Category: AFL – Australian Rules

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...

It’s important the sceptics acknowledge what a success this game was – the players asked for it, said all the right words and they backed it up

Even for the most sceptical, there was never any question that the quality of skill in the State of Origin’s return game would be exceptional. There were three Brownlow medallists, two Coleman medallists, 29 All-Australians and 19 premiership players. Patrick Dangerfield and Max Gawn had 16 All-Australian blazers between them, more than the entire Western Australian squad combined.

The doubt lay in how hard the players would go, and how seriously they would take it. How much would they be willing to risk? And how far down the well – in the middle of a Perth summer and with no serious game time in the legs for nearly five months – were they prepared to go?

Continue reading...

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

The AFL’s state of origin game has come with a marketing blitz, a lobster charter off Rottnest Island, some champions saying all the right things and vague and fading memories of the concept’s glory years.

There’s a dearth of sporting offerings at this time of year. The T20 World Cup, the fourth in five years, is too bloated and too politically riven to really capture our attention. Watching some begoggled Finn pelting down a mountain at 120kmph has a certain ghoulish appeal, but it’s not exactly in the Australian sporting marrow.

Continue reading...

Late-night decision on the 23,000-seat roofed venue paves the way for Tasmania Devils to enter AFL and AFLW

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

A contentious $1.13bn AFL stadium has been given the official tick of approval by Tasmania’s parliament to pave the way for the Devils to enter the AFL and AFLW.

The 23,000-seat roofed venue at Macquarie Point was voted through the island state’s upper house of parliament at 11pm on Thursday following two days of debate.

Continue reading...

The Bombers captain couldn’t be more contemptuous of the place, but the club is claiming victory – it’s a fitting summary of the AFL trade period

After a few days of trade period, a fortnight of Trade Radio, 11 months of trade speculation, and a few thousand variations of the phrase “it’s an interesting one”, I’d reached the point where I genuinely believed that I was about to be traded to Essendon. My internal monologue thrummed with trade-speak – the hedging, padding, euphemistic language that’s used to buy time and fill space. Even when walking the dog or purchasing a hammer, I was exercising my options, in good dialogue and monitoring the situation.

For a few years, trade period was like that old Del Amriti song Nothing Ever Happens. But this year there were captains, club champions, Coleman and Norm Smith medallists up for grabs. Still, very little of interest was confirmed until the final 15 minutes. It was like one of those Olympic track cycling races where everyone was sizing one another up, biding their time, looking over their shoulder and working their angles, before one mad, final flurry.

Continue reading...

• Blues’ star forward gets his move despite late snag

• Clayton Oliver to GWS, and Christian Petracca joins Suns

Carlton’s two-time Coleman Medallist Charlie Curnow will join Sydney in the biggest deal of the AFL trade period.

Despite last-minute haggling before the deadline of 7.30pm on Wednesday, Hawthorn were unable to convince Essendon to trade away captain Zach Merrett.

Continue reading...

In August their season was dangling, and on grand final day they were meant to be the banged-up ones. Then they went into hyperdrive

This time last year, Dayne Zorko collapsed to the ground like Sergeant Elias in Platoon. Twenty minutes later he was in the rooms, firing out XXXX cans from the esky, like Greg Williams from the bottom of a pack. By that point Chris Fagan had already been in his players’ ears – be humble, stay fit, don’t come back heavy the way Hawthorn did in 2008, and don’t squander the opportunity to build on this success.

As Brisbane basks in their back-to-back premiership, it’s worth reflecting on a hinge moment early in the 2024 season. The Lions were 13th, had won two from seven, and had just been smacked by GWS in Canberra. Weighed down by the ongoing Hawthorn racism allegations, Fagan was having health problems and had asked the club for several weeks off. Against Gold Coast in round eight, they lost Brandon Starcevich in the warm-up. Lincoln McCarthy, a popular and talented forward, ruptured his ACL. An hour later, Darcy Gardiner wrecked his knee as well, the fifth player on the list to do so. But they beat the Suns, in a win Fagan described as one of the most significant in his time in football, and they were up and away.

Continue reading...

Geelong followers’ sustained hunger for success is really about wanting a club that has been this good for this long to get its adequate reward

• All your questions answered in our guide to the AFL grand final

In the week leading up to the AFL grand final, official footy media has been united in polite admiration. Geelong may not be the finalist that most excites the narrative, but there is mutually agreed praise for the fact that they are here again, contending again, another year defying the AFL cycle driven by salary caps and draft picks that sifts teams down to the bottom half of the competition after a season or five near the top. Deeper into the crevices of the internet, politeness fades, with diehards of other footy allegiance more likely to say that they are sick of the bloody Cats who should piss off and give someone else a turn.

On pure statistics, this is fair. As a fully disclosed Geelong person claiming no objectivity while anxious for another win, I might be accused of gluttony at the buffet. In truth, though, in 2025 I want this one bad. It doesn’t feel like one more inevitable year in an era of unbridled success. Let me explain before you put a foot through your screen. The numbers are admittedly awesome in the last 22 seasons: 19 finals series, 14 prelims, seven grand finals, four premierships and hunting a fifth. Rich pickings, especially to supporters of teams that have finished most of those seasons outside the top eight.

Continue reading...