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“Take this Friday night game at the SCG – but beware, you’re playing Geelong again.”
“That’s bad.”
“But you’ll have 16 marks inside 50 in the first half!”
“That’s good!”
“You’ll kick 4.12 and one from seven from inside 40 metres.”
“That’s bad.”
“But you won’t lose the game!”
“That’s good!”
“A draw contains potassium benzoate.”
*blank stare*
“That’s bad.”
“Can I go now?”
Sometimes footy is a simple game.
At the end of the day, when it all boils down to it, what matters most isn’t contested possessions, or inside 50 numbers, or the all important hitouts to advantage percentage.
AFL is a sport where the aim is to kick a little bit of leather in between the big sticks at either end of the field as many times as you can. Not that it seemed Sydney understood this at the SCG on Friday night.
It is honestly not possible for a team at the highest level to kick for goal worse than the Swans did against Geelong.
A scoreline of 6.18 already reads terribly – but it was actually worse than that. Sydney had a further eight shots at goal fail to register a score, and several of their misses truly had to be seen to be believed.
This is how their shot map looked at three quarter time.
One of those misses up close was Tom Hickey, who went full ruckman in the second term with as bad a shank as you will ever see from the top of the goalsquare – the one positive that it prompted a truly meme-worthy face from Lance Franklin and especially the Swan next to him who might just be the most Sydney-looking man I’ve ever seen in my life.
With 135 seconds to go, Robbie Fox would add his name to the hall of shame with this miss that was nearly as gruesome, and certainly more costly in the grand scheme of things.
Four of their behinds were posters – but given Fox’s was one of those, it would be wrong to suggest the Swans’ horror night was merely unlucky.
The stats say it’s the most inaccurate performance by a team all season. I’ve watched footy for 18 years and I can’t remember a butcher job this thorough.
By all rights, it should have cost Sydney the game – but luckily for them, Geelong were just as awful, but in more subtle ways that don’t jump out and smack you in the face like a shank from 15 metres out.
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This was a game that the Swans should have won by at least six goals – but paradoxically, it’s also a game that the Cats, leading by eight points with five and a half minutes to go and having grabbed all the momentum, threw away as well.
The two best teams in the competition at the pointy end of last year, they hardly resemble the powers they once were. Geelong are defensively all at sea, cut to ribbons by the Swans and exceedingly lucky their opponents couldn’t hit a barn door if it were dropped on the heads; Sydney, meanwhile, have lost all cohesion at the coalface, and once the Cats got on top after half time in the clearances they quickly lost the iron grip they’d held on proceedings up until then.
In the end, a draw is the perfect result – because given both sides have sizeable percentages by virtue of running up the score against this year’s dregs, it’s as good as a loss. And quite frankly, just like I wrote about Richmond and Fremantle’s dismal draw a little under 12 months ago, neither team deserved to win this game.
Joel Amartey of the Swans and Jake Kolodjashnij of the Cats react to a draw. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)
Let’s start with the Cats. By half time, the Swans had 39 marks in their forward half – the AFL average for a full game is 36 – and a staggering 16 inside their attacking 50. Not even West Coast last week were that sloppy in defence.
The Cats gave up 17 of the latter to GWS and Port Adelaide in recent losses, their season high: last year, the most they conceded was 15 to Richmond, and averaged just 9.44 per game.
This isn’t by any means a new problem – only Hawthorn, North Melbourne and West Coast have given up more marks inside 50 this year than the Cats’ 181, or 12.93 a game. It’s three and a half extra quality shots at goal more a match than in 2022.
As flagged at half time on Fox Footy, a lot of the problem, but not all, rests with Esava Ratugolea. Chris Scott’s mission this year has to turn the former forward into his backline fulcrum: whether the end goal is for him to be a pure interceptor in the vein of a Darcy Moore or Mitch McGovern, or primarily a Liam Jones or Callum Wilkie-esque stopped who can also pluck a mark or two along the way, it’s impossible to say.
It’s not like the move hasn’t had some success – Ratugolea averages more intercept marks (3.3) than anyone at the Cats this year, including Tom Stewart, although it must be said that he racked up a big chunk of them against the Eagles in Gather Round who at times just seemed to be kicking straight to him.
The problem is this: he reads the ball well in the air, jumps nicely, and has all the athletic attributes to be an elite AFL footballer, but he doesn’t read the play anywhere near as well as he needs to to play such a crucial role.
Intercepting talls like Moore and prime Jeremy McGovern grant their opponents scant respect, but are always careful to note what space is the most dangerous and where the ball is likely to go next. More defensively minded key backs like Wilkie and Sam Taylor aren’t that aggressive, allowing their opponents to essentially act like magnets for where the ball is going, then back themselves to read it better in the air and either take the grab or spoil instead.
