AFL – Australian Rules News
Melbourne player awarded record-breaking ninth blazer
AFL minor premiers Fremantle lead league with five selections
Melbourne colossus Max Gawn has underlined his status as the greatest ruckman of the modern era, awarded an unprecedented ninth All-Australian blazer after another brilliant individual season.
Gawn was named captain of the representative side, which also featured Demons teammate Kysaiah Pickett among a record five Indigenous players chosen.
Continue reading...Hird can bring ‘significant value’ to club, says Bombers president
McVeigh takes on head coach role after leaving Sydney Swans
Essendon president Andrew Welsh and new coach Mark McVeigh have offered an olive branch to James Hird, declaring they intend to speak with the club great about a role at the Bombers.
McVeigh was appointed Essendon coach on Monday, with the club opting for the Sydney Swans assistant ahead of fellow former Bombers player Hird, Fremantle’s Jaymie Graham and Adelaide’s Murray Davis.
Continue reading...AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon faces media for first time since players stood down, saying ‘the way we treat women says a lot about who we are’
The AFL will not invite five Sydney Swans players suspended by their club to this year’s Brownlow medal ceremony, as the league holds fire on opening its own inquiry into the actions of the quintet until a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault last week at a Melbourne hotel has been completed.
The AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Dillon, faced the media on Monday for the first time since Isaac Heeney, Nick Blakey, Chad Warner, Riley Bice and James Jordon were stood down for the rest of the AFL season by the Swans tfor breaching the club’s standards, including drinking and bringing women back to their hotel.
Continue reading...The Swans beat North Melbourne at the SCG, but the result mattered little at the end of a a week that has been a wake-up call for all connected to club
Under normal circumstances, Sydney’s game against North Melbourne would have been one of those bloodless, half-arsed dead rubbers of which there were quite a few in round 24. It would have been an opportunity for the Swans to rest a few superstars, and tune up for two home finals. It would have been one of those jolly Sunday-afternoon SCG romps the Swans are renowned for. It would have been a day of celebration for the club – the first ever double-header, a chance to talk about inclusion, respect and culture.
The alleged events at the Pullman Hotel a week ago, after which five Swans players were suspended for breaching club standards by “drinking … staying out late … and bringing women back to the hotel”, put paid to all that of course. It put paid to a lot of things – trust, relationships, reputations, careers, endorsements, campaigns. It brought forth much else – opportunist lawyers, performative and presumptive op-ed columnists, out-of-their-depth chief executives, amateur sleuths, thrice hourly “breaking of silences” and a lot of rage. It’s very much a story for our age – with battlelines drawn, with facts disputed and with all sense of scale and perspective torpedoed.
Continue reading...As AFLW Swans prepare for a highly anticipated double header with the men’s team, lifelong fans wrestle with whether to show their support
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Most people who meet Polly Burridge these days know her as “that Swans girl”. The 30-year-old is a vocal and public fan of the Sydney AFL team, making social media content about the club, networking with other fans, and co-hosting a Swans-devoted podcast, True Bloods. It’s a long way from the girl who was bullied for loving AFL as a kid growing up in the NRL heartland of south-west Sydney.
“It’s a very, very big part of my identity and how I define myself as a person,” Burridge says.
Continue reading...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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Continue reading...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.
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...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.
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...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...