Category: AFL – Australian Rules

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.

When Andrew Welsh took over as Essendon president last September, he won rave reviews. He brought warring factions to heel. He interviewed potential recruits at the draft combine. He said things like “we’ve lost our mongrel” and “I want to get the swagger back”. He refused to acquiesce on the Zach Merrett trade.

Welsh is one of the most successful property developers in Australia. He’s said to be worth close to half a billion dollars. Even as a builder, however, he’s been reluctant to utter footy’s most dreaded word. For many clubs, and for Essendon in particular, the concept of a rebuild is a protean one. From month to month, it’s either a rethink, a re-stump, a re-wiring or a total re-do. Welsh himself opted for reset. “We now have a high-talent young core in place, the heavy lifting of the reset is done, and we are ready to climb,” he said. “We will not stop working until we restore this club to its rightful place.”

This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions

Continue reading...

Essendon lacked energy and cohesion. If they don’t learn to defend, other clubs will continue to run rings around them

Heading into the season, Essendon released a mini-documentary called “Spend a day with Brad Scott”. To be honest, it didn’t really present as the most riveting 24 hours. Most of it took place in a classroom type setting, with the coaches and players endeavouring to bed down a team defence. They sat with their notepads and biros, nodding and jotting and giving every impression that they were taking it all in. Clearly this was something that needed to be taught, that needed to be learned, and that needed to be swiftly implemented.

It was an acknowledgment that this has been their major malfunction for the entirety of Brad Scott’s tenure. And the way footy’s being played in 2026, if you don’t have a coherent and reliable team defence then you’re toast. Heading into Sunday's game against Port Adelaide, Essendon would have thought it was a prime chance to implement some of their summer learnings. Port, after all, had been every bit as disappointing against North Melbourne as Essendon had been against Hawthorn.

Continue reading...

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.

In 2023, the late Sam Landsberger wrote a piece in the Herald Sun recalling how Andrew Dillon came to work at the AFL. Dillon was driving down Punt Road in the early 2000s after playing a game for amateur club Old Xaverians. Senior AFL administrator Ben Buckley, who was recruiting for an in-house counsel, was in the next lane and spotted his former Xavs teammate. “Hey Dills,” he shouted across traffic, “you’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

A quarter of a century later, a line from North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson in an interview with Jay Clark jumped off the page on Sunday. “I spoke to Gil [McLachlan] on Tuesday night and he says: ‘This will all be resolved by the end of next week,’” Clarkson said. “This was the grand final week of 2022. Just talk to ‘Dills’ and this will all be resolved.”

Continue reading...

‘The potential phase is over’, the club’s president wrote during the week. Alastair Clarkson’s team appears to have taken note

For most of his tenure at North Melbourne, Alastair Clarkson’s eyebrows have been arched in a kind of perma-frown. The bigger the deficit, the steeper the arch.

It’s not as though his team has been completely hopeless. Most of the time, they’ve tried their guts out. They’ve just been incredibly frustrating. They’d won 11 games in three years heading into the weekend’s clash against Port Adelaide. They were 11-1-57 since Clarkson took over. In press conferences, he preaches patience, the long haul, the future. But it’s the eyebrows that keep the score – two hairy registers of shanks, turnovers and towellings.

Continue reading...

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.

There comes a point in every footy season where everyone involved begins to fray. It often starts just after the Anzac Day round, when Melbourne’s big wet sets in, the ladder begins to splinter, there’s debate about “the state of the game” and there’s often a public spat between two prominent media figures. For anyone trying to process it or avoid it, it’s good to consult someone from outside the footy bubble and be reminded that none of this stuff actually matters.

But it started early this year. This year’s soap opera began in the first week of March, with a 12-goal onslaught and a voice message. Sam Docherty, sounding like he was speaking from an F45 class while riding a lawnmower, unleashed an expletive filled, rather entertaining and fairly accurate depiction of his former club.

Continue reading...

The Magpies didn’t enjoy the best off-season but they excelled in opening round at the MCG as too many fumbles and shanks cost St Kilda dearly

St Kilda spent the summer talking up Sunday night’s opening round game, and Collingwood spent the summer being talked down. It was St Kilda’s occasion, but it was Collingwood’s game. The Saints had the hope, the hyper-inflated recruits, the best paid player in the sport and the largest home-and-away crowd they’d ever played in front of. But Collingwood had cool heads, manic pressure, a wily old fox in his 426th game and two brothers who had 77 touches between them.

The Pies didn’t have the greatest of summers. It felt like the majority of pundits, including this one, had them missing the top 10 (do I have to say that now?). There were all sorts of rumours swirling about regarding the coach Craig McRae, which he and the club were forced to confront publicly. Their captain Darcy Moore was injured. They were coming off less than convincing scratch matches at La Trobe University and Ballarat.

Continue reading...

The Magpies didn’t enjoy the best off-season but they excelled in opening round at the MCG as too many fumbles and shanks cost St Kilda dearly

St Kilda spent the summer talking up Sunday night’s opening round game, and Collingwood spent the summer being talked down. It was St Kilda’s occasion, but it was Collingwood’s game. The Saints had the hope, the hyper-inflated recruits, the best paid player in the sport and the largest home-and-away crowd they’d ever played in front of. But Collingwood had cool heads, manic pressure, a wily old fox in his 426th game and two brothers who had 77 touches between them.

The Pies didn’t have the greatest of summers. It felt like the majority of pundits, including this one, had them missing the top 10 (do I have to say that now?). There were all sorts of rumours swirling about regarding the coach Craig McRae, which he and the club were forced to confront publicly. Their captain Darcy Moore was injured. They were coming off less than convincing scratch matches at La Trobe University and Ballarat.

