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We had the game of the series, a bunch of other thrillers and some moving and shaking on the ladder – it’s all systems go for the final five weeks of the home-and-away season.
Collingwood are now two games clear on top of the ladder after one of the great wins, while Port Adelaide must not only deal with the heartbreak of defeat, but also the looming possibility, with Brisbane and Melbourne closing in, that a home qualifying final is far from sealed up just yet.
The Lions and Dees dodged bullets themselves, but that was nothing compared to the one St Kilda Keanu Reavesed their way out of against North Melbourne to finish off the round. Around them in fifth and seventh, the Western Bulldogs and GWS got the job done to make things very tricky for Essendon and Gold Coast respectively, and set up a mouth-watering, eight-shaping clash next week.
From heartbreaking injuries to defensive blunders and everything in between, there’s plenty to unpack – so let’s get stuck in.
It’s a sign of how instantly Will Ashcroft has become one of the most respected footballers in the AFL that news of his ruptured ACL on Sunday morning was met with near-universal devastation around the footy world.
It’s a bigger blow to Brisbane’s hopes of a premiership than surely anyone could have anticipated when he walked in the door at the end of last season; even as a number one draft pick just about destined for greatness in the eyes of every draft pundit in the business, the impact he has had on the Lions from the word go has been profound.
Goodness knows how his class, toughness and game awareness will be replaced around the ball as the Lions head into September – it might be time to permanently inject Cam Rayner or Zac Bailey on-ball – but the one, however, miniscule, positive is this: Ashcroft has surely already done enough in 18 AFL games to be crowned the 2023 Rising Star.
Yes, the pool is about as deep any in recent history, with Harry Sheezel and Mitch Owens the other frontrunners and all of Max Michalanney, Finn Callaghan, Jye Amiss and maybe even Bailey Humphrey live chances to poll votes – Luke Pedlar is ineligible due to suspension but would otherwise be among the leading candidates as well.
But I think, just as happened a bit to Sam Walsh in his debut season, that Ashcroft has been so consistently excellent this season, especially as part of a midfield with no shortage of stars, that it has almost flown under the radar just how good he has been already. And missing the final four games of the home-and-away season shouldn’t detract from that in any way, shape or form.
Ashcroft ranks third for the Lions for disposals this year, with Lachie Neale and Josh Dunkley ahead – he’s also third behind those two four tackles, fourth behind them and Oscar McInerney for clearances, and fifth behind them and Hugh McCluggage for contested possessions. He’s 19 years old.
He also kicked what might be the Goal of the Year.
Sheezel has had the ball in his hands more and has been brilliant, but in my opinion it’s got to count for something that Ashcroft is doing all this in arguably the competition’s best midfield. To have not just forced his way in almost instantaneously, even shifting McCluggage to a wing for big parts of the season, is significant: I can’t be the only one who thought heading into the season he’d need to bide his time as a forward with stints on ball this year.
As good as the rest of the field has been – I’ve loved Owens’ season as much as anyone in Rising Star contention – I just can’t go past Ashcroft. And I still believe the award should be judged as much on the chances of future superstardom as it does performance in the season in which the player was nominated.
Marcus Bontempelli was, in my view, robbed of the 2014 award, despite being the obvious standout player of that year’s crop, because the view was his 16 outrageous games was less meritorious than 22 good to reasonable ones from Lewis Taylor.
Ashcroft, too, will miss a few games. It shouldn’t matter – any judge can see that this man is going to be a star of the game for years to come. Frankly, as he goes through a tough next 12 months rehabbing his knee, it’s the least the game can do for him.
Will Ashcroft. (Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
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Craig McRae and Ken Hinkley have made this a two-horse race for coach of the year honours – but what Sam Mitchell is doing at Hawthorn can’t be discounted.
A heavy favourite for the wooden spoon heading into the season, Mitchell’s Hawks might sit 16th on the ladder, but they have taken the fight up to many teams significantly higher than them on the ladder, and having thoroughly outplayed Richmond for three quarters at the MCG on Saturday, were on track for one of their most impressive wins yet.
But for all his coaching ingenuity, particularly in making the Hawks lethal around stoppages, there’s one thing Mitchell needs to fix: how they handle a tight lead in the final minutes.
That’s three times now this season – the others against GWS in Gather Round and Adelaide in Tasmania – where the Hawks have coughed up games late in the piece.
Against the Crows, they paid the price and were criticised for not stacking enough numbers behind the ball and allowing space for Darcy Fogarty’s match-winning set shot; something similar, but actually more egregious, happened against the Tigers.
