Weitering on him. In isolation this matchup worked for Carlton – Melksham managed just one goal for the game and one mark inside 50, with Weitering hoovering up 6 intercept marks.
TWIF asked Voss about the match-up after the game.
“How important is it to have a tall (Weitering) that is mobile enough to go with someone, I guess, you know, half a foot a foot shorter than him?
Yeah, he’s a big man. So to get past him is a bit of a challenge. You want to be able to build a defense that can play tall, small – take their turns when they need to. That seems to be what modern defenses are all about. Play a little bit more with where your relevance is to the ball and where your strengths lie…At the same time, we’d like him further up the ground doing what he does best, which is obviously generating and interrupting opposition’s passes of play.”
For the Demons the tactic is likely bourne out of desperation – a lack of reliable talls to direct traffic through. This make Voss’s response to the situation easier – without multiple credible tall targets deep, it becomes easier to place the most mobile one on the deep anchor – even if that anchor is on the smaller side.
So how does this all relate to Jake Melksham, 186cm KPP?
It’s worth noting this is the first year that Melksham is considered to be a tall forward. That’s down not to just how Melbourne have used him, but also how teams like Carlton have responded in kind.
It turns out that some player classifications are determined not just by position on the ground and particular nominated roles (such as ruck), but also by the players that are determined to match up on them. Champion Data employees callers at the ground to not only determine what happens on the field but also on field matchups. These matchups are relatively rigid and static. The nature of the role perhaps doesn’t reflect how modern footy is played – but that’s a tangent for another day.
It’s these matchups that feed into the player classification model. The type of forward (key or general) is determined not just by where they line up on the ground, but also who lines up alongside them. Because sides like Carlton have sent KPDs to mind Melksham, Champion Data have determined that the small to medium sized forward is actually tall.
Determining player positions is tough in modern footy. The days of the standard footy field grid are long in the past when looking at how teams actually operate on the park. Interim measures – such as the Champion Data classifications – are increasingly being stretched by inventive coaching and game evolution.
Further research is being done at both club level and by independent analysts. TWIF’s own James Ives has teased different player classifications, while former legend The Arc developed his own model way back in 2016.
Or maybe Jake Melksham is just a 186cm KPP? Probably not, but maybe?
In the margins
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
What statistics are correlated with winning and losing in season 2025? And how do those correlations differ for different teams with different strengths and game styles?
This article comes with an acknowledgement and a few disclaimers. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the incredible work of Andrew Whelan of WheeloRatings.com – having such a rich data source as a base meant I could take the time to pull together the analysis.
The disclaimer, for the purposes of this piece, is that I’ve used really simple linear regression with r2 as the basis for determining correlation. It’s not something you’d use to try to put a predictive model together, but it does enough to allow us to draw some interesting points.
Another disclaimer is that correlation is not causation, and doesn’t establish directionality. For example, West Coast’s margins are more strongly correlated to their ruck output than the rest of the league. Is that because when Bailey Williams and Matt Flynn have managed to win the battle, Harley Reid is able to go to work, or is it that an opposing ruck getting bested by them is emblematic of a team ripe to be beaten by West Coast?
It could also be that a given stat is a real non-negotiable for a team, it’s something they can be relied to win week in week out regardless of the end result – which would be reflected in a low correlation. The data can hopefully lead us to some interesting points for discussion, but can’t be definitive one way or the other.
Lastly,it is worth noting that I have used stat differentials (team minus opponent) rather than raw stats when correlating to margin, so keep that in mind.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the statistical correlations.
As you’d expect, kicking more goals than your opponent is very strongly tied to the final result. Champion Data’s rating points are also very closely correlated.
We can see that xScore has a higher correlation with victory than the pure number of shots, which we’d expect from a measure that incorporates not just the volume but the level of difficulty of shots taken.
Among score sources, Points from Turnover appear more valuable than Points from Stoppage, unsurprising as turnover is the primary scoring source. Points from forward half are a better predictor than points from defensive half.
xScore rating, that is how well the teams are executing on the shots at goal they generate, appears to be worth about as much as a gap in uncontested possessions, which is a better predictor than contested possessions or clearances.
Commit more clangers than your opponent and you’re likely to lose, however the correlation is relatively weak (to have a clanger you’ve generally got possession first).
Defensive half pressure acts is a rare example of a “positive” stat with a negative correlation to margin. If you’re racking them up, it means both that the ball is in your defensive half and the opponent has control of it.
We’ve got the league averages, so where and how does each team diverge on individual statistics?
The arrow indicates the direction a team diverges from – a red arrow to the left means that stats correlates less (or more negatively) with margin for the team than for the league at large and blue indicates stronger correlation.
Adelaide win through having a better spread of goalkickers than their opponents. They’ve had more unique goalscorers on 10 occasions for an eye-watering average margin of +62 points. Handballs are more valuable in their games than average, and kicks less so. The gap in value of points from forward half compared to defensive half expands.
They also don’t rely on a high mark inside 50 differential as much as the rest of the league. To revisit our disclaimer, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad at it, just that it hasn’t correlated with winning and losing to the same degree it has for other teams. Adelaide has lost 5 games for the year – in three of them they won marks inside 50 and in a fourth they drew. They’ve lost marks inside 50 three times, and won two of those games. They’ve drawn it three times for a three point loss and two 10+ goal wins. They’ve also managed to win by 10+ goals with a +0,+0,+1, and +2 marks inside 50.
Brisbane aren’t converting xScore into wins particularly well (because they’re 4th worst in goal accuracy this year). They’re getting more value from centre clearances than most teams, and appear to not be as affected by turnovers. This is partly driven by the fact that they haven’t had a turnover differential larger than 8 in the positive or negative whereas a quarter of games league-wide have blown out past this.
