What did the first week of the finals tell us that we didn’t already know?
Other than seventh-placed Greater Western Sydney beating sixth-placed Sydney, all games went according to Hoyle and we finished up with two fewer teams lining up to lose to Richmond in the grand final.
It did tell us that Geelong and Sydney are slipping, but with the bevy of champions they have and the culture of the two teams, they weren’t about to go without a fight – a totally expected answer.
Geelong won two games fewer than last year but were unable to improve their recent finals win-loss ratio, which has now become embarrassing. Sydney won one game fewer than last year, and 2012 is now fading into history, with the one grand final since then being a ten-goal thrashing.
Make way for the new breed of skilled ball-handlers who play a high-risk game that is exciting, but are Richmond and West Coast, who finished one and two on the ladder, ready to abdicate yet? And do the ‘oldies’ still have a place in the modern game?
Looking at the top-100 game and goal lists, it would appear that experience is still a handy ingredient in making finals, but it’s not essential. By the end of the season there were ten current-day players on the all-time top-100 game-players list. Hawthorn had one (Shaun Burgoyne), Geelong had one (Gary Ablett), Sydney had two (Jarrad McVeigh and Lance Franklin) and Melbourne had one (Jordan Lewis), so five of the ten, or 50 per cent, were in finals teams.
(AAP Image/Dean Lewins)
After Week 1 only two of those players remain, and after next week there’ll be only one.
However, top-100 goal-kickers are entirely different. Of the eight on the top-100 list, only Eddie Betts was not playing for a finals team – not that it did them much good, as four of the remaining seven players (Lance Franklin, Jack Riewoldt, Gary Ablett and Mark LeCras) failed to score a goal.
The three others did create some movement in their first finals appearance for 2018. Jarryd Roughead scored three goals to pass Brad Johnson and join Paul Salmon in 42nd position, Tom Hawkins score two goals to leave behind Bill Hutchinson and make himself outright 60th, and Josh Kennedy leapfrogged Chris Grant and is now in 45th position.
The departure of Sydney (Franklin) and Geelong (Hawkins and Ablett) leaves only Roughead to play this week against Melbourne. Riewoldt, Kennedy, LeCras and possibly Roughead will be the only ones playing in the preliminary finals.
Lance Franklin’s game on Saturday, though not a great performance, was important from an AFL all-time top-100 game-players point of view. It was Buddy’s 290th game, which took him into a three-way tie with Bill Hutchinson (a bad week for him!) and Dean Cox in 98th position on the ladder, thus forcing out of the top 100 the four players he was previously tied with on 289: Barry Davis (Essendon), Barry Hall (St Kilda, Sydney and Western Bulldogs), Stuart Maxfield (Richmond and Sydney) and Michael Voss (Brisbane Bears and Brisbane Lions).
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