Continue reading...

Look back at football’s defining moments and Cometti did them all justice – he didn’t miss a beat and always had the perfect one-liner ready to reel off

• Dennis Cometti, Australian sports commentary great, dies aged 76

The late Tony Charlton, who called a dozen VFL grand finals and three Olympic Games, said sporting commentators should “produce words like bubbles in champagne”. There have been some sublime sporting commentators in this country. But no one in Australian broadcasting turned words into bubbles like Dennis Cometti. Few could match his repertoire of wit, timing and verve. And few were so professional, so versatile, so fully dedicated to their craft, so capable of meeting the moment.

In many ways, Cometti was an outsider. Yes, he’d played and coached in the WAFL. But he wasn’t a legend of the VFL who transitioned into commentary. He wasn’t from the eastern seaboard. He wasn’t some nuggety, phlegmatic former player. He looked like an Oscar Wilde character. He sounded like a man who’d just back-announced Boz Scaggs on the radio. He had to prove himself to audiences who’d never heard of him, and who weren’t used to such dulcet tones calling VFL football.

Continue reading...

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here

You can’t turn on a television right now without stumbling across a football documentary. The highlight of the current crop is surely Adam Kingsley’s paint peeling spray at half-time of last year’s Sydney derby in the GWS Giants documentary No Holds Barred. It was reminiscent of Leyton Orient’s John Sitton berating his team of hapless, bewildered scrubbers in the 1990s. Unlike the Orient, Kingsley’s Giants responded well to the blast.

Of all of them, Amazon Prime’s Final Siren: Inside the AFL had the biggest budget and the most hype. It promised “war without weapons”, which was a bad start, and which itself was the title of a footy documentary from the late 1970s. Netflix’s Drive to Survive was very much pitched at people who normally couldn’t give a stuff about car racing. Likewise, The Test was a way of reconnecting the Australian sporting public with a national cricket team that had very much been on the nose. I’m not sure what the purpose of this one is – whether it’s to make the sport accessible for overseas people who have never seen a game of Australian rules, or to whet the appetite of rusted-on fans on the eve of the season.

Continue reading...

• West Australian was best known for calling AFL games

• His broadcast career spanned 51 years across radio and TV

Dennis Cometti, one of the greats of Australian sports commentary, has died at the age of 76.

The West Australian became known for his incisive calling, silky voice and sharp wit in front of a microphone over the course of a career spanning 51 years, which included stints with the ABC, Channel 7 and Channel 9.

Continue reading...

Everything about the Lions suggests they have more to show, while Fremantle and Gold Coast are stacked with talent but don’t seem ready

• Part one: Collingwood on a cliff edge as time waits for no one

• Part two: history suggests Geelong may struggle

“It’s definitely not ideal, is it?” Darcy Fogarty said in the days following Izak Rankine’s homophobic slur. And no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t ideal for his AFLW colleagues. It wasn’t ideal for the people running things. It wasn’t ideal for Rankine himself. And it wasn’t ideal for his team, who’d spilled into the rooms after the round 23 win over Collingwood on top of the footballing world. It was a party atmosphere that night, the celebration of a club that had secured a double chance, broken a hoodoo, and finally believed it belonged with the best. What could possibly go wrong?

Continue reading...

The Cats remain a flawed team and could find themselves among footy’s lower middle class after last year’s grand final mauling

• Part one: Collingwood on a cliff edge as time waits for no one

Melbourne recently released a membership video that leaned into the cliches and the disappointment – one of the better executed and coherent offerings from the club in recent years. They were eight wins off finals last year. But they beat Brisbane at the Gabba, nearly beat Collingwood twice and ran top-placed Adelaide close. They lost half a dozen games by eight points or less.

Continue reading...

The Craig McRae-era Magpies play exhilarating football but their age profile makes you wince while other, younger teams are preparing to spike

The rule changes and AFL adjustments keep coming with the introduction of wildcard round and an extension of the finals series the biggest for many years. But even with 10 clubs playing beyond the home-and-away season for the first time, there will always be teams heading in the wrong direction or simply well off the pace.

In the first of a three-part series on 2026 predictions, here’s how we see the bottom part of the ladder playing out.

Continue reading...

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.

With about half an hour to go before last year’s trade period deadline, as player manager Tom Petroro began to resemble financial analyst Tom Piotrowski, Michael Voss phoned Charlie Curnow. The deal was unlikely to go through, the Carlton coach told him. Curnow would have to suck it up, mend some bridges, say all the right things and commit to the Blues again.

Within a few minutes, however, he was a star in someone else’s sky. The Sydney players they traded him for were on holiday in South America, and took a call from their now former coach. “They pretty much just said we want you out,” Ollie Florent told afl.com.au. “It probably could’ve been handled better,” Will Hayward said.

Continue reading...

Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.

Lachie Neale has what boxers call “ring geometry” – an intrinsic, spatial understanding of safe spots and danger zones. He has fast feet that can dance, decelerate and drive out of a stoppage. But all the things that make him such a magnificent footballer – his timing, judgment, diligence and ability to extricate himself from trouble were apparently absent in his private life. A Lions grand final hero in September, he was tabloid fodder by Christmas.

What follows isn’t some sermon from the puritanical pulpit. I’m more interested in the media’s willingness to cross lines they wouldn’t have once dared, and our voracious appetite for these stories. If the mainstream media had pursued these scandals in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the printing presses would have short-circuited. If our best sportspeople had been at the mercy of the British press in that same era, their careers would have gone the way of their marriages.

This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions

Continue reading...