Who are the scariest AFL players going around at the moment?

If your team is up against them, it doesn’t matter how badly they are playing or what they have done up to that point in the game. If winning time comes, who are you afraid of?

That’s the criteria. Throw form out the window. Who are the players, when they strut on the field, you think “Gee, we have to stop this guy” – stats or recent form be damned?

Personally, I am usually afraid of forwards. The question I ask myself is never ‘how are we going to get past this guy?’ but instead ‘how are we going to stop this guy?’

As a result, there are no defenders on the list. I will note that someone like a peak Jeremy McGovern or an Alex Rance might have made their way onto this list in recent years because they were almost omnipresent every time the ball went forward of centre. I don’t think that there is necessarily one such defender in the game at the moment.

I also want to note that this won’t really be a stats-based column. This isn’t about that. It’s about pure feeling. It’s about the players that fill you with dread and hatred during the game, but as soon as the game is over and they have ripped your heart out, that dread and hatred is replaced by grudging respect.

We’ll start with number seven.

7. Tom Hawkins
Hawkins is 33 years old. Has played over 300 games and is well on his way to 700 goals. How is he still on the list?

Because he’s exactly the same player that he’s been since 2012. It’s almost a decade straight of being one of the three or four best key forwards in the game.

Since 2012, his lowest goal total is 46. His lowest game total is 19. He has had, for every year, between 14 and 24 goal assists.

The man is a freak and is genuinely ageing like a fine wine, if he is even ageing at all. But this exercise isn’t really about stats, it’s about the feeling that you get when the ball is coming toward him.

There aren’t many quite as scary as Hawkins. He’s built like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and looks like he’s had roughly the same amount of work done. The difference is Mickey was slipping in The Wrestler, but Hawkins is still the guy.

Some will say that this should have been Jeremy Cameron. But Cameron doesn’t fill me with dread in the same way that a behemoth like Hawkins does when the ball is on its way.

Cameron is a half forward flanker in a key forward’s body. Hawkins is bigger, stronger, better and honestly looks more like an action movie hero. Hawkins is in at number seven on the fear rankings.

6. Charlie Cameron
If Hawkins scares you with size and strength, Cameron scares you with speed and sizzle.

No player in the AFL accelerates more ferociously than Charlie Cameron. He’s like a Formula 1 car: one second he’s there and the next he’s not.

This is true when he’s in pursuit of the ball or the player on the opposition team who has the ball. You cannot stroll out of the back line when Cameron is in the mood because he will absolutely mow you down.

Beyond that, he’s spring heeled. He has the ability to jump straight up that you see in only the rarest of athlete highlight reels.

And finally, Cameron can talk to a ball in the way very few can. As soon as he gets the ball you can feel through the TV that the Gabba crowd swells and whispers of ‘what’s Charlie going to do here’ swirl around the ground.

It’s that sort of hum and murmur around the ground when an opposing player gets the ball that makes me freak out. Have they seen something that I don’t know? Is he good from this pocket and I just haven’t watched them closely enough? Surely he couldn’t from there, but the fans seem excited?

Charlie Cameron elicits all of those questions from me constantly, whenever he’s around the ball.

5. Max King
King is the youngest player on this list by a mile. He’s 21 years old and hasn’t yet hit 50 games.

But the fact is that when he gets a run and jump at the ball and gets both of the dukes up, it’s like trying to spoil the Empire State Building. Beyond that, when King really gets rolling, he’s a totally unstoppable player.

Three times this season he has ripped games away from the opposition. Firstly, he did it against Fremantle in the second game of the season just after a potentially crushing loss to Collingwood.

He barely touched it in the first half. In the third quarter King kicked three goals in 132 seconds of game time. King finished with four. Saints won.

The next week versus Richmond, it was a close game at three-quarter time with the Tigers leading by four. Dylan Grimes was out injured by this point. King kicked four goals in the fourth quarter after having none over the first three. Saints won in a canter.

Then against Adelaide, Saints won another nail biter. King, once again, kicked four in the second half. Saints won.

King has been the difference in winning and losing at least three times this season. His kicking is improving by the week, 1.7 against GWS notwithstanding.

But more than that, barracking against him is like barracking against Steph Curry. Even if he’s done nothing, if it’s a close game and he makes one 32 footer at the start of the fourth quarter, you don’t think ‘well he’s missed everything else, he’ll probably keep missing’.

Instead, you think ‘well how many more is he going to make?’ You ask the same thing of Max King. He is the definition of scary.

4. Christian Petracca
Petracca is a little different to the rest of the players on this list. He is probably the single best player in the AFL at the moment.

Week in and week out, he is among the more consistent players in the AFL, unlike some of the more mercurial talents on this list.

But really, despite these things, there aren’t many scarier than him. When the game is on the line at a certain point it comes down to will to win.

