AFL second qualifying final match review: Geelong v. Hawthorn at Melbourne

The last time these two teams met, DANGERFIELD!, well, Dangerfielded all over the MCG with 43 disposals. Now, just like in 2014, they meet in the second qualifying final at the same venue.

This match promised to be not only a renewal of – cliché alert – one of AFL footy’s greatest modern rivalries, but also a mouth-watering tactical match-up. Geelong have dominated the league aerially, taking 6.727 more contested marks per game and 6.909 more marks inside fifty per game than their opponents. They have also redefined footy as a struggle for territory as well as possession via Patrick Dangerfield’s other-worldly ‘metres gained’ numbers.

The Hawks, on the other hand, have been on a mission to put the ‘foot’ back in ‘football’. They may win 16.77 fewer contested possessions per game than their opposition (the lowest in the league, although as Madness of Sport points out, that still equates to 47% of the contested possessions in their matches), but they make up for it with sublime foot skills. At the zenith of run-and-carry footy, the period between 2009 and 2011, AFL teams began to handball more than kick over the course of a season, but the influence of Hawthorn (and of the ex-Hawthorn assistant coaches who have landed coaching gigs at other clubs) has reversed that trend. Hawthorn’s kick-to-handball ratio of 1.341:1 is the highest in the league; Geelong’s 1.228:1 is still above the league average of 1.209:1.

The stage was thus set – the ruck/clearance dominance, verticalité, and aerial threat of the Pivotonians against the ground-level proficiency and the Gaelic-style, MCG-optimised short game of the Mayblooms.

The first quarter began tensely, Geelong kicking the first goal and preventing Hawthorn from responding until after the mid-point of the term, despite the ball spending nearly three-quarters of this period in the Hawks’ attacking half. Paul Puopolo and Tom Hawkins both took hangers, but only the latter converted, and the Cats went into the first change with a seven-point lead.

In the second stanza, the pendulum began to swing in Hawthorn’s favour. They matched the nominal hosts in the centre and their positioning at kick-ins was such that the Cats struggled to clear the ball beyond half-way following a Hawks behind. With five goals (two in a row to Luke Breust being key) to three, the three-time premiers finished the half ahead 6.6.42 to 5.5.35.

Soon after the main interval, the Mustard Pots got out to a seventeen-point lead before Hawkins won a holding-the-ball free with a superb tackle. His kick to Daniel Menzel resulted in the first of three quick goals; after one more major each, the Cats headed into the final change up by two points.

The last quarter began with Hawthorn taking a lead of less than a goal before a hard-fought period of more than ten minutes in which either side could only register behinds. The ending of the match couldn’t have been scripted better: Geelong five points down, Menzel to Josh Caddy for a goal, two Steven Motlop behinds, then Isaac Smith takes THAT mark and the boy from Cootamundra wattled it across the face of goal.

Tactically, the most unexpected aspect of this game was Hawthorn matching Geelong in areas in which the Hoops’ tall brigade would have been expected to dominate. Geelong won the clearances by one, 39-38, Hawthorn won the centre clearances 14-11, the hit-outs 40-38, and took thirteen marks inside fifty to Geelong’s ten. Geelong did, predictably, win the contested possession count 170-118.

Despite losing or breaking even in all the other statistical categories relating to ball-winning (clearances, centre clearances, hit-outs, marks inside 50) and ball movement (kicks, inside 50s), Geelong won this qualifying final by simply making more efficient use of the ball when they did get it.

It wasn’t an epoch-making (or even epoch-ending) encounter, but Geelong have shown the rest of the competition the blueprint for defeating ‘Fourthorn’.

Geelong 12.13.85 (Motlop 2.3; Caddy 2.0; Hawkins 2.0; McCarthy 2.0; Blicavs 1.0; Guthrie 1.0; Menzel 1.0; J. Selwood 1.0; Cowan 0.1; Dangerfield 0.1; Enright 0.1; Stanley 0.1; rushed 0.6) – Hawthorn 12.11.83 (Breust 3.1; Burgoyne 2.1; Gunston 2.1; Rioli 2.1; Schoenmakers 2.0; Hill 1.0; Fitzpatrick 0.2; Mitchell 0.1; Shiels 0.1; Smith 0.1; rushed 0.2)

AFL women’s match review: Western Bulldogs v. Melbourne at Footscray

This blog has previously expressed interest in the wingman-less sixteen-a-side form of footy played in the Victorian Football Association between 1959 and 1992. We got a chance to see how this would work in a modern footballing context on Saturday night, when the AFL’s women’s exhibition match was played on the Whitten Oval between two sixteens notionally representing the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne.

