Category: AFL – Australian Rules

• John Longmire says on-field ramifications not a priority for club

• Victoria Police detectives expected to arrive in Sydney

Sydney’s last premiership coach says there’s a deep sense of sadness at five Swans players being banned for breaching club standards. John Longmire, the Swans’ longest-serving coach, says the suspensions of the players is “flattening” for all involved.

Swans Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner, Nick Blakey, Riley Bice and James Jordon were stood down for the rest of the season on Wednesday.

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Sydney is a football club that has been lauded for, and indeed traded off, its magnificent culture. The trademarks of the “Bloods Culture” were written on butcher’s paper. On the field, it was about blue-collar football, selflessness and embracing the grind. Whenever they played the flashier West Coast, they called it a clash of the Cortinas and the Ferraris. Significant people at the club dispute that there was ever a “no dickheads” policy. But off the field, premiership player Luke Ablett wrote in 2014, the culture was “the character traits that you aspire to. That might be training standards, recovery standards or what you do and where you go on a Saturday night.”

The club operates in a challenging market where Australian rules football is not followed and covered as obsessively as it is in other cities. The Swans, as the late Dr Geoffrey Edelsten always insisted, have had to do things differently. They have positioned themselves in direct contrast to the nine NRL teams in Sydney. They are popular with the city’s LGBTQ+ community. They were the first professional sporting team to enter a float in the Mardi Gras. Their diversity action plan was the first of its kind in the AFL. This Sunday will be the first time the men and women’s teams have played on the same afternoon at the SCG.

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• Crows key forward, 36, to call time on career after one last shot at flag

• ‘I have treated it like my last year for the past six years,’ he says

Adelaide great Taylor Walker says he doesn’t need a premiership to be fulfilled with his AFL career – but he sure would love one. The 36-year-old decided to retire at the end of the season when he woke in an emotional state at 3am last Wednesday.

“The closer I have got to the end, it has probably become a little bit more evident that it might be this year – but I have treated it like my last year for the past six years,” Walker told reporters on Monday.

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There are more than 300 men and women in the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and dozens of what could be loosely termed “rucks”. Of the 34 elevated to Legend status, six were ruckmen – Roy Cazaly, Jack Dyer, Merv McIntosh, John Kennedy Sr, Polly Farmer and John Nicholls.

There was a footballer running around on the weekend who is worthy of being spoken about in that company. On all the measures that matter, Max Gawn has legitimate claims as the greatest ruck in the history of the sport. He’s been the premier ruck in the competition for a decade now. In that time, his team has rebuilt, broken a curse, self-sabotaged, fallen away and spiked again. In that time, the league has implemented rule changes that have redefined the role of the ruck, and rendered several of them redundant. Every opposition coach targets him. Ken Hinkley’s Port Adelaide always sought to rough him up. Chris Scott’s Geelong seeks to circumnavigate him. Every year, there’s a new challenger to his status as the premier ruck in the country. Every year, it’s Gawn wearing the All Australian blazer.

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The Blues’ 76-point demolition of the reigning premiers Brisbane indicated just how much the club’s young talent is responding to Fraser

There’s no real ‘aura’ about him. There’s no corporate speak. There are no vows to ‘lean into it’, to ‘own it’, or to ‘make Carlton great again’. There’s just the most low-key of locums, a very un-Carlton-like figure, a man who’s done the hard slog of coaching at the lower levels, who’s been able to mend what was a demoralised group. And there are a lot of wins. There’s a solid body of evidence that Josh Fraser knows what he’s doing, that his players are responding to him and that he’s the right man for the job. Whoever gets the nod, given the young talent on display on the weekend in a 76-point demolition of the reigning premiers Brisbane, it will be a good job to get.

Still, prior to the weekend’s 24.10 (154) to 11.12 (78) win, few had Carlton pegged as anything more than a lower middle-class team – honest and vastly improved under their new coach yes, but probably no threat to the higher echelon of the competition. But their performance against Brisbane is probably as well as they’ve played since the opening round of the 2024 season, when they mowed down the Lions at the Gabba in one of the biggest comebacks in the history of the game. On Saturday they posted their biggest score since August 2012 when they walloped an Essendon team that started the season well but fell in a heap after Stephen Dank’s peptides wore off. Carlton being Carlton, they then sacked Brett Ratten 12 days later.

