Opinion
Happy New Year, everybody!
The countdown to Round 1, 2023 officially starts now – so throughout January, I’ll be looking at all 18 AFL clubs and doing my best to put together an optimum team for the new year.
I’ll take injuries and suspensions into account, but this won’t be a predicted team for Round 1 – think of it more as a guide to what your team’s best 23 (the 22 starting players plus the new unrestricted substitute) could look like as the year unfolds.
It’s a crucial season for the Adelaide Crows in 2023. After three years of steady, incremental improvement under Matthew Nicks, it’s time for a developing side to at least threaten a finals return for the first time since their grand final appearance in 2017.
There’s plenty to get excited about – boom recruit Izak Rankine adds to a burgeoning group of talented young small forwards, while the midfield, led by ball magnet Rory Laird, tackling machine Sam Berry and returning skipper Rory Sloane looks quietly promising.
However, the Crows still have plenty of rough edges to be sanded, and shortcomings in their squad are still obvious. They lack a bona fide second tall defender to take some pressure off the impressive Jordon Butts; they ranked fourth-last and last respectively for uncontested possessions and marks in 2022, indicating issues with their outside ball movement; and with Paul Seedsman’s future uncertain after missing all of last year with significant concussion woes, the wing role proved beyond Nicks to fill.
All of this will need to be addressed should the Crows hope to crack the eight in 2023 – let’s take a look and see what means they have at their disposal to do just that.
The Crows ranked 14th for points against in the 2022 home-and-away season: considering two of the teams below them, West Coast and North Melbourne, were among the worst defensive sides the AFL has ever seen, that’s far from ideal.
Part of the problem, especially late in the season, came from conceding bags of goals to opposition key forwards: Hawk Mitch Lewis had five by half time in Round 17, Port Adelaide’s Todd Marshall four in Round 23, and of course, Josh Kennedy went into retirement with eight in his last game for West Coast in Round 21.
Jordon Butts is a beauty as the number one key defender, notwithstanding the bath Kennedy gave him, but he needs support. Kennedy got him time and again leading into open space with nary a chop out in sight, which – combined with the Eagles feeding him at every chance – led to a flood of goals.
Butts is great one-on-one – just a week earlier, he’d done a tremendous job holding Carlton’s Harry McKay – but he’s not the quickest off the mark, making that support oh so crucial. Notably, Tom Doedee, who usually fulfils that role, was missing against the Eagles.
I’d love to see Jordan Dawson fill that role as well in 2023, and use his height and excellent reading of the play defensively as well as offensively.
He was used often on the wing in 2022 as a quasi-Seedsman replacement, but I’m still adamant his best role is as a distributor coming out of defensive 50, and at least try to combat some of the Crows’ famously dodgy disposal where turnovers hurt you the most.
That would also mean Brodie Smith, coming towards the end of his career, has less pressure on him as the number one ball user in transition, and can shift into more of a lockdown roll on opposition gun small forwards
The X-factor in this mix is Wayne Milera; after an injury-plagued last few years, he has flagged a return to half-back in 2023.
Dawson is more rangy than genuinely quick, and it’s been a while since Smith’s line-breaking runs from his younger days were seen on the regular, so a fully fit Milera could be just the rebounding option to allow the Crows a quick transition to their bevy of quality forwards.
As for the second tall, the Crows experimented late in the season with youngsters Nick Murray and Josh Worrell, both of whom showed glimpses of promise: I suspect, though, that along with Butts only one of them can be named in the first-choice team without becoming too top-heavy, especially with Doedee capable of punching above his weight against opposition talls on occasion.
I am, however, holding out hope that after a rough start to his AFL career, Fischer McAsey can return from his time away from the club and lock down that second key tall spot. A talented enough junior to go pick 6 in the 2019 draft, McAsey has fallen a long way out of favour since his last senior game in 2020 – but his best is good enough to overtake Murray and Worrell in the pecking order… if he can find it.
