Six big questions for the AFL in 2018

The clock has struck midnight and calendars are being changed all over the nation – it’s officially the new year, and a new AFL season is just months away. Here’s six big questions that 2018 will give us the answers to.

What impact can Gary Ablett have at Geelong?
The cat came back. We’ve known for more than a year that Gary Ablett would likely return to Geelong for the 2018 AFL season, it became a reality in October and now he’s on the verge of pulling on the hoops again for real.

I’ll admit to being a little conflicted about all this. On one hand, I feel Mark Thompson was right in his biography when he said that it was wrong of the AFL to tear apart the romance of Gary and Geelong just to feed the expansion machine. From that angle of thinking, it warms the heart to see Gary come home.

However for similar reasons, it makes me a bit uneasy that Geelong’s end-of-first-round compensation pick – which surely no sensible observer could feel wasn’t an unreasonably high level of compensation for Steven Motlop leaving the club – found its way to Gold Coast in the trade.

The whole thing reeks of the AFL pulling strings to achieve the desired outcome. Maybe that’s a necessary evil but it’s something I’m uncomfortable with at the best of times, much moreso when it is a helping hand to a club that has played finals in ten of the last eleven seasons and won three premierships in that time.

However I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the result I’ve been barracking for since it first became a serious possibility, because once the idea of a midfield featuring three all-time greats in Gary Ablett junior, Patrick Dangerfield and Joel Selwood burrows into your brain, it’s impossible to get out. I’ve gotta see it!

Gary Ablett is 33 years old and has missed 39 of his last 88 possible AFL games through injury. He is also one of the top three players of the modern era, maybe the best of the modern era, maybe the best of any era.

That presents a wide spectrum of possible results to come out of his return to the club where he and his father made the Ablett name famous.

If his body fails him he could retire this year contributing little to nothing and the misadventure could derail the Cats’ 2018 season – on the other hand, if he, Selwood and Dangerfield all fire at the same time the Cats may very well be unstoppable.

It’s a trio with the kind of scary, old-testament vibe that could melt your face clean off, ark-of-the-covenant style. As Belloq said to Indiana Jones: We are simply passing through history. This… this is history. You want to see it open as well as I.

Am I crazy, or does AFLX actually have potential?
I know any mention of AFLX is unlikely to elicit anything other than a chorus of groans among footy fans right now, and fair enough. I’ve been among that crowd more than once as the concept has gradually grown legs.

That said… maybe it’s just the fact that the eye-catching and entertaining Big Bash League is on right now, but I’m starting to feel like it might not be the worst thing in the history of the world if AFLX became part of the sporting schedule around this time of year.

There were a few remarkably dull weeks in December before the BBL got underway where the calendar seemed wide open for something with a bit more pep than the A-League to occupy our attention in the gaps between Ashes Tests.

On evenings like that if there was an AFL-lite competition with quick and entertaining matches, plenty of goals, featuring beloved recent retirees and state league stars, are you really telling me you wouldn’t tune in?

Maybe I’m just grasping at straws in search of a way, any way at all, to get Boomer Harvey playing football on my telly again. Still, I’ll be watching the first real trial run of AFLX this preseason with interest.

Tom J Lynch – stay or go?
In 2018 Tom J Lynch is going to make the biggest decision of his career – will he remain with the Gold Coast Suns for the long term, or will he seek success at one of the AFL’s seventeen other clubs?

There are a lot of factors that will come into play here and it’s a question which I’ll be looking at in more depth in the coming weeks – but let’s take a quick squiz now.

Gold Coast have been around for seven seasons now and are yet to play a finals match. They’ve only had one season where they came even remotely close, and they sacked their coach after it.

Are the Suns realistically going to play finals in 2018, or anytime soon? You would never say never given the curveballs this beautiful game loves to throw at us, but all signs point to no.

That would seem to make the scenario pretty straightforward given Lynch’s manager suggested in October that the prospect of success will play a central role in the decision to be made.

Complicating this however is the fact that the AFL have already publicly made it known that they’d be willing to back up whatever contract offer the Suns make with a hefty ‘ambassador’ bonus outside the salary cap to keep Lynch at the expansion club.

Would the guarantee of a gargantuan payday be enough to convince Lynch his future lies on the Gold Coast? If not, then the Suns will also face a hard decision on whether or not to match an offer for the restricted free agent.

If they happen to finish the year as 2018’s wooden spooners – not an unrealistic scenario – then letting Lynch go via free agency might well see them hold the first two picks in the supposed “superdraft” of 2018.