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The booing began when Isaac Quaynor pounced on a loose ball 10 seconds into last week’s game between Adelaide and Collingwood. They booed Billy Frampton, a former Crows player. They booed Dan Houston, who had ironed out Izak Rankine in his final act as a Port Adelaide player. But most of the boos were directed at Quaynor, partly because of the history between him and Adelaide, and partly because he kept getting the ball.

The resentment over the handling of Rankine’s homophobic slur last August was clearly still lingering. Local broadcaster Stephen “Rowey” Rowe had predicted a cacophony of boos in the lead-up to the game. “I think they’re a bit dirty ‘cos he sooky-sooky la-lahed, and rightly so,” he told Eddie McGuire.

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Saints star lopes forward to change the game in win soured by Max King injury. And Jack Gunston outscores the Bombers

It’s exactly a year since Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera played one of the great final quarters of recent years. There was no last-minute mayhem against North Melbourne on Sunday, like their was against Melbourne in 2025. But his game in totality was perhaps even more impressive: 46 touches and four goals in a half isn’t a bad day at the office. He’d collected a stack of possessions in the first half, but he hadn’t exactly bent the game to his will. He won the first few clearances of the third quarter, an area of the game the Saints dominated all day. He then loped forward and totally changed the dynamics of the contest.

The clues to how good Nas could be were evident right at the beginning of his career. Initially it was the way he moved, the way he slalomed and slunk with minimum exertion. Then it was the way he kicked, the way he took the risky options and pulled them off. You could see it all coming together off a bank flank. Then he was thrown into the middle. Then he started drifting forward. Throw in an opposition disinclined to properly clamp him and you have an incredibly dangerous footballer. North sent about half a dozen players to him on Sunday, all with varying degrees of competence and enthusiasm. There were no Irish henchmen to take him down like last week in Geelong.

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The former Carlton co-captain on the hardships that took him to ‘rock bottom’ and the ‘obsession’ that helped him carve out a 13-year AFL career

Sam Docherty always thought it would be his body that would tell him it was time to call it quits. He’d had two bouts of cancer, three knee reconstructions, more than a dozen epidurals and serious injuries to a toe, shoulder and even an eye. In his final AFL game, Hawthorn’s Calsher Dear accidentally kneed him in the nose. Docherty played the rest of the game with a tampon up one nostril to stop the bleeding.

But it was his mind that got him in the end. His final year with Carlton was exhausting. He was dropped twice. The team was hopeless. The coach Michael Voss was under siege. Docherty was told by senior people at the Blues that he needed to come into the club in a better mood. He felt disrespected, detached, angry and confused. Just before he announced his retirement, the club told him they wouldn’t be offering him a new contract anyway.

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Ken Hinkley was in his element. He was in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, flicking the journos to third man and fine leg. He already sounded like a local. He was already trafficking in the “we”, in the “us against the mainland”, in the “ich bin Tasmanian”. His handover at Port Adelaide had been so scripted, so corporate, so Koschy. He had impressed, and probably burnished his coaching credentials, during his brief stint in the media. But he always seemed raring to get back into the real stuff.

To understand why Hinkley was chosen as Tasmania’s first coach, it’s worth looking at the men who missed out. Nathan Buckley was the firm early favourite, but perhaps lacked the ability to be a salesman, to charm the birds from the trees, to “spruik the gospel” as Devils CEO Brendon Gale says. John Longmire has taken a team to five grand finals, but has a cushy role at the Sydney Swans, and seems more relaxed than he has in two decades. Both Buckley and Hinkley always seemed more prepared to upend their lives, to move to the island, and to start a team from scratch.

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• Former Port Adelaide coach will prepare club for 2028 entry

• Nathan Buckley and John Longmire overlooked for role

Ken Hinkley has been officially named as the Tasmania Devils’ inaugural AFL coach, less than 12 months after being moved on from Port Adelaide.

The league’s newest expansion franchise, who will enter the competition in 2028, announced on Monday that the 59-year-old had signed a five-year deal.

