Category: AFL – Australian Rules

The Blues have not found a saviour but five wins in as many AFL matches under Josh Fraser leaves them with an unusually difficult decision to make

Footy can turn quickly. One minute you’re seven goals up at the MCG. The next minute Kozzy Pickett is coming at you with bazookas under both armpits. One minute you’re walking into training with the snout of a microphone in your face, as you apologise for yet another fade out, and yet another coach sacking. The next minute you’re in a circle while one of your teammates belts out the club song on a harmonica.

Carlton really should have beaten GWS Giants by more on the weekend. In the first quarter, they kicked just one goal from 18 inside 50s. They squandered a lot of chances and had the worst of the whistle. But it was exactly the sort of game they would have found a way to lose two months ago.

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• Former Adelaide star’s wife thanks medics for saving his life

• ‘It’s pretty amazing that he’s got through it,’ says Mark Ricciuto

Tony Modra’s wife has thanked the two first responders who rushed to the AFL great’s aid after a truck accident.

Modra is in a critical but stable condition in an Adelaide hospital with head injuries after an accident on his cattle property on Thursday afternoon.

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Damien Hardwick had another one of his gripes last week, teeing off at the officiating and the clamorous Geelong crowd. Lots of things have raised his ire over the years – umpiring, rules, fixturing, trade speculation, panel show inanity, journalistic pestering and woke governments. We shouldn’t be too hard on him for that. We want coaches to speak their minds, and to hate losing. In the absence of proper leadership at the AFL, they’re often the ones best placed to drive change. The more premierships they’ve won, the more emboldened they are to be critical. Chris Scott does it with a studied passive aggression. Hardwick rarely bothers with the passive part.

Hardwick pushes back on the view that he and the Gold Coast Suns have had everything handed to them on a silver platter. “Mate, we don’t get much,” he said last year. But he’s enjoyed some of the softest fixturing an algorithm could conjure up. He has a dozen top-10 draft selections on his list, and half of those were top-three picks. He’s enjoyed all the fruits of the Suns academy. He has the reigning Brownlow medallist, a former Norm Smith medallist, and the current leader of the Coleman medal count. So why is there that familiar drift? And why are so many players angling to leave?

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The Saints landed on the right side of a tight tussle with their young star in full flight alongside Liam Ryan in the AFL win over GWS Giants

To be frank, on a day where the Socceroos were opening their World Cup campaign and the New York Knicks captured their first NBA title in more than half a century, the prospect of AFL games at Ninja Stadium in Hobart and under the roof at the Docklands didn’t exactly get the pulse racing.

And so, while the national sporting eye was on Vancouver, Brisbane did what they were expected to do in Tasmania with a win against Richmond. The more intriguing game of the two was between St Kilda and GWS Giants, and the cross-code fans who spilled out of bars after the Socceroos’ win over Turkey were treated to an entertaining contest.

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Prime minister and governor general join family and football greats to remember the life and achievements of the Australian football legend and MND crusader

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Neale Daniher was best known as an AFL legend and motor neurone disease crusader but his family have used his state funeral to remember him for his laugh, sweet tooth and love of music.

The 2025 Australian of the Year died on 25 May aged 65 after a 13-year-long public battle with MND, which he dubbed “the Beast”. On Wednesday, more than 5,000 mourners clad in blue beanies gathered at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for his state funeral.

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Melbourne and Collingwood let their attacking football do the talking as 90,000 at the MCG felt the absence of the AFL great and MND advocate

There were more than 88,000 people at the MCG on Monday. But there was an absence, a void. There was lots of money raised, and celebrities and comedians of various grades sliding for laughs and donations. There were entire bays of supporters wearing blue beanies. There was Neale Daniher’s daughter, heavily pregnant, the spitting image of her dad, and now very much the public face of Fight MND. There was Jai Arrow, a 30-year-old former NRL player who was recently diagnosed with MND, tossing the coin. There were doctors and researchers talking about the disease with an optimism that we hadn’t heard in previous years. There was talk of significant progress in prognoses, in improving quality of life and in tapping into gene therapy.

But there was still that pall. When Daniher was wheeled around the MCG boundary line this time last year, it felt like a farewell. Such was his personality, you checked yourself whenever you felt pity or sorrow at what he was going through. Only in his absence could we get a proper appreciation of how much he’d done, how much he’d endured, and how much we’d lost.

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Club and AFL condemn messages received by Hawks forward, who told social media followers ‘don’t be like this guy’

The AFL and the Hawthorn football club have condemned “vile and appalling” racial abuse sent to player Mabior Chol via a series of direct messages on social media.

Chol, a Hawthorn forward who is of South Sudanese heritage, posted a screenshot of the comments he received on Instagram following his side’s loss to the Western Bulldogs on Friday night. The language contained in the comments were not fit for publication.

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Some of the best football of Patrick Cripps’ career has come in the wake of coach sackings. In 2019, after Brendon Bolton had finally been shown the door at Carlton, Cripps played one of the best games of the century. His statistics, astonishing as they were, don’t quite do justice to how well he played that day. “It’s probably one of the best individual performances I’ve ever seen on a football field,” his Brisbane opponent Dayne Zorko said.

