When the other team is the Lions wearing Fitzroy colours, it is not the best time to make this pedantic point.

The torp from Sidebottom… a Peter Daicos moment.

Or maybe … the AFL coaches are the same people voting each week. That’s could magnify a bias. I am sure there are a lot more umpires who cast votes. And you don’t win a Brownlow because of one game. This guy won it by playing well in a lot of games, in a very strong team too. He was judged in March to August be a large and rotating panel of umpires.

Probably Daicos would have won without missing the final games. And then no one would be complaining. And yet it’s the same umpires casting the same votes. What we have is a player who already won the medal, who played four to five more games than Daicos & Bont. He played about the same number of games as Petracca, but he was 5 votes clear, that’s not an one game aberration. The penalty for missing games in the Brownlow is higher then All Australian, so while that’s an approximate comparison, it is far from conclusive. Perhaps if we awarded the Brownlow on the best 20 rounds per player … but that’s a different award, and having an advantage by playing more games is not the fault of the umpires.

he got 3, the AFL appealed for 4 and won.

It looks a lot like the Tom Stewart one. In both cases, the disposal had been received by the other player before impact, in other words, both were late bumps. And this one is a year later, a year that players should have spent getting the message. The AFL appealed and got 4 for Stewart over the initial 3. By that precedent, I guess the AFL is compelled to repeat the appeal if the Tribunal hands down 3 weeks.
I can’t see much difference between the two.

I thought Billy Frampton was a revelation. He’s now played on two of the top tall forwards and is learning fast.

This is not about arguments or opinions. Whether you are convinced or not doesn’t matter (sorry).
It is about legal constraints attached to the Port licence to be in the AFL. It won’t change if Collingwood FC doesn’t want it to, and why would the Board agree to do that? The only opinions that count as those of the Collingwood FC Members who elect the Board, I think.
The AFL must enforce the conditions attached to each licence. Firstly, Collingwood FC could go to court to make it so, and second, what a dreadful precedent it would set. Should Collingwood the abandon the salary cap?

Port should not be allowed to wear full black and white stripes. This was the price of entry to the AFL. The black and white brand is AFL IP of Collingwood, and so is the magpie emblem, and that’s that. There is only one black and white in the AFL. The legal and brand advice the Collingwood FC took when Port joined is as valid now as it was then; there is no chance the Collingwood Board is going to get any advice to back down, and given what Port agreed to, Port has nowhere to go on this. Sooking about it may help the Port president win votes with members, but the AFL should just send a quiet message that this debate is a dead end
Surely Port’s SANFL team wears black and white. That’s heritage.

You missed the point that these are professional footballers, paid a lot of money. The NRL provides this. If the League, or the club, has decided that it’s in the interest of the game and its future to be inclusive, so be it. These are not amateur footballers. They are acting spoilt. They want to take, but not give.

If that’s how it works, you must be puzzled by where NZ is in world cricket.
Measuring the relative standard of an Australian sport is I think impossible, apart from comparing it to the same sport played elsewhere. Of course, you can’t really do that with AFL.
Which leads to this point: You can’t see globally elite soccer players playing in Australia. You can’t even see the best Australian soccer players, because if they are good, they won’t be here. By definition, you only get to see the players who can’t get a game somewhere else coached by those who can’t get a job somewhere else. And the trophies they play for in Australia are not going to be part of anyone’s childhood dreams. Whatever else you think about AFL, its fans get to see the best of the best competing to win the sport’s most coveted trophy.

It’s not just Australian soccer which suffers in comparison. Many of the smaller European domestic leagues are pretty dire too, at least based on my experience of the Dutch first division.

The money in AFL comes from broadcast rights. AFLw will grow broadcast interest, and in any case, the AFL has much more scope to subsidise AFLw than Australian soccer.
If anyone plays a sport in Australia for the future prospect of higher earnings by moving overseas, that’s their call. But future prospects overseas don’t drive money for people playing professionally in Australia. This is true for any endeavour. If you slave away at preparing for a career as an astronaut, you might get a great job one day in the USA, but this future prospect doesn’t earn you any money while you are in Australia.
I also don’t know how someone paying to watch an Australian playing in the English Premier League brings money to Football Australia, even though EPL is a hugely more enjoyable way to spend your time. OK, transfer fees are distributed widely down to feeder clubs (at least in Europe), so maybe there is some payoff there.

At my country Victorian primary school, British Bulldogs meant capturing and lifting a runner completely off the ground. I think for the first runner, you only needed to touch. Definitely tackling, group tackling. I imagine this game has passed into history.

it’s a drop kick!

Bradbury got to the final through a series of elimination races (winning the semi-final in a similar fashion to the final), and he was already an Olympic medallist in speed skating, which was not true of all the other finalists. He was not “laughably slow”. He was fast enough to get to the final, and he skated slowly in the final in purpose. He took a smart gamble on what he thought would happen, and he needed to be out of harm’s way to capitalise on being correct. He should have got two gold medals: one for being the fastest skater (he crossed first, so he was the fastest, that’s how you win) and one for reminding everyone that experience counts.