There’s so much more to be considered here, and we don’t even know yet just which clubs might be the frontrunners in the race for Lynch’s signature if indeed he decides to move.

All that can be said for certain is that he is the biggest talent on the table in 2018 and the decision he makes will shape the fortunes of the clubs involved for years to come.

Will Port and Essendon’s busy offseasons pay off?
Undoubtedly the two clubs making the biggest splashes at trade time in 2017 were Port Adelaide and Essendon.

Port signed two free agents in Tom Rockliff and Steven Motlop, traded in Jack Watts, picked up three delisted players in Trent McKenzie, Jack Trengove and Lindsay Thomas, and even recycled a former AFL player through the draft in Dom Barry.

Essendon secured a former All-Australian and premiership player in Jake Stringer and two very handy talents in Devon Smith and Adam Saad.

It’s fair to say that my decision to give Port Adelaide a ‘D’ on my trade period report card was a controversial one. It even inspired some legend on facebook to shop together this timeless image of me in a dunce cap, which I will treasure as long as I live.

In a nutshell my concern with Port’s offseason is this: they were a better than average but not elite team in 2017, and they’ve added a few players who are better than average but not elite to that (as well as some who are clearly just mature stocking stuffers). To me that math just doesn’t add up to any kind of significant improvement.

Port still have to be considered potential contenders though when you look at the way the last two years have gone, and I look forward to seeing whether or not they can make me eat my own words in 2018. I love it when teams do!

As for Essendon, they have gone the longest without winning a final of any club in the league (bar Gold Coast who have never played one) so the pass mark for them in 2018 is desperately simple: taste success in September, or we’ll be wondering if it was all worth it.

Will the new MRP be as good as it looks?
In an almost unsettling display of common sense the AFL gave the match review panel a significant overhaul just a few weeks ago.

A quicker turnaround for incidents that occur on Thursday or Friday night games is something I’ve wanted to see happen for a while – it’s by no means a huge change, but it should save a couple of players per year from ‘trial by media’ over the weekend.

I’m also a big fan of removing some of the barriers that made clubs less likely to challenge a ruling at the tribunal. There’s no longer any penalty in terms of player availability for doing so, and hopefully it will lead to us getting the right decision more often than not.

As written by Ryan Buckland, the changes made look set to be an improvement across the board. Generally speaking I believe we’d all agree that a match review panel, like an umpire, is an essential part of the game but one that we’d like to notice and talk about as little as possible, and the changes made do, at a glance, look like ones that can help that be the case.

If so it might be a good omen for great and sensible things to come under the tenure of Steve Hocking as the AFL’s GM of Football Operations.

That said I feel like unbridled optimism about the MRP is a trap that even a particularly thick-skulled mouse would be smart enough not to run into, so personally I’ll be keeping a lid on it for now and waiting to see what happens when what looks good on paper is put to the test in real life.

Who’s going to win it?
The biggest question of all, of course, is which of the AFL’s 18 clubs will be holding the premiership cup aloft at the end of 2018.

The last two years have surprised perhaps as much as any in history, and they’ve lead to a landscape where the AFL doesn’t seem to have that one obvious power team head and shoulders above others entering 2018 as favourites.

It’s only fair in fact that those managing the league get some credit – I like to take pot shots at them as much as anyone (like, at least three or four times in this article alone) but other sporting competitions should envy the competitiveness and eveness of the AFL.

Sixteen of eighteen teams have played in a grand final inside the last 20 years (the two that haven’t being expansion teams who have existed for less than half that time), and 13 of those teams have won a premiership in the last 25 years (only St Kilda, Melbourne and Fremantle have missed out).

It’s a great time to be a footy fan, fans of just about every club (not you Gold Coast) should believe they’ve got a chance at winning a flag in the next five years. As much as half the competition, or maybe even more, is potentially ‘in the mix’ this year.

Can the addition of Bryce Gibbs balance out the loss of Jake Lever, Charlie Cameron and Brodie Smith and help Adelaide to complete the tale that so few teams do, bouncing back from a losing grand final to win one the next year?

Could Sydney or GWS, both sides arguably underperforming in 2017 given the depth and quality of the talent available on their playing lists, rise to the occasion and bring the premiership cup back north of the Barassi line?

Or perhaps the top shelf superstar talent at Richmond or Geelong could see the Tigers go back to back, or the Cats claim their fourth flag in twelve years? Port Adelaide and Essendon will both believe they are going to improve this year – can they rise all the way to the very top?

Perhaps maybe even as in 2017, a club could come from outside of the top eight to win it all. As a new year dawns, anything and everything is potentially on the table.

Welcome to 2018.