Category: AFL – Australian Rules

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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The Collingwood defender’s very being screams imminent confrontation but if the Pies’ opponents show any holes he and his teammates will exploit it

At this time of year there’s usually a story along the lines of “is this the most important game in the history of the Gold Coast Suns?” It’s often trotted out for Collingwood’s annual mid-winter trip, probably because it’s one of the few times they get a half decent crowd. Gold Coast’s problem, among many, is that this Collingwood side treats every game as a matter of grave importance. The Suns are more inclined to pick and choose.

There’s no real enigma to the 2026 version of the Pies. Their list is lopsided. They have significant limitations on every line. They have a few plodders up front and they’re patching holes down back. But their commitment is unconditional. They show the opposition exactly where they stand. If their opponent has any holes, any flakiness, any lulls, the Pies will exploit it. Few teams get more from less.

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Judge finds woman was truthful after the St Kilda star accused her of lying about attack

Former AFL player Nicky Winmar has been found guilty of dragging a woman by the hair and hitting her head against a door.

Winmar, 60, argued the woman lied about the attack but Bendigo magistrate Trieu Huynh on Friday found she was being truthful and convicted him of three charges.

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Monday’s ABC Four Corners episode looked at the life and death of Nick Lowden, who at 23 was the youngest footballer to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE affects participants in collision and combat sports – having been first identified in boxers nearly a century ago – as well as soldiers and domestic violence victims. “Why am I like this?” Lowden asked his mother. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my brain?”

The worst of these stories end up in the flat, neutral tone of coroner’s reports. In 408 subheadings, John Cain’s inquest into the death of Shane Tuck documented what CTE does to the brain, the lives of athletes and their loved ones. The Tuck and Lowden families spoke of young men who didn’t understand what was happening to them, who drew on their athlete’s instinct to fight, and who eventually retreated. Nothing I have read about a footballer has been so crushing as Cain’s detached description of the final 24 hours of Tuck’s life.

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From his first game, the hyperactive Port star has bowed to no one. He played one of his best ever games in Showdown 60

Zak Butters ran on to the Adelaide Oval like he always does: over-caffeinated eyes darting, that Ramsay Bolton face of his beaming. But there was an extra edge to this one. It would almost certainly be his last ever Showdown, and he was determined to make it a memorable one. Two and half hours later, he’d played one of the best games of his career, turned Adelaide inside-out and showed why he is the most sought-after footballer in the country.

From the moment he stood up to Max Gawn in his first AFL game, Butters has bowed to no one. “A competitive little prick,” Ken Hinkley once called him – presumably as a term of endearment – and the 23 Crows players who gave him an unfathomably wide berth would no doubt agree.

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They weren’t thrashed. And they weren’t disgraced. But Richmond’s loss to North Melbourne on the weekend was a cripplingly tedious affair, the sort of day where you wonder whether any progress has been made at all. Games between bottom sides, as the Tigers’ win over West Coast in May demonstrated, can be as entertaining as a top-four clash. But Sunday’s game was blighted by cynical coaching, uncontested marks and a certain futility. A few of Richmond’s older players seemed to have checked out, the forwards barely got a look in and most of their best young talent were watching from the stands.

A team would normally be pilloried for a performance like that. A coach with nine wins from 60 would normally be out the door. But it’s been tempered by their drip feed of injuries, which has featured most body parts and vital organs – hips, feet, knees, collarbones, throats, groins, brains, ligaments and tendons. The nature of the injuries and the protean timelines have only added to the frustration. Tom Lynch lost the use of his voice box and had to undergo speech therapy to rediscover his vocal projection, Josh Smillie was sent to Philadelphia to reprogram his body, and Sam Lalor is still nursing what’s not entirely convincingly referred to as a “partial Achilles tear”.

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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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