Carlton don’t often lose more defensive 1 on 1s than their opponent, only on four occasions so far and never by more than two. Their biggest wins against West Coast and North saw them win the stat by 6 and 4 respectively. When they’ve been required to make more defensive half pressure acts than their opponent however they’ve got an average margin of -24 compared to +20 the other way.
Similar to Adelaide, Collingwood benefit from having a better spread of goalkickers than their opponents. All of Collingwood’s losses have come while winning the inside 50 count and three of the four came while also winning the marks inside 50 count, including a three point loss to Geelong while recording their best differential for the year (+9).
They’ve only lost the tackle count once all year, in their opening round drubbing by GWS. While they recorded a solid +21 tackles in their 1 point loss to Fremantle, the other two losses saw low differentials (for Collingwood) of 8 and 10. Three of their four biggest wins have matched up with their three biggest tackle differentials. Their pressure game also helps explain why they can lose the kick count convincingly and still come out on top.
Essendon want clean hands. Their average result is a 47 point loss when recording more ineffective handballs than their opponent, compared to just a 9 point loss when recording fewer. This is mirrored in effective disposal tallies. It’s not surprising, decimated by injury my best guess is that they just don’t have the drilled structures in place to respond to errors so when things go bad there is little damage mitigation.
It’s been a common theme of criticism that Fremantle can tend to rack up meaningless uncontested possessions. They’re 7-3 in games they win the count and 6-3 when losing it, but with a slightly better average margin. By comparison their average margin when winning contested possession is +26.2 compared to -10 when losing it.
Geelong benefit from winning the intercept game as well as tackles inside 50. When the Cats have recorded +8 tackles inside 50 or better they average a 65 point win. On the two occasions they’ve achieved -8 or worse they’ve lost by 18 and 41. They also don’t mind getting on the positive end of some xScore variance. Points from stoppage aren’t as big a predictor for them as others.
Gold Coast are towards the bottom of the league for post-clearance ground ball, but they’re 8-1 when they’ve won the stat. They boast the same record when winning crumbing possessions, but are dead average in the stat across the season.
GWS have only won points from centre bounce in 6 games this season, but they’re 6-0 with an average margin of +45 when doing so. They’re not as dependent as most teams on building an xScore advantage to win, because they outperform their opponents on xScore rating by a maddening 10+ points per game.
I’ll be back next week to step through the remaining nine teams as well as hopefully looking at which teams do or don’t have their performance captured well by Rating Points.
Comparing this year’s finals race
Sean Lawson
The race for finals is down to 9 teams with a month left to play in the regular season of 2025. Sydney’s loss to GWS dropped their already remote finals chances to the purely mathematical realms involving multiple wooden spooner upsets, two collapsing teams, and improbable percentage boosts.
The remaining equation is pretty simple. One team from the top 9 is going to miss out, and after the Dogs smashed GWS last night, there’s 4 teams (GWS, Hawthorn, Freo and Bulldogs) with a decent chance of missing the cut.
With 4 weeks of the season to go, this is unusually early for so few teams to be in the hunt for finals in the 18 team era.
The peculiarity of this season’s ladder is naturally being used to argue for an expansion of the finals to ten sides, so more teams can avoid dead rubbers for longer. However, Greg Swann appears to see the 10-team finals series as a change to be made when there’s 19 teams.
Most years since 2012 have seen several clubs still in close contention for catching 8th spot. Indeed, some recent seasons have still seen the team as far adrift as 13th a viable chance of qualification, although on average, the top of the bottom 6 has been more than three games behind the pace.
2016 was the last year where so few teams were in contention for finals a month out. In 2016, there were three games separating North Melbourne in 8th from St Kilda in 9th. Funnily enough, this was the season where North opened by winning 10 of their first 11, and by August were in open free-fall. North failed to win another game after round 20, and the Saints only missed finals on percentage.
If making up 1 or 2 games on 8th is reasonably possible with a month remaining, most years we can expect up to four teams to still have fans furiously running their ladder predictors and death riding certain opponents.
This year, all of the calculation of permutations is confined to the top 9 sides. The big reason there’s such a small chasing pack this year is that the fringe finalists are simply losing fewer games.
This year is the first season since 2018 where the team in 8th has only lost 7 games to this point. Further, with the longer season thanks to Gather Round, the Suns on 12 wins are the winningest 8th place team yet seen in the 18 team era.
A further consequence of the success of the teams ranked 5 to 8 is that a winning by teams outside the top 4 is that the actual positional spread within the top 8 is quite close at the start of Round 21.
Those stronger results for the bottom few teams, and the lack of a runaway ladder leader, mean nearly everything is still up for grabs.
The last few weeks of the season should be a tight jostle for home finals and double chances, everyone in the finals race has winning form to point to, there’s no clear single standout leading team, and it’s honestly strange that so many commentators seem to think that this all constitutes a “dismal” or “boring” season.
Around the Grounds
- Marnie Vinall for ABC reports on AFL plans to increase AFLW crowds, such as they are.
- Simply the best way to prepare for the upcoming AFLW season is a podcast previewing every team by Gemma Bastiani and Sarah Black, and luckily, that’s exactly a thing which exists. The W Download is running under the old Credit to the Girls Feed, and so far they’ve covered half the teams in their first three episodes.
- For some reason, regarding attempts to improve the AFLW’s standing, it has been reported in the Herald Sun that a room full of AFL executives were made to shout “Taylor Swift” in unison at a summit about the topic.
- Speaking of podcasts, here’s the complete derailment of The Footy, a podcast hosted by Dees nuff and Aunty Donna comedian Broden Kelly. They were recording during the Saints comeback over the Dees.
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