If you are going to rant about poor umpiring judgement, change the headline.
Shaking the goalpost is not a new rule, I don’t understand the connection between the AFL administration and an umpiring decision. Judgement is required in AFL umpiring since whenever. So they don’t always get it right. This time, at least, it didn’t affect the result because the kick didn’t make it to the goal square, let alone the goal post.

The centre bounce setup was worth trying. I don’t know if we can call it a failure yet, and I certainly don’t agree that there was a mistake in the process of trialling or implementing the rule change. We shouldn’t excoriate the admin simply for trying to do something different.

You are completely wrong about grassroots participation being merely an organic development that just happened. The three factors behind the Australian Football participation increase are AFLW, AFLW and AFLW, which is completely linked to the AFL administration.

The 100m penalties are the only valid criticism, because it was decision made by the current AFL administration with predictably bad consequences.

But who have also had more wooden spoons, years of the lowest dominance. If we say that winning a flag means you were the most dominant team, do we rank a second place as being more dominant than 8th or 12th or bottom? Of what about win loss ratio in home and away games? By either of these measures, Collingwood is statistically on average the most dominant team, I would think, over all of VFL/AFL history. But who cares, history doesn’t win flags.

I see some wildcards: selection: will Pies bring in Reid? Who is the Dustin Martin, playing injured? And one of the surprising things about these teams is how well they have adapted to unexpected availability, including when it happens in-game. This could be game where dynamic coaching and moves throughout the game could be a big factor, particularly as the teams are asymmetrical, and where they have perhaps an unusual number of players who have played both offensive and defensive roles.

Weather is very unlikely to be a wildcard. Crowd: maybe. It’s the replays where the GF crowds are much more partisan, I reckon that’s an under-rated 2010 factor, but on the main day, not so much.

The Tiges had the first three scoring shots, insipid may not be quite the right word.

wetter on Friday, but the MCG seems to drain pretty well

It’s probably best to avoid actual crowd sizes, some get defensive here, apparently.
You observe that in games between the same teams at the same venue attendance at the final was about 10% higher, despite more expensive tickets.
Usually your insights would be not be very relevant to fans of the beautiful game because soccer leagues mostly don’t have finals (having knockout cups running in parallel, which is cool), but we do in Australia, must be all the sun.

What do they need protecting from? Usain Bolt trying to get a game?

I need to get out more, who doesn’t? I have been lucky enough to live in Europe for quite a few years, saw some good games up to a few Champions League semi-finals and quarter finals. It’s a cracking good game at that level.
When it comes to soccer, hardly any women go, I’ll point that out right away; when it comes to cultural engagement, this is the elephant in the room. It is the single most striking thing I remember about attending European soccer, even more the crowd segregation and high fences, although it may be different in Spain and Italy. Also, I never noticed that Europeans in general identify with sporting success as a part of national identity like Australians do. In fact, it’s really laughable to suggest, in my experience. There are good reasons for that: they have much bigger symbols of identity: language, royal families, war history, cuisine etc. I have also lived in Asia. I grew up in a small country town. There is nowhere where sport is an ingrained as here, that I have seen. The fundamental proposition that crowds at domestic soccer (or league) are small because Australians have internationally low engagement with sport is wrong; at least, it is not the first place I would go looking for answers.

I lived in Sydney too, for that matter. Sydney is different to Melbourne, no doubt, although Swans crowds were pretty healthy early on. There is a traditional class split to Sydney which you don’t see in the southern states, such as the league/union thing, it’s fragmented. In Melbourne, London and Scotland for that matter, there’s a lot of force behind class rivals meeting each other; in Sydney they weren’t even playing the same game. Interesting that Australian soccer had passionate ethnic identities and rivalries, which were exterminated by the controlling body, that was probably a good call though.

You think Australian cricket is not tested on the world stage? And the marquee stars who play in BBL are genuine international A-grade talent, as opposed to players who are too old or not good enough to play in Europe.
If course you’re right about AFL: they are not tested on the world stage, although clearly they are elite athletes. But this cuts both ways: every time you watch a domestic soccer match, do you ponder that every player in front of you failed to get a more lucrative contract even in Scotland? But in AFL, you are watching the best at what they do. People will engage with any sport, but some sports do seem more attractive than others. We can look at the US, where ice hockey and American Football are huge at so many levels (not just pro), you could make the same complaints about spectators enjoying a bubble of superiority, but I don’t think that really explains the level of engagement.

“Unlike in countries where sporting attendance is culturally engrained”. You must be joking. This is a country where 100K pay to watch a horse race. Where a domestic cricket tournament that didn’t even exist ten years ago is among the most well-attended competitions in global sport. Where fans were locked out of the first AFLW game. Where the AFL has broken another attendance record. Where entire country towns revolve around football and netball matches. The problem is probably that what is true for some codes is not true of other codes. And lots of Australians watch soccer. But not the local offering. If you think more flares and extreme crowd behaviour is the missing ingredient, you’re mad.