AFL Round 12: Every dog has its day – except, you know, the Dogs

Welcome to Round 12 in the AFL, where the story lines are made up and the reputation don’t matter. What a long weekend of football it was.

From Thursday to Monday, Round 12 was an AFL football feast. Seven games, 847 minutes of action, spread far enough apart that engorgement was an option. Those who selected the degustation option were treated to upset after upset after upset.

It was the day of the dogs, only if the day stretched over many days and excluded the Dogs themselves. Work with me here.

For what loomed as a marquee spot on the fixture at the start of the season, Thursday lacked any sense of occasion, meaning or purpose beyond the four points on offer.

“They just didn’t come to play” and its cousin, “they didn’t play hard enough”, are punditry platitudes at the best of times. Unfortunately for the Western Bulldogs, this is about all we can say about their performance against Sydney on Thursday night. The Dogs, the modern exemplar of effort-based football, gave nothing but the minimum required to take the field in a game that would have given them a win’s buffer over ninth place.

More than that, the Dogs’ looked like a jumbled-together mess, an afterthought that belies the coaching prowess we’ve come to expect from Luke Beveridge and his crew.

The Dogs could muster just 42 points on 12 scoring shots, the kind of score line you might expect to see from a bottom four side that’s getting trounced by a premiership contender. It was a mess, both in the moment and in the days since, when we begin to pick apart what went wrong.

The reigning premiers’ forward line looked to have taken on similar characteristics of their second-half-of-the-year fade out in 2016: bits and pieces that don’t quite add up to the sum of their meagre parts. The selected forward line took a collective two marks inside 50 and kicked 3.3 on the evening – admittedly half of the Dogs’ score, but just 21 points.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Footscray’s issues started further up the ground, the Swans able to engineer a dominant territory victory (71 inside 50s to just 39 – by far a season low) in no small measure due to an outright ruck domination. The Swans ruck pairing won 65 hit outs to 16, a situation not helped by an injury to the Dogs’ Marcus Adams which necessitated Jordan Roughead move down back.

The ruck was a particular sore point for the Dogs from centre bounces, the away team losing centre clearances 13-4. Josh Kennedy gobbled up three for himself, all on the back of deft taps he was able to run on to with minimal opposition interference.

Down back the Dogs had no answer for Lance Franklin, who could have kicked more than three goals if a little luck went his way. Franklin ran riot, taking nine marks and kicking 3.5 (plus an extra two score involvements from his 16 forward half possessions), clearing leading lanes for Sam Reid (2.2) and allowing Tom Papley the space to work one on one deep in Sydney’s forward 50 arc.

With Adams now on the sidelines for an extended period, Matthew Boyd and Dale Morris in need of a trip to the repair shop every second week, and the technology to clone Easton Wood at least 25 years away from fitting into a football department spending cap, the Bulldogs have some serious defensive headaches to deal with.

From start to finish, it was a near debacle for the Dogs, who have hit their bye at precisely the right time for a significant reset. Last year, the Dogs’ quirky structure looked to be its competitive advantage. Thursday evening, it looked like a downfall in waiting.

We’re only half way through the season. But we’re half way through the season. The Dogs have some questions to answer in the weeks ahead, which we’ll get to when time and space permits.

Speaking of which, we can no longer doubt in Gary Ablett’s league-best abilities when both of football’s most precious commodities are in abundance. Ablett was in outstanding touch against the Hawks in Saturday’s early game, gathering 37 possessions and owning the centre of the MCG in the Suns’ only home and away hit out on the home of football in 2017.

Gold Coast had the game to trouble Hawthorn. Their run and carry has been electric when it has worked in 2017 (and in seasons prior), but those moments have been fleeting. For all the fun the Suns have trying to score, they lack the requisite will to work hard and support their back six. Pre-game, it was finely balanced, but the Suns held slight favouritism.

The Suns were still the Suns after all: flaky, inconsistent, and above all untrustworthy.

By the time Gold Coast romped out to a 42-point lead with a quarter and change to play, those fears were put to bed. Then the Hawks started to win more one-on-one duals and got on top in the clinches, and the Suns remembered they were flaky, inconsistent and untrustworthy.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Their early work proved enough in the end, and the Suns rose to a 5-6 record having already had their bye in Round 9. Gold Coast are close to decoupling themselves from the bottom six, with a big four weeks ahead set to shape their season.

Not content with that, the football gods served up back to back thrashings, which materialised without any foreboding.

The Lions as home underdogs is not unusual. Through 11 rounds, Brisbane had a home percentage of 53.4 per cent, easily the lowest in the competition (the next lowest is Hawthorn on 81.6 per cent, and they share their home ground with many of their opponents). That can be put down mostly to Brisbane’s slate: Essendon, Richmond, Adelaide and Port Adelaide had come before this weekend’s outing against the Dockers.

