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AFL to break new ground on Good Friday

Roar Guru
12th April, 2017
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Western Bulldogs Tom Liberatore drives his team in to attack. (AAP Image/Mark Dadswell)
Roar Guru
12th April, 2017
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1287 Reads

New ground will be broken when North Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs face off at Etihad Stadium in what is hoped to be the first of many Good Friday fixtures to come.

The inaugural Good Friday match will be played in the unusual timeslot of 4:20pm, so as to not clash with any religious services.

Aussie rules has previously never been played on the religious holiday, with the opening match of the Easter round taking place on the preceding Thursday instead.

In recent years, the AFL’s opening round fell in the same weekend as Easter, with Richmond and Carlton contesting the first match for the season at the MCG on the opening Thursday night (in 2013, it was played in the second weekend of Round 1) before a lull on the Good Friday.

The Brisbane Lions also regularly played an Easter Thursday night match at the Gabba, but have lost their place in this timeslot owing to poor performances in recent years.

Instead, the West Coast Eagles and Sydney Swans will play in this timeslot when they lock horns at Domain Stadium.

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After over three decades of lobbying, the Roos were successful in their bid to contest the inaugural Good Friday clash, giving the club their first marquee fixture in the same manner that Essendon and Collingwood contests the annual Anzac Day fixture.

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“We’re absolutely thrilled by the announcement,” the club’s chief executive Carl Dilena said when this fixture was announced last October.

“It’s a tribute to this club’s track record of innovation and a credit to all the great North people like Bob Ansett, Ron Casey and Greg Miller, who initially proposed this game in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

The Roos want to use this landmark occasion, another initiative for the club after they pioneered Friday night football in the 1980s, to kick-start its year after three straight losses to open the 2017 season.

Last August, coach Brad Scott made the controversial call to delist club veterans Brent Harvey, Nick Dal Santo, Michael Firrito and Drew Petrie, making clear his intentions to regenerate the club’s playing list.

As a result, the club that started last season with nine straight wins and barely scraped into September have been tipped to struggle.

Despite this, they have been competitive in most of their matches so far and were unlucky not to have beaten the Geelong Cats in Round 2. They led for nearly the entire match, only to concede the match-winner by the Cats’ George Horlin-Smith with over a minute to go.

Last week they kept the Greater Western Sydney Giants honest for three quarters, but faded in the last to go down by seven goals in Hobart.

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North Melbourne Kangaroos Andrew Swallow AFL 2017 tall

Things will not get any easier when they face a Bulldogs side smarting from their upset 16-point loss to Fremantle in Perth the previous week.

As they did in 2015 and 2016, the Bulldogs have started the season 2-1, and will start hot favourites to move ahead 3-1 as they continue to revel in the defence of a premiership flag which was 62 years in the making.

Prior to the shock defeat to the Dockers, they had registered impressive wins over Collingwood and the Sydney Swans, coming from behind in the final quarter of the latter match to win by 23 points.

They will be sweating on the availability of Liam Picken and Stewart Crameri, with the former being knocked out in the second quarter of the loss to the Dockers last week and the latter battling a hip complaint.

The match will be captain Robert Murphy’s 299th, which means he remains on track to play his 300th next week in a home game against the Brisbane Lions.

The last four meetings between the two clubs is split at two wins apiece, with both winning a meeting last year.

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In Round 6, in front of a crowd of over 46,000, the Roos overcame an injury-ravaged Bulldogs outfit by 16 points before Luke Beveridge’s men returned serve with a 14-point win in Round 20. On both occasions, the winner kicked 9.7 (61) in low-scoring contests.

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