The Bulldogs’ captain Steph Chiocci won the toss, and a tight first quarter ended with one goal apiece, the hosts leading 1.3 to 1.2. The Bulldogs responded with the first two goals of the second stanza, and thanks to some wayward Demons kicking – a product, perhaps, of the undersized ball being trialled – they outgoaled their opponents four to two to head into the main break leading 5.3 to 3.7.

It was the four consecutive third-quarter goals of VWFL centurion Moana Hope which put the match out of Melbourne’s reach: a holding-the-ball free, an uncontested snap, a snap under pressure, and an angled set shot took the Tricolours to a thirty-three point lead at the final change. With six goals for the night, the tattooed Collingwood recruit would pick up a well-deserved best-on-ground.

As fatigue set in despite the six-strong interchange benches, the two sides combined for a seven-goal last quarter, book-ended by Tayla Harris’ one-bounce set-shot bomb from outside fifty and Hope’s running supergoal. 6365 had taken advantage of free entry to witness a hard, contested encounter by the new ‘it’ girls of Australian sport.

But what exactly did they witness? I recorded the ball-ups, boundary throw-ins, and secondary stoppages, and also took note of the inside 50s toward the end of the match.

This season, AFL teams averaged 52.17 inside 50s per match. Considering that the women’s match was played over flat twenty-minute quarters instead of the thirty minutes (inclusive of time-on) used by the men, that equates to 34.78 over eighty minutes. Melbourne’s tally of 42 and the Bulldogs’ tally of 39 are both comfortably higher than the rate of inside 50s achieved in the AFL. The teams combined for 1.741 points per inside 50 (Bulldogs: 2.308, Melbourne: 1.214), which is higher than the 1.701 in the 2016 AFL season.

According to a publication put out by the AFL during last season’s hullabaloo about congestion, AFL matches in 2015 averaged 43.7 boundary throw-ins and 29 ball-ups, for a total of 72.7 stoppages, 22% of which were secondary stoppages. (Equivalent figures for 2016 have not been released by Champion Data or sought by the media; apparently everyone has moved on from the Great Congestion Debate of 2015.) Adjusted for the difference in playing time, this equates to 29.13 boundary throw-ins, 19.33 ball-ups, and 48.47 total stoppages.

The women’s match had 34 ball-ups and 11 boundary throw-ins for 45 stoppages, five of which, or 11.1%, were secondary stoppages. The number of ball-ups was thus 14.67 more than expected, the number of boundary throw-ins was 18.13 fewer than expected, the total number of stoppages only 3.47 fewer than expected, and the percentage of secondary stoppages was just over half that of the 2015 AFL season.

So how does wingless sixteen-a-side footy shape up? If the purpose was to reduce ‘congestion’, which is usually defined as the number of stoppages in a game, it failed. Forcing teams to avoid the wings and flanks simply replaces boundary throw-ins with ball-ups in the corridor. It does, however, increase the number and quality of inside 50 entries: this is why VFA teams averaged 102.37 points per game in the Association’s sixteen-man era.

And that would appear to be the way that AFL House wants it. The rhetoric surrounding the women’s league has been all about ‘free-flowing’, ‘high-scoring’ footy, free from ‘congestion’. The powers-that-be have floated nine-point supergoals, last-touch out-of-bounds free kicks, and zones to enforce one-on-one match-ups among key position players.

That might appeal to the purists (and to the target audience for the half-time advertisement for the minimal-contact AFL 9’s format) but some of us actually like the congested, handball-heavy, high-interchange modern footy. Let’s have these girls play the game as it is played nowadays, not the way it was played in the imagined golden past of the purists.

Western Bulldogs 14.6.90 (Hope 6, Vescio 3, Ashmore 2, Brennan 1, Jakkobson 1, Lambert 1) – Melbourne 7.9.51 (Frederick-Traub 2, Harris 2, Marinoff 1, Foley 1, Eva 1)

AFL Grand Final 2015 match review: Hawthorn v. West Coast at Melbourne

After a year – one might call it an annus horribilis – in which football became increasingly stoppage-infested and whistle-heavy on the field as well as marred by race- and gender-based controversies off it, Hawthorn and West Coast played out a so-so Grand Final in front of 98,633 M.C.C. members, corporates, coterie group members, and other assorted hangers-on.

