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AFL top 100: Round 7 preview

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Roar Guru
15th July, 2020
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As I stated in my recent article, history tells us that since 2015 three teams from the final eight in the previous year will go missing and be replaced by three new contenders for the premiership cup.

As the ladder stands at the moment, the three teams to miss from the 2019 list would be Giants, Eagles and Bulldogs and their three replacements would be Port Adelaide, St Kilda and Carlton. However, despite the reduced number of games in the 2020 season, it is still only a third of the way through and this round as much as any round will have a big bearing on the final makeup of the comp.

The three finalists from last year currently outside the eight sit in tenth, 11th and 12th position and are only outside the eight on percentage. In fact, they are only four points behind the second team, Geelong, and when you consider that six of the eight finalists from last year play each other this weekend, the ladder could take a far different shape by Monday night.

In the opening game, the Cats play the Magpies, who currently sit in fifth position and it is a battle between the highest-scoring attack and the most miserly defence in the competition this year. Geelong will be hoping that Mitch Duncan passes his fitness test while Collingwood will be without Steele Sidebottom and potentially others depending on fitness tests for Josh Diacos, Jamie Elliott, Ben Reid and the injury-prone Matt Scharenberg.

Nathan Buckley, the only coach who can boast a better than 50/50 coaching record against Chris Scott, will welcome back Jordan de Goey, but Sidebottom still has weeks to go on his suspension.

No side will have a home ground advantage this week as games are played out of the various hubs, which makes it difficult to fathom while the same conditions applied last week, yet every team that was named first on the team sheet won.

When Gary Ablett Jr steps out onto Perth’s Optus Stadium on Thursday night, he will equal the game tally at Geelong of another great Geelong player: his father, Gary Ablett Sr. Although he has kicked 589 goals more than his son and achieved a lot of awards along the way (Best and Fairest 1984, leading AFL goalkicker three times, leading Geelong goal kicker nine times, Norm Smith Medallist 1989, Geelong captain and All-Australian four times), Jr became one of the greatest players the AFL has ever seen.

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He was the inaugural captain of the Gold Coast Suns from 2011 to 2016, he won the first three Best and Fairestd at the club and won again in 2017 to add to his two Best and Fairest at Geelong. He also won two Brownlow Medals (one at each club), was the leading goalkicker at Geelong in 2006 and at Gold Coast in 2012 and 2013, played in two premierships for the Cats and made All-Australian eight times.

He is still playing great football and will be a key player in the Cats’ drive to win a premiership in 2020.

For their opponents the Magpies, their captain Scott Pendlebury – given good health and fortune – will be eyeing off some significant milestones of his own. After passing Gordon Coventry to become the second greatest game player of all time at the Magpies, he now sits only six games behind Collingwood’s greatest game player of all time, Tony Shaw, and six games behind their longest-serving captain of all time, his current coach Nathan Buckley.

Pendlebury played in the 2010 Collingwood premiership, winning the Norm Smith Medal on the day. Like Gary Ablett, he will be keen to see his team progress to the finals for another tilt at a premiership flag.

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