Speaking of Doedee, it’s probably time for the Crows to consider him as a legitimate captaincy option. With Rory Sloane returning from a knee injury (and, but we’ll get to this later, borderline best 23 if the Crows are serious about a finals tilt), it would surely be beneficial for both player and club to facilitate a transition while Sloane is still around to offer experience and wisdom to the next generation.
The youngest of the Crows’ four acting captains in 2022 – the others Ben Keays, Reilly O’Brien and Brodie Smith – Doedee is one of the AFL’s most courageous players, oozes leadership potential, and is a galvanising force in the Crows’ defence. He’d be an excellent captain if given the nod.
Father-son recruit Max Michalanney will also be part of the Crows fans, and probably straightaway.
Whether he develops into a genuine dour stopper or a more exciting rebounder, he had a lot of strings to his bow in defence in his junior career, and the Crows would want to give him as many early chances as possible to expose him to AFL level while the likes of Smith are still around to pass on the wisdom of experience. Whether he’s an upgrade over a known quantity like Chayce Jones is unknown, but it’s well worth trying for the first few months of the season at least.
You can find fault with a lot of things about the Crows, but you can never doubt their ticker. They get their hands dirty, they hunt the hard ball, and even when their disposal by foot lets them down they’re seldom disgraced in defeat.
It’s time, though, to combine that competitive desire with outside skill and take the next step from plucky underdog to finals contender. And given the list at the Crows’ disposal, that probably requires some thinking outside the box.
He fell badly out of favour in 2022 (Crows fans, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my recollection is him shirking a contest didn’t go down well with Nicks), but Lachlan Sholl couldn’t be a better fit to solve the Crows’ outside issues if he can nail down a wing in 2023.
Ultra-impressive in his first couple of years by foot, he was reportedly linked to Carlton before they preferred Blake Acres as a winger; but the fact the Crows have locked him in until 2024 speaks to his potential.
He played the first nine games in 2022 before managing just two – both as medical sub – for the rest of the season, and I refuse to believe his attributes can’t make them better if given the right role.
I’m going out on a limb for the other wing spot, but Jake Soligo would be a left-field choice that just might prove sage in a few years’ time. Ultra-impressive in his first AFL season last year, he’s hard at the ball, tackles fiercely and wins his own ball – but at 180cm, he strikes me as being too small for the modern, Marcus Bontempelli-Patrick Cripps specimens he’ll be coming up against.
The Crows are spoiled for choice when it comes to tough, in-and-under guys, and Soligo in particular was renowned as a junior for his two-way running and work rate. The wing role has grown in importance over the last few years – Ed Langdon in particular has been crucial for Melbourne – so if the Crows can bed down two of them for the long term in Soligo and Sholl, it would mean one less thing to worry about.
Mitch Hinge is the other option as a defensive winger: but to be brutally honest, the Crows probably aren’t going anywhere anytime soon if he’s getting opportunities ahead of Soligo and Sholl.
As for the engine room, expect Reilly O’Brien to keep having to fight for the number one ruck spot with Kieran Strachan, but his back end to 2022 was substantially better after being scared into lifting by being dropped, so it’s again O’Brien’s spot to lose for 2023.
Rory Laird won’t be going anywhere after basically bringing his own footy in 2022 – I’d love to see him be more penetrative with his ball use as the undisputed leader of the midfield brigade, but it’s hard to fault a guy who averaged nearly 33 touches a game. Ditto Sam Berry, who pound for pound is the best tackler in the game – incidentally, his 181cm frame is why I’m pushing so hard for Soligo to be tried on a wing, as having all three of your starting centre-bounce mids under six feet tall would really become a hindrance when it comes to winning the hard ball.
As for the third starter, I’ve been an unashamed Jackson Hately megafan since his junior days, and remain convinced he just needs a solid run in the midfield to arrive at AFL level. Nicks’ weirdest move in 2022 was shifting Hately to a wing in Round 12 after an ultra-impressive month in the guts. It didn’t take long for him to prove he was about as suited to the role as he would have been if Nicks had asked him to play in the ruck.