‘PLAY YOUR ROLE’ screamed a sign in the Hawks’ dressing room, the club of the Liberal-voting I’ll-Be-Right-Jack eastern suburbs nouveau riche telling its players to be cogs in the machine. This is a team who know exactly where to be and what to do at ball-ups, throw-ins, and kick-ins, coached by a man for whom football is a sudoku puzzle he has already cracked many times over.

Although Luke Shuey was the first to goal, Hawthorn answered with five straight in the remainder of the opening term, including a snap and a set shot from Cyril Rioli which got a certain commentator’s blood pulsating. Down 1.5.11 to 5.0.30 at the first change, it was possible to claim that i gialloblu were ‘kickin’ themselves out of it’, but their loss would be about more than inaccuracy.

The truth was that the Mayblooms were simply better all over the park, and in hindsight, never looked troubled after Luke Hodge, fresh from being fêted as ‘a good bloke’ by the incestuous back-slappers who populate Melbourne’s football media, produced a wonder snap from the left-hand pocket to open the second quarter. Before long, Jack Gunston had added two goals from open play in the forward line, before Isaac Smith got in on the action, putting the home side forty-four points up mid-way through the period.

For the rest of the second term, and for a bit of the third one, the ‘Weagles Web’ began to tighten. This tactical system, in which the Eagles push their back pockets forward and their wingmen back, and then congest space behind and in front of the opposing forwards, is hailed as the greatest innovation in footy since Jack Dyer invented the drop punt. A goal against the run of play and another after the siren made the score 9.3.57 to 3.8.26 at half-time, while a third consecutive West Coast goal, coupled with two out-on-the-full kicks by harried Hawthorn defenders, brought the margin down to an agreeable four goals.

‘STAY IN THE MOMENT’ read another fancy brown and yellow sign in the Mustard Pots’ dressing rooms, but it felt as if they were rattled. Two nagging problems remained for the Eagles, however: long sequences of stoppages in their forward fifty which went unconverted, and the unexplained disappearance of Coleman Medallist Josh Kennedy.

From there, the two sides traded goals before another brace from Gunston and then a beauty from Isaac Smith, who roved a loose ball in the pocket and slotted it through on the half-volley. Late in the quarter, Matt Suckling became the last ever player to be substituted on in an AFL match in place of David Hale, and he goaled almost immediately, putting his side ahead at the final change, 14.5.89 to 5.9.39.

I giallomarroni began the fourth quarter with two goals. West Coast forward Josh Hill provided the crowd with some slapstick entertainment, taking three bounces and waltzing into a seemingly open goal, only to find his kick smothered by the on-rushing Brian Lake. With the margin at a game-high ten goals, it was a procession from thereon in. Kennedy’s first shot for the day (!) came with five minutes remaining and fell short. Jeremy McGovern kicked two goals soon after to become the Eagles’ only multiple goal-kicker.

With two goals, four score assists, eleven score involvements, and some great lock-down work in the forward line, Cyril Rioli was named Norm Smith Medallist, the third Tiwi Islander and second member of the Rioli family to win the honour. It could equally have gone to Isaac Smith, Hodge, or the possession-happy Sam ‘Knees’ Mitchell, and the overlooking of James Frawley’s neutralisation of the league’s top full-forward (the AFL website called it a ‘Kennedy Assassination’) by the selection panel demonstrates the anti-defence bias typical of such a cheap-thrills, TV ratings-hungry league.

Tactically, this win was all about Hawthorn’s domination of space. The Eagles had only played one match this year on the M.C.G., and their defensive structures, honed on the long, narrow expanses of Subiaco Oval, were ineffective. The Mayblooms racked up double their opponents’ tally of uncontested marks and two and a half times as many uncontested possessions; the width of the famous ground gifting them ample space in which to play their trademark keepings-off footy.

Their total of 270 kicks was the highest in a grand final since 1986; additionally, they kicked 104 times more than they handballed (but at least forty percent of these were chip kicks to an unmarked teammate). The Coasters, on the other hand, handballed more than they kicked.