With a minute left and leading by just five points, have a look at the below behind the goals vision and see how the Hawks set up behind the ball with the Tigers coming on the half-forward flank – or, actually, how they DIDN’T set up.
The first thing I notice is Kamdyn McIntosh, all alone in the hot spot, with not a Hawk near him. Every brown and gold player, whether by design or because of inexperience, has been sucked up to the ball, which is fine, but it takes a good five seconds for anyone to realise that the Tigers are one hacked kick away from an easy goal – by which time, as McIntosh is manned up, Dion Prestia has replaced him as the loose man in the corridor.
Liam Baker ends up pouncing on a spoil to kick the winning goal, but if he felt like it, he had Prestia five metres in the clear for an easy handball to put it through anyway.
The Hawks had done so well up until then to take much of the sting out of the contest, controlling play at the stoppages, taking time off the clock and maintaining possession with great effect. That it took the Tigers until the last minute to head them was a credit to a young team that was always a danger of being overrun.
All the same, as aggressive as the Hawks are in just about every facet, it’s probably time for them to find a better way to defend when they have a match in their keeping. Especially with one of the game’s leading interceptors in James Sicily at his disposal, there is no reason this isn’t a fixable issue.
Do that, and the Hawks can nab two or three extra wins next year – it might be the difference between a season of treading water and an unlikely finals berth.
(Photo by Daniel Carson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
Toby Greene might have got most of the plaudits out of GWS’ sixth consecutive win over Gold Coast in Canberra on Sunday.
But at the other end of the ground, there was a Giant who was just as crucial to their latest triumph, and he’s been doing it for weeks: Sam Taylor.
The reigning All-Australian centre-half back took a quality opponent in Ben King to the cleaners at Manuka Oval, not just keeping him goalless and with just four disposals to his name, but claiming another swathe of intercept marks for good measure.
It’s no coincidence his return from a serious hamstring injury against Fremantle in Round has coincided perfectly with the Giants’ surge, and remarkably, a win next week over the Western Bulldogs in Ballarat might just be what secures them a finals berth – and it’s an eminently winnable game in their current mood.
The Dogs will need to do something to curb Taylor’s influence, because right now, he’s the best key defender in the game and is only not an All-Australian lock because of the six games he missed through injury. Which is where Rory Lobb comes in.
Lobb kicked five goals in the Bulldogs’ VFL rout over the Northern Bullants, and with key forward replacement Buku Khamis quiet on Friday night against Essendon, is a good chance to earn a recall. But having struggled so consistently for impact all season long, his way to provide a key role for the Dogs in Ballarat next Saturday might be to keep Taylor accountable.
Lobb is a big man, moves nimbly for his size, and is athletically more than capable of matching Taylor. It might also make things less complicated for him: Taylor’s superb reading of the play means all he’d really need to do is follow him to the footy, and then try and equalise.
The Giant will most likely make a beeline for Aaron Naughton at the first bounce, who was given a working over by Bombers interceptor Jordan Ridley on Friday night. If Lobb can at least occupy his attention, then it makes Naughton’s job easier, and consequently an easier path to goal for the team as a whole.
(Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
St Kilda, with five rounds to go, are sixth on the ladder, and I have absolutely no idea now.
That’s twice in a month the Saints have trailed one of the bottom two at half time – West Coast in Perth followed by Sunday’s abysmal start against North Melbourne – and pulled it out of the fire late to dodge the mother of all bullets.
This was the bigger steal, the Saints down by 16 at three quarter time before kicking five in the last quarter – they’d managed four in the first three – to squeak past North and old coach Brett Ratten.
The frustrating part is this: the Saints’ first 15 minutes of the final quarter, in which they kicked four of those goals, was exceptional. They attacked with flair reminiscent of the early days of the season, and Ross Lyon’s masterstroke of having Rowan Marshall attend centre bounce ruck contests and then shoot forward paid off in spades with a pair of telling marks and one clutch goal.
It was the same against the Eagles: the Saints only seem able, or willing, to play this way when faced with doom if they do otherwise. At all other times, it’s been slow, stodgy, error-riddled and awful, to the point where both the Eagles and Kangaroos have left their games knowing a win was there for the taking.
This was a performance that makes it hard to see the Saints clinging onto their finals spot. They’ll need to win three of their last five, and their next four are all at Marvel Stadium – including, inexplicably, an away game against Hawthorn this week – but the Hawks game is the only one they’ll start favourites in, and even that one is looking seriously dicey on current form.
