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Opinion
A huge cleanout of players after the end of the 2019 season meant that the Crows started the 2020 season with much fewer top 100 game-players and goalscorers than before.
Nine players had left the club with only one retirement (Andy Otten) and two delistings, Paul Hunter and Richard Douglas. Hunter was from the rookie list and had not played an AFL game. Douglas, however, was the leading current player with 246 games to his credit and 164 goals and was the Crow’s ninth-greatest game player overall.
In total, Adelaide lost well over 1000 games and 1000 goals of AFL experience from their 2019 list but managed to retain a reasonable mix of experience across the board. The title of most experienced current player fell to 32-year-old David Mackay, who managed ten games for the year and a career total of 230 games meaning that he is only one game short of a top-ten ranking on the Crows’ top 100 game-players list.
Three other players have reached the 200 game milestone with the club and a further seven have passed 100 games, although one of these – Rory Atkins, a member of the 2017 losing grand final team, has been traded to the Gold Coast Suns. The loss of Atkins and the almost certain departure of Brad Crouch means that Adelaide will be left with 15 players from their all-time top 100 game-players list.
Only one of these players was a new addition to the elite list in 2020: Lachlan Murphy.
Promoted from the rookie list, Murphy added only 12 games to his career total but this was enough for him to qualify at the bottom of the list on the same rung as ex-players Kyle Cheney, Hayden Skipworth, Andrew Crowell and James Thiessen.
Coach Matthew Nicks, in the second year of his three-year contract, will be hoping that the four potential 2021 top 100 members (Reilly O’Brien, Darcy Fogarty, Tom Doedee and Chayce Jones) all maintain enough form and fitness to replace these players and continue the good form shown at the end of season 2020.
Fogarty was the only player to break into the top 100 goalscorers for the Crows in 2020, but at the other end of the scale, Taylor ‘Tex’ Walker managed to score sufficient goals to overtake 1990s heartthrob Tony Modra and gain the mantle of Adelaide’s premier goal scorer and Tom Lynch scored enough goals to move past Kurt Tippett and finish only one goal outside the club’s top-ten goalscorers.
It is interesting to note that of the five AFL top 100 goalscorers who wore the Crows jumper at some stage during their career, only one scored all his goals at the club. That is the current leading goalscorer, Tex Walker.
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