Footy is as complicated as it is simple, and sometimes the guy that tries the hardest and wants it the most is the one who you should fear.

Petracca, in every game that he plays, tries the hardest and wants it the most. He’s Rocky Balboa’s heart and body with Apollo Creed’s skills.

He is one of three players in the modern game that can rip the ball out of the opposition’s hands, explode out of the middle and either hit a leading forward lace out or kick a goal.

Equally, you can play him in the forward line and say good luck to whoever has the misfortune of playing on him. He can mark the ball reasonably strongly but it’s panic stations when he gets the ball to ground.

He can explode through tackles, pick up the ball with ease and grace and it feels like he is incapable of missing from inside 50 metres. He is a true superstar.

3. Toby Greene
Now we’re getting to the big dogs. Greene is not playing all that well at the moment, I concede. But that honestly is kind of the point of the list.

The Tigers played GWS in the second round of the season and I was counting my lucky stars that Greene wasn’t playing.

In the 2019 grand final, the player that worried me was Toby Greene. I knew that we were better, but Greene was the one who I thought could rip the game away from us, more than Josh Kelly, Stephen Coniglio, Jeremy Cameron, or Nick Haynes.

It was Greene. He’s like the shark from Jaws. He feels inevitable and whenever he’s around the ball there is an unmistakable air of danger.

He’s unpredictable in every single way and that makes him scary. He could blow his stack again, as he so often has, and kick a player in the head or push an umpire.

Or he could elevate for a mark that he has no business taking. He could find a teammate that he has no business finding. He could kick a goal that he has no business kicking.

Even if he isn’t playing well, Toby Greene is to me the embodiment of terror in modern footy.

2. Dustin Martin
What makes Dustin Martin scary, when you boil it down, is his air of menace.

His physical appearance is menacing. He has piercing eyes, is covered in tatts, and has proven himself to be as strong as any player in recent memory.

But beyond all of that, the air of menace is in the way he performs and the way he puts together games and seasons.

It’s like he is constantly waiting for the right moment to strike. Kobe Bryant (and before him Roger Mayweather) took the nickname ‘Black Mamba’ for himself, but it might equally be applicable to Martin.

For the first few years of his career, he was denied the accolades his clear ability should have granted him. He was not consistent enough. He didn’t appear to try as hard as he could at all times. He floated in and out of games.

Then after 2017, everything changed. It was that year when he did apply himself fully, and he put together the greatest season in the history of professional Australian rules football.

All of those menacing physical and aura-based traits combined with the consistent ability to wreck a game, lifting when it mattered again and again.

After 2017, that inconsistency and the floating came to be celebrated, especially because he turned it on in finals again and again. That floating made him even scarier.

It was always when is he going to lift? Not is he going to lift.

If he gets near the ball and the Tigers need a goal, he’s going to kick it. Never mind he’s had four disposals in the first half, Martin is the one that causes fear in the heart of the opposition.

Dustin Martin’s greatness is quantifiable and has been quantified in the form of a Brownlow, three premierships, three Norm Smiths and a cavalcade of other achievements.

But what can’t be quantified without an ECG machine is the level of the heart attacks that he gives opposing fans when he gathers the ball off his laces inside 50 and has a look at the big sticks when the game is in the balance because he, they and I just know he’s going to kick it.

Look at the opposition with his piercing eyes and remind them who the king is.

1. Lance Franklin
There’s only one comparison for Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin and it’s an apt one, given what’s currently happening at the box office.

Franklin is Tom Cruise. He’s undeniable at this point. You see him swaggering into anything and it’s a certainty that it’s going to be a success.

Franklin sends defenders scrambling even today in year 17 in the same way that Tom Cruise releases a movie and no studio wants to go up against him in the box office, even as he nears 60 years old.

Franklin has had his Magnolia moments of speed and power and strength below his knees but some of that is gone, so now he’s just playing the hits.

Franklin getting the ball in the centre square and seeing an open goal square is the second most box office thing in the world at the moment, falling short only to Tom Cruise in an F-14 with a sick helmet.

At a time when Marvel and DC superheroes are taking over the business of cinema, placating fans with nods to past movies, Tom Cruise is his own superhero.

The only shared DNA between Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise in Top Gun is Tom Cruise. He’s his own franchise and nobody wants to go against him.

Franklin is the same way. Often imitated, never duplicated and he’s still in his own category as far as freaking out opposing players and fans.

There are better forwards than Franklin today. There are none scarier.

In a room where the ten best forwards in the AFL are talking, I guarantee Franklin is the centre of gravity in that room.

If you play the car key game in the same, Franklin is walking out with the keys and driving the group to the next place.

He is the alpha among alphas. The number one apex predator in the AFL, even in year 17.