Still, they’ve kept themselves in the hunt, which is more than can be said of Fremantle, or Adelaide, or Gold Coast. Rarely has a team ever been in the eight yet felt more unlikely to be finals-bound than this mob, but they’ve gritted their way into a puncher’s chance. Somehow.
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If that was Adelaide’s season – and I expect it was – then they couldn’t have given more to try and keep it alive.
The Crows’ last quarter, coming from the clouds to very nearly pinch a match in Melbourne’s control from virtually start to finish, was nothing short of magnificent. Tougher in close, more daring on the outside and unleashing a wave of incredibly speedy ball movement, the Demons were just about powerless to stop them.
To their credit, Melbourne rallied, responded to the Crows’ four-goal burst to tie the scores, kicked three in a row, and then held their nerve when the visitors came again with three more goals in a tense final minute. They’re a good side, and for the second week in a row, have bested a high-quality interstate side at the MCG to just about wrap up a top-four spot come finals time.
I wrote a few weeks ago in far more harsh terms about the Crows following their loss to Collingwood, basically saying they bottled a statement win for the taking. I’m more positive about this loss, partly because it comes with their season already just about over, and also partly because Sunday’s performance would have been a Magpies-esque heist if they’d pulled it off.
But make no mistake, Adelaide’s slim finals hopes are now shot. Another loss, and heading into a Showdown without Izak Rankine along with Josh Rachele after their livewire – who, by the way, was best afield at the MCG – went down with a serious-looking hamstring injury at three quarter time. If winning their last five games wasn’t going to be tough enough already, taking down Port Adelaide for a second time this season without both of them looms as just about impossible.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more confident that the Crows are going to be something special next year, and for the years to come. With no Rory Laird against a fearsome Demons midfield, a team that’s still developing under Matthew Nicks has all the building blocks in place for a serious crack at the top.
Only time will tell whether they can make good on all that.
To be clear, this isn’t a message for every Collingwood supporter, or indeed most of them.
This is for the small section of Magpies fans who felt the need to, after your team pulled off its latest and probably greatest heist to beat Port Adelaide on their own turf and just about seal the minor premiership, target Willie Rioli with racist messages described by the Pies as ‘abhorrent and disgusting’.
Yes, every club has a section of their fan base who do this – and it sucks. But it sucks even harder than usual when it’s coming from supporters who have had it as good as any in the history of our game over the last 18 months, and whose attention should have been on celebrating a famous win from a team as entertaining, exhilarating and likeable as any in my lifetime.
Sure, Rioli whacked Nathan Murphy off the ball and it’s natural to be upset about it. But it’s just as despicable to engage in retaliatory abuse, whether anonymous or otherwise, and the result is that this will at least share the spotlight when we should only be talking about one of the great wins by a club that is doing some of the most extraordinary things our game has ever seen.
What’s most disappointing is that Collingwood as a club, from Darcy Moore to Craig McRae and all the way up to the board, have been doing their best to consign the ‘everyone hates us and we hate them’ Magpie mindset of most of their history. Almost totally gone is the arrogance and self-grandeur of this club that was part and parcel of the Eddie McGuire years especially – no doubt helped that his replacement as president, Jeff Browne, is mostly content to let his side do all the talking on the field.
That section of supporters that racially vilified Rioli would do well to take the same approach – and it’s not just on this occasion. It was Collingwood fans that made national news earlier this year for their targeted booing of Lance Franklin at the MCG – and then actually took issue with McRae and the club itself coming out and saying they had a problem with that in a statement, which was somehow even more disappointing than the booing itself.
I wrote after Round 1 this year that the Magpies under McRae had done the impossible and become likeable.
I’m going to have to make a correction to that: the Pies as a whole will never completely turn around their identity until the basket of ferals who do things like racially abuse Indigenous footballers pull their heads in and stop embodying the worst stereotypes generations of rival supporters have come to expect of them.
Your club is doing so many wonderful things – right now, you’re doing your best to undo a lot of that great work, on the field and off. Stop it.
Willie Rioli. (Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)
Random thoughts
– I think my feelings about a finals wildcard round can best be summed up with: ehhh, okay, fine.
– Jack Viney is something else when the game’s on the line.
– Just quietly, Marcus Windhager has arrived. Super late against North with the game on the line.
– Seeing Izak Rankine’s reaction to what seems like a serious hamstring injury was devastating. Footy’s cruel sometimes.
– I’m glad he’s on my team.
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