By the same token, there was something unreal about Fremantle’s start to the year. As we discussed in Numbers Game a fortnight ago, pretty much everything has gone right for the Dockers in the first half of 2017. Travelling, ahead of their bye, to play a high variance team, it was marked as a danger game. So it proved; the Angel of Mean Regression remains undefeated.

Fremantle looked hapless in defence, unable to stop Brisbane’s relentless attack and drive with long kicks and chains of handballs through the centre of the Gabba. It started early, and after the Dockers inserted some respectability into the game with some strong clearance work by Nat Fyfe and Lachie Neale as rain fell in the second quarter, not all was lost for the away side.

Brisbane would have none of it. By half way through the third quarter, Fremantle had given up. The Lions, who roll the dice hard no matter their opponent, came up with seven after seven after seven, putting up easily their biggest score on the year on the back of their most inside 50s for the year and recording only their third contested possession count win for the year.

There was plenty to like about the Lions’ method, and their key position stocks, and their midfield which looks to be gelling under the influence of Dayne Beams and after getting a decent run at things without too much injury. It’s early days, but the end of Brisbane’s time as the AFL’s penny stock draws closer; wins like this help remind us of what’s been and what’s to come.

(AAP Image/Tony McDonough)

The two Queensland sides saluting was the entrée to a tasty main course of Port Adelaide and Essendon. The Power were heady favourites, the Dons, like the Suns, untrustworthy in season 2017. Essendon and Port Adelaide had played some interesting, high-scoring games under the Etihad roof in recent years, and this loomed as another entry into that book.

It was. For Essendon. The Bombers blitzed the Power in the first ten minutes of the first quarter, scoring 47 points before Port Adelaide touched the ball (an exaggeration, but not an egregious one). Essendon’s ball movement was sublime, their midfielders as clean as a hospital ward, their forward line functioning on a higher plane.

Port Adelaide had no answers, their back six under siege from high Essendon entry kicks that Cale Hooker was pleased to snaffle without hesitation. He kicked five goals in the first half, 60 minutes of football that saw the Dons open up a 52-point lead. Remarkably, it grew larger in the second half, Essendon running out 70-point winners.

It was the kind of performance that we would expect from a team primed for a tilt at meaningful finals football. Essendon are capable of this kind of performance on a weekly basis, their issue being week-to-week consistency. If this is the start of something, it’s a hell of a start.

Carlton’s season has been similarly up and down, and it potentially reached its defining crescendo yesterday at the Blues beat the then-ladder-leading GWS Giants. I joked earlier in the week that it was Giants versus Giants-lite; the game had much more substance than a silly label like that.

Greater Western Sydney won almost every meaningful underlying indicator: inside 50s, uncontested possessions, forward 50 tackles, clearances, scoring shots. The Giants had 207 possessions in the forward half of the ground, a really high number; Carlton had 132, a more typical number.

There isn’t a statistic for coaching. The players executed his game plan, but make no mistake: this was a win to the credit of Brendon Bolton. He marshalled his back six to perfection, making them accountable, instructing them to stay goalside of their opponent, and forcing GWS to either kick to contests or have long, difficult shots for goal on the run. Liam Jones’ work on Jonathon Patton was a case in point.

For it all, the Giants probably should have won the game. They were able to create more than enough chances but failed to convert. Chief amongst those who squandered opportunity was Toby Greene, who kicked 0.5 on the day, including a howler in the final minutes which would have given his side a likely match-winning lead.

Greene kicks that goal 999 times out of 1,000. It’s difficult to say, but from the outer, it looks like one of two things: a bad decision to take a shot for goal which he miskicked, or an attempt to pass the ball to team mate Sam Reid with a deft kick which he miskicked. No matter, we have the result. It was a neat summation of his team’s day.

The Blues chalk up another win and hit the half way mark of the season in an interesting position. They’re down on wins and percentage compared to the same time last year, but subjectively the team feels like it is in a much better place. Like the Lions, there’s still plenty of work to be done; wins like Sunday are a hint of what’s to come, and a sneak peek of the prize on offer.

And weren’t we treated to a football spectacle yesterday? There’s not enough kilobytes on the internet to properly expound such a glorious exhibition of Australian rules football. The outcome is another Collingwood close loss and Melbourne’s ascension into the top six, a place many in the know predicted they’d finish coming into the year.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

What’s the sum of it all? Coming into the round, it looked as though the foundations of a dam wall were being built around the top nine or ten spots on the ladder. No more. It’s all up in the air again.

How up in the air? Come back tomorrow and find out. We passed the literal half way mark of the season with Brisbane’s win over Fremantle on Saturday; the second half of 2017 is going to be madness.

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