At 190cm, Hately better fits the modern midfield prototype, and is a significantly bigger body than Laird, Berry, Soligo and Harry Schoenberg, who you can also expect to see running around the Crows’ midfield in 2023. He’ll need to work on his disposal efficiency, but he’s hardly alone in that at West Lakes, and his build alone offers a point of difference in an Adelaide engine room that looked decidedly one-trick for a lot of 2022.
I’ve left Rory Sloane until last, but with the amount of quality options the Crows have in midfield, I can’t help feeling his time in the engine room should be in bursts alone. Interestingly, in the match he injured his knee, a win over Richmond, he spent most of his time starting in attack, not attending a single centre bounce.
There’s still a spot for him in Adelaide’s best 22 – we’ll get to that – but for the good of the team, his time as a starting mid is probably over.
Rory Sloane and Patrick Dangerfield. (Photo by James Elsby/AFL Photos/Getty Images)
Here’s where it gets interesting for the Crows. Their midfield is limited by foot, the backline a touch ragtag, but Adelaide have put together a forward line that definitely has top-eight quality.
It’s just a matter of getting it to them enough. The Crows ranked 13th for average inside 50s in 2022, and as a consequence, finished 14th for total home-and-away points. Adding Izak Rankine is all well and good, but won’t mean much if they can’t get the ball beyond the 50m arc.
You might have noticed I left Ben Keays out of my midfield group – I’ve given Nicks a bit of grief in this write-up, but will concede his late-season call to move Keays into the forward group has some legs. After three goals against Carlton while trying to keep Adam Saad accountable, he didn’t add to the tally, but there are enough high-quality opposition half-backs to make that move worth persisting with in 2022, especially given the Crows’ abundance of hard-nut midfielders that don’t kick so good.
The key forwards basically pick themselves: Taylor Walker might still be the Crows’ most important player, and even though he’s 33 in April, should still be worth his two-plus goals a game and take the opposition’s best defender. That leaves space free for Darcy Fogarty to continue to blossom: if he can get more of the ball than his 9 disposals per game average in 2022, his incredible goalkicking accuracy could make him a legitimate Coleman Medal contender down the track.
After just 11 games in 2022, it’s also time for Riley Thilthorpe to get an extended run in attack. After five goals on debut in 2021, he’s yet to kick more than two in a game again – but he’s a mountain of a man who can clunk a mark and take a spell in the ruck, and he’s just got too much potential to languish in the SANFL.
The smalls are where the Crows can really build moving forward: Rankine’s addition is a serious coup even if they did have to pay up to bring him over from Gold Coast.
Izak Rankine. (Photo by Sarah Reed/Getty Images)
In tandem with Josh Rachele, who should go from strength to strength after an exceptionally promising debut season hampered by a few teething problems, that’s enough to give opposition defences sleepless nights – and as an added bonus, both should be capable in 2023 of the occasional stint in the midfield to add some spark and raw pace to a group of otherwise solid citizens. Think ‘poor man’s Shai Bolton’ to begin with, but the sky is really the limit with Rankine in that role.
Shane McAdam as the mid-sized option is also well worth continuing with: an exceptional mark for his height, all he needs is two goals a game, and further improvement to the defensive side of his game, and he’ll continue to be an asset. With Rachele and Rankine as bona fide goalkicking options, I’d love to see McAdam become the pressure forward every good side needs – but if he can’t, new recruit Billy Dowling could be worth a look as a scoreboard-hitting midfielder who dominated the SANFL U18s.
That leaves Ned McHenry and Lachie Murphy as the smalls who make way for Rankine – any complaints, Crows fans?
Backs: Tom Doedee (c), Jordon Butts, Brodie Smith
Half-backs: Jordan Dawson, Nick Murray, Wayne Milera
Centres: Jake Soligo, Rory Laird, Lachlan Sholl
Followers: Reilly O’Brien, Sam Berry, Jackson Hately
Half-forwards: Ben Keays, Darcy Fogarty, Josh Rachele
Forwards: Riley Thilthorpe, Taylor Walker, Izak Rankine
Interchange: Shane McAdam, Max Michalanney, Harry Schoenberg, Rory Sloane
Substitute: Ned McHenry
Emergencies: Billy Dowling, Mitch Hinge, Chayce Jones
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