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Opinion
The four Saturday games of Round 1 will be played in three different states and will feature only two of last year’s eight finalists.
However each of the games will feature at least one of the AFL’s top 100 game players with the early afternoon game of the round Melbourne versus Fremantle hopefully featuring two.
Two of the seven top 100 AFL game players remaining on club lists, Eddie Betts and Scott Pendlebury, will have played in the Thursday and Friday games respectively, but the next two to play if form and fitness prevail are Nathan Jones for Melbourne (the junior member of the seven) and David Mundy (the second most senior member).
Jones has played the second most number of games for Melbourne (294) and currently sits in equal 94th position on the total career games list with Tigers legend Jack Titus and North Melbourne’s dual Brownlow medalist Keith Greig.
No doubt he will be keen to remain in form and fit to help Melbourne back into the eight in 2021, and if he can do so he will pass two personal milestones along the way. Six games would see him become the 92nd player to reach 300 games and 13 games would make him the greatest game player of all time at the Demons.
The Dockers’ David Mundy in his first game in 2021 will become an AFL top 25 player, joining Fitzroy’s greatest player Kevin Murray and David Cloke, who chalked up his 333 games in two stints at Richmond and one at Collingwood.
(Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
Mundy however has a much harder task than Jones to become top-dog game player at his own club. He would need to play every home-and-away game this season to wrest the title away from one of the greatest players of all time, Matthew Pavlich.
Melbourne’s four other top 100 game players will all improve their ranking while Nat Fyfe, Matthew Taberner and Darcy Tucker at the Dockers will also advance.
The Essendon-Hawthorn game will see Alastair Clarkson take over the mantle as the most senior coach in the AFL and he will be supported by the AFL’s most senior player (both in games and age) Shaun Burgoyne.
His opponent, Essendon’s Ben Rutten, took over the coaching role from last year’s most senior coach John Worsfold and is one of the two newbies in the competition.
Burgoyne – like Jones and Mundy – will be hoping for a stellar season if he is to advance from his lofty fifth place on the AFL all-time top 100 game players list to join the four members of the 400 club: Brent Harvey, Michael Tuck, Kevin Bartlett and Dustin Fletcher.
On last year’s form, the match between last year’s runners up Geelong and last year’s wooden spooners Adelaide should be a foregone conclusion, although it is worth noting that both teams won three of their last four home-and-away games in 2020.
The match will feature Geelong’s longest serving captain and current AFL top 100 elite player Joel Selwood in his 311th game, and it is not beyond possibilities that Selwood – who currently is the third greatest game player at Geelong – could become the Cats’ greatest game player in 2021.
Like Mundy at Fremantle, though, he would need to have a year with little interruption due to injury or other factors.
The final game of Saturday between Brisbane and Sydney could possibly provide the highlight of Round 1: the return of Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin to the Sydney team.
Franklin missed the entire 2020 season with injury, so despite being an AFL top 100 game player and goal scorer, a Hawthorn top 100 game player and goal scorer and a Sydney top 100 goal scorer, he has yet to make the cut and become a top 100 game player at the Swans.
He is only one game away, so his first game in the red and white will see him reach the target and join the elite group who can still claim the double trifecta: top 100 games and goals at two separate clubs and the AFL.
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