St Kilda’s Brad Hill, Brisbane’s Cam Rayner and Port Adelaide’s Connor Rozee: exciting players for exciting teams.
It’s another sign of this curious AFL season that no sooner have we got through that mid-year marathon of 33 games in 20 days than suddenly we’re pondering a frenzied race to the finish line.
Ten teams have just five home and away games remaining, the other eight have only six. Theoretically, even 16th placed Hawthorn, eight points outside the top eight, still harbours some sort of finals chance.
But the Hawks, having won just one of their last seven games, are palpably ‘gone’ in finals terms. Which means so are the other two sides with identical win-loss records, Sydney and Fremantle, and, for that matter, Gold Coast, two points better off but from one more game. Not to mention the bottom two, Adelaide and North Melbourne.
Essendon, meanwhile, half-a-game outside the top eight and with six still to play, remains a statistical chance but over the next five weeks face reigning premier Richmond then three of the current top four. Goodbye Bombers.
That’s just under half the competition effectively out of contention. What do their fans do now? They follow a ritual with which supporters of less successful clubs are familiar. Jump on a bandwagon.
Yet even that’s not quite as simple as it used to be. The old rule of thumb used to be temporarily adopt a traditional struggler as it staged its quest for an unlikely and romantic premiership win. But are there any fairytales left to follow?
The Western Bulldogs completed theirs four years ago now. The following year, it was Richmond breaking a 37-year flag drought. Now the Tigers seem old hat again. GWS’s little-lamented obliteration in last year’s Grand Final didn’t tend to suggest the Giants have a wealth of sentimental support behind them.
So just who will pick up the support of the neutrals this finals series? I suspect it may well be not just the teams with the most romantic storylines, but those which play the most attractive football. And in a happy maybe-not-so-much-coincidence, right now they also happen to be teams near the top of the ladder.
In another season of some at times pretty turgid football, many footy fans stuck on the couch in lockdown have had their greatest pleasures watching those teams which do manage to break the defensive stranglehold on the game to both actually move the football at some pace, and to score.
Three teams for me have stood out in that regard – Brisbane, St Kilda and Port Adelaide – currently ranked second, third and fourth for points scored, and on the ladder, sitting second, fifth and first respectively.
The asterisk here is Geelong. The Cats are the No. 1 team for scoring. They’re No. 1 for fewest points conceded, too. They’ve also been involved in a couple of the worst games to watch in 2020, that yawnfest against Melbourne in Round 4 still giving some of us football purists nightmares.
But their attacking best can nonetheless be breathtaking, captured most memorably in that seven-goal third-term blitz against Brisbane in Round 6, and indeed, their most recent performance, smashing Port Adelaide with a seven-goal final quarter last Friday night.
One of the most intriguing questions around the looming finals series is whether the Cats will give themselves the best chance by grinding opponents down or beating them on the fly. We already know what coach Chris Scott’s response to that query would be: “Both”. It’s the capacity to flick the switch that seamlessly in the pressure cooker of a final which will be the issue.
And would an attacking Geelong have the neutrals in its corner? Well, the Cats have been around in finals terms a long, long time. Then again, they haven’t won a flag now since near the start of last decade.
The Cats can be a great team to watch, but are neutrals ready to give them a shot after such a strong period of dominance around a decade ago? Jono Searle/AFL Photos/via Getty Images
That’s a comment to make any St Kilda supporter roll their eyes, the Saints of course having won just one premiership 54 years ago, and having since lost four Grand Finals and drawing another.
We know how romantic a St Kilda premiership would be. But this version of the Saints may even pick up a few more neutrals on the pure football front than did the last, also, given how famously stingy were the teams Ross Lyon took oh-so-close to premierships in 2009-10.
These Saints are ranked only mid-table for defence but they certainly know how to attack, with key forwards Max King and Tim Membrey a dangerous combination with Dan Butler at their feet, the pace of the likes of Brad Hill and Zak Jones and the youthful poise of both Hunter Clark and Nick Coffield off half-back.
Brisbane’s hat-trick of premierships is getting close to two decades ago now, but the extent of the dark periods since then has ensured the Lions their share of the sentimental vote. So does their rightfully very popular coach Chris Fagan.
But it’s the way the Lions play football, too, which guarantees they’ll have plenty of neutral support in their corner this finals campaign.
The dash and dare of young tyros like Hugh McCluggage, Cameron Rayner, Jarrod Berry, and Zac Bailey, a still-young but old-head-on-his-shoulders All-Australian key defender in Harris Andrews and the could-be-anything factor of forward Eric Hipwood are a perfect complement to the seniority of Neale, Zorko, Lyons, Robinson and Birchall.
Port Adelaide, meanwhile, have again learned to score off the back not only of very steady defence, but some genuine enterprise of youth.
There’s many parts to the Power system but it’s when the likes of Connor Rozee, Zak Butters, Xavier Duursma and Mitch Georgiades get their hands on the football that heart rates rise and opponents start getting jittery.
Port Adelaide’s courage in off-loading someone of the stature even of a Chad Wingard to load up on talented kids has borne fruit remarkably quickly. A successful finals campaign by the Power would give enormous encouragement to more AFL clubs to show a bit of boldness in list management terms.
Port’s renaissance is exciting. The Power are good to watch. So are the Saints and Lions. And even those old Cats are capable of finding some extra lives to crank up the pace a few notches when they have to.
Exciting football is at a premium these days. It’s the teams which play it most which might win the popular vote as well as quite possibly a premiership to boot at the pointy end of this extraordinary season.
This article first appeared at ESPN.