West Coast won the hit-outs, the total clearances, and the clearances from stoppages. Their midfield seemed to hold up, but Nic Naitanui didn’t dominate Hawthorn’s makeshift ruck unit as much as he might have liked. The ‘Weagles Web’, however, was beaten, Hawthorn taking 17 marks from 59 inside 50’s compared to the Eagles’ 11 from 40. The Hawks were also victorious in the tackle count, 59-45, and in the crucial interchange rotation stakes, 118-100.

So what does all this mean for football, the universe, and everything? We hear a lot these days about congestion and how it is killing modern football (for example, my previous post). This was, by modern standards, a somewhat uncongested match with only fifty stoppages, a majority of which were in fact cleared by the Eagles.

But the fact that only twenty-seven free kicks were paid (14-13 Hawthorn’s way) and only 104 tackles were laid in an era when teams regularly hit the century mark in fiercely-contested matches points to the lack of physicality in this match. This was basketball on grass: Hawthorn chipping the ball around the perimeter until they could find trusty old Cyril loose in the forward line, while Sam ‘That’s Why We Choose Swisse’ Mitchell racked up meaningless disposal stats.

Hampered by the M.C.G.’s greater width than their usual stomping ground, and, like all good defensive teams, hindered by the heat, West Coast were unable to take the game to Hawthorn.

Some are already bigging up this Hawthorn side as (one of) the greatest ever. They certainly have the silverware, but their brand of football is singularly suited to Gillard-Abbott-era Australia: low-risk, TV-friendly, with a paradoxical mélange of keepings-off and unrestrained macho aggression, all combined with a win-at-all-costs club culture eminently attractive to the haw-haw-get-out-of-my-way arriviste bourgeoisie.

So goodbye to football for another season. It’ll be back next year, with no substitutes, ninety interchanges, no Goodesgate, and Paddy Dangerfield in the famous old hoops. Can’t hardly wait…

Hawthorn 16.11.107 – West Coast 8.13.61

Goals: Gunston 4, Smith 3, Rioli 2, Birchall, Hill, Hodge, McEvoy, Roughead, Schoenmakers, Suckling (Haw.); McGovern 2, Darling, Hill, Hutchings, LeCras, Shuey, Yeo (W. C.)

Best: Rioli, Mitchell, Smith, Hodge, Gunston, Burgoyne, Frawley (Haw.); Gaff, Shuey, Butler, Hutchings, Priddis (W. C.)

Football Turned Inside-Outside

Earlier this season, I wrote a few posts detailing how football positions had changed over the years and suggested that the old-fashioned nomenclature of ‘ruck-rover’ and ‘half-forward flank’ might one day be changed to reflect modern tactical realities. It seems that the AFL Coaches’ Association have had similar thoughts, naming their own all-Australian team with players listed in the traditional eighteen positions but given new names to reflect their roles.

The Association’s chief executive, Mark Brayshaw, is quoted as saying that the line-up reflects the game’s modern tactical evolution, “not what it looked 100 years ago”. The teams is as follows:

B: Easton Wood (Footscray) – Alex Rance (Richmond) – Zach Tuohy (Carlton)

HB: Bob Murphy (Footscray) – Cale Hooker (Essendon) – Jarrad McVeigh (Sydney)

C: Dan Hannebery (Sydney) – Matt Priddis (W. Coast) – Andrew Gaff (W. Coast)

HF: Patrick Dangerfield (Adel.) – Jake Stringer (F’scray) – Brett Deledio (R’mond)

F: Chad Wingard (Pt. Adel.) – Josh J. Kennedy (W. Coast) – Jack Gunston (H’thorn)

Foll: Todd Goldstein (North Melb.) – Nathan Fyfe (Freo) – Josh P. Kennedy (Sydney)

I/C: David Mundy (Freo) – Scott Pendlebury (C’wood) – Bernie Vince (Melb.) – Nick Naitanui (W. Coast)

Rance and Hooker are listed as ‘tall defenders’, Wood as a ‘tall/medium defender’, Tuohy, the only foreign import in this all-Australian side, as a ‘small defender’, and Murphy and McVeigh as ‘medium defenders’.

Goldstein is, naturally, the ruckman, with Naitanui as his understudy. The two starting wingmen are labelled ‘inside/outside midfielders’, as are half-forward flanker Dangerfield and bench-warmers Pendlebury and Vince. The ruck-rover, rover, and centreman are rebranded as ‘inside midfielders’, as is Mundy.