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The sense of doom may be gone but the Blues needed this win against the Magpies more than any other under Fraser – and they weren’t up to it

For any AFL team that considers itself wildcard round material, Collingwood is the doorman. They’ll show the sides in footy’s middle classes exactly where they stand, where their soft spots are, and how far they have to go. For the best part of a decade and a half, Collingwood has been checking Carlton’s credentials and knocking them back. The Pies have beaten them 14 of the last 16 times they’ve met. Nine of those have come under Craig McRae. They’ve included spiflications, capitulations and abominations. They’ve included wayward shots after the siren and last-minute daggers to the heart. In almost every instance, the Blues have shot themselves in the foot to some degree. In almost every instance, Collingwood have forced them to line up for hours, denied them entry, and reminded them they’re not yet ready.

For a few weeks under Josh Fraser, Carlton looked capable of snaring a spot in the AFL’s latest construct. But they’ve met their match against the two clubs that have given them the most grief in recent years – first in the teeming rain against Hawthorn and then on Saturday against Collingwood, where they were defeated 14.6(90) to 10.9(69). Under Fraser, they’ve shed that sense of doom that hung over the club. But they needed this win more than any other under the new coach. And they weren’t quite up to it.

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Do you book your flights, or cool your jets? Is it Wharfie Time, or squeaky bum time? Was it one of the best home and away wins of recent years, or just another four points in the winter grind? It’s hard to know what to do, or how to react, if you’re a Fremantle person right now. Do you go the full West Australian newspaper, or the full Justin Longmuir? Are you still anchored down by the last 30 years? Will you only believe, as some Geelong people only truly believed in 2007, when you’re 15 goals up halfway through the final term of a grand final?

Analysis of recent AFL history is skewed by the introduction of new clubs and new rounds. But the past quarter of a century provides a good snapshot of how clubs in a comparable position to Fremantle right now ultimately fared. Since 2000, only seven teams were in as strong a position as the Dockers at this point of the season. Of those, three ended up winning the premiership, and three lost the grand final. The runners-up included the 2009 Saints, who were undefeated at this point of the season, and the 2005 Eagles, who were three games clear of second.

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• Former player found guilty of three assault charges against woman

• AFL commission says ‘violence against women has no place’

The AFL has removed Nicky Winmar from the Australian Football Hall of Fame after the former St Kilda and Western Bulldogs player was in June found guilty of three assault charges involving violence against women.

Winmar, who retired from playing in 1999 after 251 AFL games, was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022 after having been eligible since 2005 – a move widely lauded at the time given the Saints great’s feats on the field and the famous stand he took against racism.

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GWS pegged back a 39-point deficit against an injury-ravaged Geelong to add another scalp to AFL wins over Fremantle, Brisbane and Melbourne

GWS Giants are 11th on the AFL ladder. They have the same number of wins as North Melbourne. They have lost to some absolute brumbies. They are still wildly inconsistent from week to week, even from half hour to half hour. But the Giants save their best for the best. They have beaten all the main premiership aspirants. They pegged back a 39-point deficit against Geelong to claim a 12.14 (86) to 11.7 (73) victory on Saturday. If your imagination allows it, and if they deign to turn up, they are not only capable of shaping the final series, but making a deep run themselves.

Cats coach Chris Scott was asked whether he rated the Giants as a contender. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t analysed their season.” To kick off his presser, he had pored over the stats sheet and then crumpled it into a ball. It was as though he was saying “the only statistic that mattered tonight was the number of my players being taken out of Olympic Park in an ambulance”. Tanner Bruhn wrenched his neck, Jack Henry hurt his throat and Jeremy Cameron spent the last quarter in a wheelchair sucking on a green whistle.

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Nathan Fitzgerald was named in the back pocket for the Epping reserves. A teacher, he was looking forward to the second week of school holidays. Early in the morning, he’d watched the Socceroos with his dad and younger brother. He planned to watch Richmond play Carlton on Saturday night. He’d recently proposed to his long-term girlfriend.

There has been big money and high-profile signings in the Northern Football Netball League over the years, but not in the third division and certainly not in the reserves. Almost all of Epping’s players live and work locally, and played their junior football at the club. Mernda Central College, where “Mr Fitz” taught maths and science, has nearly 1,800 students from prep to year 12. Some of those students were at Lalor Recreation Reserve watching their teacher play. They saw the umpires inspect the ground. They saw the away team establish a nine-goal lead. They saw the initial clash of heads. They saw Nathan’s head then hit another player’s leg, before smashing into the “multilayered synthetic surface” that covers a concrete cricket pitch.

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