Cripps was a wreck heading into that game. The final few months under Bolton had been a slog. The team was hopeless. Cripps was the youngest captain in the AFL, had two opponents hanging off him every week, and then had to go and say what a great job the coach was doing. On a miserable Sunday afternoon, he’d been held to 11 possessions by Essendon second-gamer Dylan Clarke. To watch him six days later was to watch a completely different athlete. It was the fusion of rage, relief and release. It brought to mind one of those corporate smash rooms, where burnt-out white-collar workers don overalls and face masks and take a crowbar to a room full of crockery.

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Brisbane threw a lot at Fremantle but the visitors had the answers. There’s a whiff of history about this side

“Flagmantle” is no joke now. There are some outstanding teams who haven’t really got warm yet. But the Dockers are the ones with the best and the most even spread of talent. The Dockers are the ones who have met every challenge, who can win in a dozen different ways, and who have reeled off one of the more impressive three-month streaks of recent years. The Dockers are the ones with the whiff of history about them.

A trip to the Gabba is no picnic and there was a view that the visitors could be got at on the weekend. Bookmakers, bless their benevolent souls, installed Brisbane as favourites. Fremantle had been up for a long time, were flying to the opposite point of the country, were missing several of their most important players and were up against a proud, still smarting opponent.

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Brad Scott’s exit from North Melbourne in 2019 was very different from his sacking at Essendon this week. “Brad’s offer to step aside is nothing short of selfless and honourable – terms befitting his character,” Kangaroos president Ben Buckley said at the time. “There’s nothing but blue sky for North,” Scott said. He said it three times. He thanked the individual board members, the coterie groups and even the media. But many thought he had left North’s list in tatters. David King called him “a visitor”. Certainly the backside completely fell out of the Roos in the years after he left.

Scott wasn’t at the press conference announcing his departure from the Bombers on Tuesday. Most agree that he wasn’t the right fit, and probably never had been. He’d never been fully embraced by Essendon people, or the senior players. There was always a lingering doubt over the state he left North Melbourne in. There was always the sense that he was an outsider.

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

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• Scott leaves after run of just one win in 11 games in 2026

• Dean Solomon looms as a potential interim boss at Bombers

Essendon are not ruling out a return of James Hird as head coach, despite president Andrew Welsh insisting he’s not just bringing back an old Essendon boys’ club.

Welsh, who stood by the call to block Zach Merrett’s trade request last year, is adamant the Bombers “won’t be pushed around” even as they have sunk further into the doldrums.

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• Former player and coach was diagnosed with MND in 2013

• Family confirm Daniher died at home

The former AFL player and coach Neale Daniher has died, 13 years after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

The 65-year-old’s family issued a statement on Monday confirming Daniher had died at home.

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A record third quarter at Engie Stadium was akin to a flawless training session for the Giants while the signs are there that all is not well at the Lions

Few AFL coaches go the full Krakatoa quite like Adam Kingsley. The Giants uploaded footage of him going off his rocker at the main break of the Sydney derby last year, a game where they’d been largely uncompetitive in the opening half. Sunday’s first half against Brisbane didn’t warrant that kind of outburst. They’d been playing well against the reigning premiers, a team that always seems to bring out the best in them. But they need a follow up documentary on what was said at half-time, or what changed. They unleashed the kind of artillery barrage we rarely see in the modern game, and the kind we never see against the team that has won the past two premierships.

Their semi-final clash in 2024 was one of the more remarkable games of the modern era. This one didn’t have any of the wild swings, just half an hour of one-way, downhill, all-out attack, like one of those country footy games where a bunch of former AFL players feast on a team of 45-year-old farmers. With very little resistance, they strolled into goal in the first 20 seconds. They then unleashed the kind of football we saw from the Giants in 2016 and 2017 – long, sweeping waves emanating from half back. It resembled a flawless training session.

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• Collingwood veteran sets new VFL/AFL benchmark in 433rd match

• Pies teammates wear gold numbers in clash with West Coast Eagles

After an intense build-up, Collingwood veteran Scott Pendlebury has run on to the MCG to break North Melbourne legend Brent Harvey’s AFL/VFL games record.

Scott Pendlebury has run out alongside his children Jax and Darcy for his AFL/VFL record-breaking 433rd game for Collingwood in front of a huge MCG crowd.

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Even his most ardent admirers may admit to a case of Scott Pendlebury fatigue right now. So let’s begin by getting a few words out of the way. Time. Space. Basketball. Saunas. Ice baths. Let’s also put aside some of the more tedious elements of the buildup to his record-breaking game – the gold-plated number, the multiple and lucrative costume changes, the signature wine range, the standing ovation at the 10-minute mark, and the discussion over whether he should have been rested or not.

Emotionally, technically and physically, Pendlebury has much in common with his fellow 400-gamers who gathered at the MCG this week. All of them were wily enough to avoid grievous harm on the field. All of them were temperamentally sound, and weren’t the type of personalities to let the outside noise seep in. And all of them avoided the kind of vices and distractions that can curtail sporting longevity.

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