Up forward, we have Stringer and the Coleman Medallist Kennedy as ‘tall forwards’, Deledio as the ‘high half-forward’, Wingard as the ‘small forward’, and Gunston as the ‘tall/medium forward’.

So this, apparently, is how modern football coaches set out their teams: six defenders, seven midfielders, one forward-midfielder hybrid, four forwards, and one ruckman, with three midfielders and a second ruckman on the bench. Forwards and defenders are differentiated, basketball-style, by their height, while midfielders are designated as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’; reflecting the fact that their role in the team is defined by where they are positioned at stoppages.

Due to lax enforcement of the holding the ball and deliberate out of bounds rule, ball-ups have reached an all-time high of seventy-three per match. Football these days is characterised by teams getting bodies to the stoppage; the game either descends into a series of repeat stoppages, or the team extracting the ball from the muck is left with acres of open space in which to play keepings-off footy and string together chains of uncontested possessions.

With so many stoppages, this is the most efficient way to position players. Reduce the number of stoppages, and it becomes more efficient to position players around the ground in something resembling the traditional eighteen positions.

There was nothing wrong with the way football was played between 1899 (when teams were reduced from twenty- to eighteen-a-side) and 1978 (when the interchange bench was introduced). Teams were set out in five lines of three with three players following the ball; followers and rovers were rested in the forward and back pockets every ten or fifteen minutes in an ice hockey-style line shift.

This positional layout was the most efficient way to spread out a team’s human resources across a large oval field. It enabled tactical innovations from Collingwood captain Dick Condon’s combination play of the 1900s to the handball-centric, play-on game of Len Smith’s Fitzroy in the 1960s. In addition, it gave the sport unique positional terminology: what other sport has a ruck-rover, and what would they do with him if they did?

The football played in those days could be good or bad, depending on the teams playing, but the ideal remained a free-flowing, steadily-paced match between two eighteens. Modern football endeavours to create stoppages and structure set plays around them, while interchange ‘rotations’ are seen as a resource at the disposal of the coach, leading to twenty-one players facing twenty-one instead of eighteen facing eighteen.

How do we get the traditional eighteen-position layout back? By enforcing the holding the ball and deliberate out-of-bounds rules to reduce stoppages. By not paying marks for kicks which travel backwards, so as to stifle the uncontested possession-based antipodean tiki-taka practiced by sides like Hawthorn. By legalising the flick pass and the ‘Crow throw’ to help soon-to-be-tackled players clear the ball from congestion (or, more radically, the ‘throw pass’ used in the VFA between 1938 and 1949). And by reducing the use of interchange ‘rotations’: the only thing rotating on a footy field should be the almighty T. W. Sherrin as it circumulocates into the towering arms of an old-school full-forward.

The number of interchanges per team per match in VFL/AFL football evolved gradually upwards from 1978 to the mid-2000s. It has since exploded, only stunted in the last two years by the 120-rotation cap imposed by the league. Modern teams are able to run players on and off the ground in order to ‘flood’, a verb which originally signified getting numbers into the backline but now refers to any part of the field. This means more congestion: from forty-eight stoppages per match in 2005 to seventy-three this season. Rather than correlating with better football, the high-interchange game is a sign of weakness, of a team unable to outwit its opponents with superior skill and tactics so it instead resorts to out-rotating them. There is a reason why the all-time high number of rotations in a home-and-away match was set by the Gold Coast Suns (176 in 2012).

Order must be restored to the system of player replacement. By limiting players to coming off then going back on again twice or three times per match, footballer-athletes will be forced to be endurance runners instead of sprinters, and technically rubbish teams will be unable to compete by swamping their opponents with fresh legs.

Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part three

Modern football has evolved a number of positions and roles which didn’t exist in the old six-lines-of-three schema: the loose man in defence, the quarterback, the high half-forward, and that bête noire of the Melbourne press – the tagger.

The loose man in defence is familiar to those of us who follow soccer as the sweeper or libero. Combining extra security at the back with the ability to set up play from the defence, liberi were the characteristic accoutrement of tactically hip European soccer teams in the late Cold War era, following their usage by both participants in the 1974 World Cup final (Franz Beckenbauer for West Germany and Arie Haan for the Netherlands). In Australian football, the ‘loose man’ is typically a reasonably tall forward who has been re-deployed on or behind the half-back line.

