Opinion
After all the excitement and drama of the Friday and Saturday games, the three Sunday games turned out to be fizzers, and the last day of home-and-away matches finished with a whimper.
It needn’t have been this way had the Dockers shown the desperation, commitment and fight to overcome the Saints in the first game of the three held in Hobart.
The lacklustre Fremantle outfit held St Kilda at bay for a while, but they were never in front for the whole game. The Saints continued to increase their lead and eventually ran out winners by nearly ten goals.
Cooper Sharman took the opportunity to impress for St Kilda with four goals in his fifth game, giving him a total of ten for the year, and Jack Bytel kicked his first two goals in AFL football, while no Docker player managed to kick more than one.
Even the incentive of Blake Acres’s 100th AFL game against his old club failed to lift the Dockers, and as a result the next game became a dead rubber as the Bombers’ position in the eight was no longer under threat.
Despite this, Essendon took the opportunity to practise their skills in the second quarter, scoring six goals to one by the Collingwood kids and ending the game as a contest. Eventually they ran out winners by 38 points against a brave but inexperienced Magpies outfit.
Both the in-form Peter Wright and Alec Waterman kicked four goals, while Jake Stringer and Devon Smith showed they were reaching peak form in preparation for next week’s elimination final against Western Bulldogs in Tasmania on Sunday with two goals each.
For Collingwood, core players Taylor Adams, Jamie Elliott and Jordan de Goey led from the front, with Jamie Elliott providing a good target up front, scoring four goals. But in an incident that summed up the whole game his potential fifth goal, which would have taken his total career goals to 200, was touched by the man on the mark before it sailed straight through.
Jamie Elliott (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
The final game of the home-and-away season had no impact on the final eight. It was a contest between the two clubs that had battled to avoid the wooden spoon in 2020 and, while North Melbourne had already claimed that unwanted distinction for this year – it’s their first wooden spoon in over 50 years – for Adelaide it was the opportunity to showcase their improvement from last year and climb above Collingwood and Gold Coast to finish 15th.
Unlike the other two Sunday matches, the lead did change in this game, but the Crows were never headed after the first quarter and eventually won by 44 points.
Shane McAdam kicked three goals for the winners and debutante Lachlan Gollant had the distinction of being the last player to kick his maiden goal in the regular season.
Nick Larkey kicked three goals for the Kangaroos, which took his career total past teammate and fellow top-100 goal kicker Cameron Zurhaar, who was injured and subbed out of the game with no goals to his name.
Other highlights of the game were the final appearance of David Mackay and Tom Lynch, who both scored a goal for the Crows.
Like Chris Mayne at Collingwood, Mackay finished his career on 248 AFL games, and like Jamie Elliott at Collingwood, Tom Lynch’s one goal meant he finished the season and his career at Adelaide with 199 club goals.
The difference is that in his two years at the Saints – and before he played his first game for the Crows – Lynch had kicked four goals, taking his AFL total to 203 goals.
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