Ratugolea is great at calculating a ball’s drop zone quicker than anyone else, and with his huge frame, is able to command the landing space and take marks regularly. Like this against Carlton earlier this year.
The problem is that he has a habit of assuming that the ball is always going to come in long and high, and positions himself accordingly. The Fox Footy lab had the perfect example of this during the second quarter.
In the below shot, Ratugolea, ostensibly manning Logan McDonald, actually moves further away from him as he retreats deeper inside 50, figuring that his teammates will put on enough pressure to fill the gap on 50.
In the sort of defensive communication breakdown that happened throughout the first half, that space is left empty: I can only assume, given how well-drilled and disciplined the Cats have been down back for a decade, that it was Ratugolea’s job to fill that space, because Logan McDonald gets gifted the easiest leading lane you will ever see.
Not helping matters was the fact the Cats were far too top-heavy in defence. This is the first time all season Ratugolea and Jack Henry have played in the same backline all season, with the latter coming back from his foot injury via the forward line before Ratugolea’s soft-tissue injury against GWS enabled his move into defence again.
Throw in Sam De Koning, incredible last year and good again on Friday night with four intercept marks, and you’d expect the Cats to rule the skies (spoiler alert: they didn’t) but left them vulnerable to hard leads from not just McDonald, but the dangerous Sydney smalls too.
It was notable that after half time, the Cats increased their pressure on the Sydney ball-carrier significantly, preventing easy uncontested marks and speedy ball movement through the middle, and making the job a hell of a lot easier for the defence.
After the Swans went inside 50 32 times for 16 marks in the first half, they’d do it just eight times for ONE mark in the third term; the Cats’ intercept mark numbers skyrocketed, finishing with 12 for the game to the Swans’ nine, with Henry and De Koning each contributing a game-high four.
Nevertheless, it’s something that needs to be looked at, because a big portion of those marks inside 50 came from the smalls, and in particular Sydney’s wingers in Braeden Campbell and Errol Gulden pushing aggressively into the range 40-50 metres from goal.
Between them, they’d have five grabs inside 50, and but for errant kicking could have really made the Cats pay on the scoreboard: Isaac Heeney would also have three and Papley two as well.
That the Swans had seven shots at goal in the first half from within 40 metres told you of the space they found in the most dangerous part of the ground: only kicking 1.5 from them kept the match alive, but not without the Cats doing their best to gift the game to them.
In spite of that, though, what will surely be of greater frustration to Scott is the Cats’ last ten minutes. Having tightened up defensively, begun to dominate out of the centre and far more efficient inside 50, this was a game Geelong had by the balls with ten minutes to go.
At one point, they’d taken eight contested marks in a row – remember what I said about them ruling the skies? – and it took until the 17 minute mark of the quarter for Sydney to so much as have a disposal inside 50.
It was disarming to see the Cats as sloppy as they were with the match in their keeping. Things like Max Holmes marking with not a Swan in sight 60 out, running to 50 with Brad Close the only other player within sniffing distance, and then choosing to blaze long to Gary Rohan in a one-on-one when he honestly could have run 20 metres closer and had the shot himself, we just didn’t get from Geelong last year.
I can’t remember Isaac Smith having a more jittery night than this: with 10 and a half minutes to go and the Cats a goal in front, the game is almost iced if he doesn’t drop the easiest uncontested mark he will get in his life after being laced out by Gryan Miers 30 metres out and directly in front.
Ollie Henry got to 35 and sprayed out of bounds on the full, with a chance to draw last man standing Harry Cunningham up for a Joe the Goose to Patrick Dangerfield – who himself burned a golden chance in the third quarter when he dallied too long from a set shot and was rushed into a close-range behind.
It was in leaving the centre corridor totally unguarded with the Swans two points down in the final two and a half minutes, or in having the three loose players behind the ball positioned so poorly they could only watch as the ball sailed over ALL their heads and towards Fox one out with Henry, only for him to hit the post.
It was in giving up three shots at goal in the final 135 seconds, any one of which could have sunk them entirely: all gettable shots for first Fox and then Heeney twice, two missed and one out on the full.
It was in Tom Stewart, a brick wall all night, doing the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him do with 36 seconds left: with the ball bobbling into his hands after a defensive 50 stoppage, he’d go for the most aimless of kicks, on his left foot, aiming at the centre corridor – the biggest no-no in the game.
The best-case scenario was that he actually kicked into De Koning, one of about four other players in the way of the kick when he tried it; comically, it spilled to Heeney, whose flying soccer off the ground just missed.
Future historians will look at this game and think it was the Swans who pissed two points down the drain.
But as horrific as their kicking for goal was, that was about the only thing that let them down. Geelong weren’t the better side at the SCG, but their butcher job on this match was every bit as diabolical.
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