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The running theme of the pre-season predictions was the disbelief among prognosticators in the ‘rule of two or three’ – every season for the last decade (and almost every season in history), either two or three teams in the finals one year dropped out and were replaced the next.
The on-staff writers warned us: it won’t be stagnant, folks. Of course North Melbourne is in rebuilding mode, but surely the other seven teams would be there again, we insisted. I mean, six of them won 16 games last season, and the seventh won the grand final!
Fast forward to today, and the ladder might look more reasonable turned on its head. Three of the last four competitors in the grand finals and a 2016 finalist are in the bottom four, and perennial bridesmaids Richmond and Port Adelaide sit comfortably in the top four.
Were the finals to start today, fully half of the teams competing in finals would be new, including Melbourne and 2016 wooden spoon Essendon.
So, what happened?
First of all, we’re only three rounds into the season. Essendon has played three teams whose combined records so far are 2-7, and one of those wins was against the Dons. My ELO-based metric has them as 58-point underdogs to Adelaide this weekend; if they give the Crows a challenge, then we can reconsider their qualifications.
Similarly, the Kangaroos have faced three teams that have amassed a 7-2 record and all sit comfortably within the top eight at the moment. Their play has been a pleasant surprise, and Shinboners can expect to see positive results very soon (although Western at Etihad this week is not exactly a punter’s delight).
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Secondly, if there was a second team that most of us (ahem – us) assumed would fall out of finals besides North, it was Hawthorn.
The signs were there. Besides the close calls last year, besides the quick exit in September, besides the desperate trades this off-season trying to make the team younger, the thing that caught up with Fremantle in 2016 caught up with the Hawks this year: a lack of speed.
Footy today is a fast man’s game, and nothing captures the problems Hawthorn faces better than the sequence in Sunday’s game where Adam Saad simply pulled away from a generally considered speedy Paul Puopolo in the back 50… And Puopolo simply gave up on the chase.
Mind you, he could have just been passing the chase over to his midfield teammates, but the bad look typified what was a very disorganised afternoon that longtime Alastair Clarkson followers must have watched with disbelief.
The lack of speed will be hard to cure – although if the Ross Lyon method in Fremantle this weekend is to be believed, replacing a third of your team with wet-behind-the-ears athletes might do the trick. But effort is never unfixable, as Gold Coast showed this week.
And that’s the third point: the teams who surprise with success (Tigers, Power, Bombers, sometimes the Lions, Crows, and Suns) are doing so by putting in the extra effort. Sometimes that manifests in clean teamwork; sometimes in fitness at the ends of quarters or games; sometimes it’s simply a matter of who wants those 50-50 balls more.
Similarly, the downfall of a handful of teams (either throughout the first 14 per cent of the season or in individual quarters or games) is the lack of energy, effort, enthusiasm, or importance placed on the performance. That’s one of the beauties of our league: teams are close enough in talent that while we think we know who should win, all it takes is for one team to care more than the other for the upset to occur.
And that’s a great lesson for all of us in every walk of life: the race may not always go to the swiftest or the strongest, but to the one who puts in the work necessary to overcome that lack of innate talent.
Weekly wanderings
Dustin Martin and Paddy Dangerfield are neck-and-neck atop the Player of the Year list that I keep along with my ELO team ratings.
POTY points are totals of as many different sources of voting and ratings I can gather. Close behind are Ollie Wines, Rory Sloane, and Scott Pendlebury, rounding out the top five.
As for the team ratings, Adelaide (81.2) and Greater Western Sydney (79.3) are ten points clear of the third-to-seventh place pack of teams behind them, which includes Port, Geelong, Sydney, Western, and West Coast. Hawthorn has dropped from eighth to a distant 13th.
For Round 4, the only two games on the upset alert from our ratings are Carlton giving Gold Coast a run (the Blues are favoured by a point in our rating system), and Collingwood upsetting St Kilda (we have them as a nine-point favourite!).
Last week the ‘roar’ was for the incredible marks taken throughout the league, the best being the one by Puopolo. This week, it was spectacular goals, the most spec being Daniel Riolo’s candy-showing banana from the right pocket for the Tigers that was more like an Eddie Betts special than anything Rioli’s kin would produce.
If Taylor Walker’s ‘captain’s goal’ against Port or Lance Franklin’s pair of 60-metre bombs two weeks back are any precedent, perhaps next week’s trend will be ‘nine pointers’ from the centre square!
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