The quarterback is a role best exemplified by Hawthorn captain Luke Hodge. It is an Americanism which gives us a shorter way of saying ‘rebounding half-back flank/wingman’; the concept would probably be better described by another borrowing from soccer: the Italian word regista, meaning ‘deep-lying playmaker’. The quarterback launches his team’s attacking thrusts with runs or long kicks from half-back. The old mantra that matches are won in lost in midfield is belied by statistics which show little correlations between winning centre clearances and winning matches; the reason for the success of Hawthorn, Sydney, and Geelong over recent seasons can be divined by looking at the quality of those two teams’ half-back lines.

The high half-forward is ‘high’ in the sense of being an extra midfielder. Nothing more to see here than a half-forward flanker pushed up into the centre of the field. If combined with the loose man in defence, this would give a team seven defenders, six midfielders, a ruckman, and four forwards.

And then there is the tagger, or to use a common faux-euphemism, the ‘run-with player’. Football was based on one-on-one match-ups for over a century; a player who let his opponent run free was seen as having failed his team-mates and his club by committing such a gross violation of the time-honoured codes of Aussie machismo. But the need to win matches and the sport’s increasing openness to innovations from abroad saw teams use zonal marking, which people complained about. Then they brought back old-school mano a mano footy by having a tagger negate their opponent’s key player, and people complained about it.

‘Tagging’ first became an issue sometime in the early-to-mid-2000s. As coach of the dominant turn-of-the-decade Collingwood side, Mick Malthouse responded to the relentless tagging of Dane Swan and Scott Pendlebury by rotating these players on and off the interchange bench faster than their taggers could keep up; soon, teams were following suit and averaging over a hundred interchanges per match. This helped to force the league’s hand and in 2011 we got the introduction of the substitute.

So the tagging controversy subsided for a few years until Malthouse’s successor, Nathan Buckley, deployed Brent Macaffer in the role to nullify Richmond’s star on-baller Trent Cotchin early in 2014. Macaffer evidently did a good job, restricting Cotchin to thirteen possessions. His reward was to be vilified by talking heads who evidently would prefer to watch the stars of the game put together strings of uncontested possessions.

And what of the future? In English soccer, the 2-3-5 formation was superseded by the ‘W-M’ formation (3-2-2-3) in the early 1930s, yet players were still listed in newspapers according to their position in the 2-3-5 formation well into the 1970s. Perhaps football positions are going through the same phase: when you see the teams in the newspaper or on The Footy Show on Thursday night, does it really matter whether Joel Selwood is listed as the centre, the ruck-rover, or the rover?

The way we talk about positions in the future could go a number of ways. There is the soccer model, whereby commentators might say things like ‘the Dockers are lining up in a 7-7-4’ and all players might become defenders, defensive midfielders, midfielders, attacking midfielders, or forwards. There is the basketball model, where the traditional positional names are still used but all players on the court/field are expected to go everywhere and to have both offensive and defensive duties.

Websites that cater for Dream Team and SuperCoach participants certainly don’t use the eighteen traditional positions. Fanfooty, for example, classifies league footballers as ‘key defenders’, ‘small defenders’, ‘key forwards’, ‘small forwards’, ‘inside midfielders’, ‘outside midfielders’, ‘rucks’, and ‘taggers’. And I have no doubt that in the dressing rooms before a match, when describing how they want their players to set up around the ground, Ross Lyon and Alistair Clarkson do not once let the word ‘ruck-rover’ fall from their lips.

Perhaps a new set of positional names will arise that recognise the blurring of the ruck-rover, rover, and centre into a generic ‘midfielder’ role, the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between those three positions and the wingmen, the mobility of forward pockets who systematically push up into the midfield, and the evolution of half-forward flankers into auxiliary midfielders. The new schema will also need to stop lumping half-backs with backmen as ‘defenders’, given that rebounding half-backs are among the most important players in their teams’ attacking set-ups, allow for flexible numbers in players in each part of the ground, and account for the all-important role of the tagger.

Here’s an attempt:

Left back pocket – Full back – Right back pocket

(Sweeper)

Quarterback – Half-back – Deep-lying midfielder

Wide midfielder – Second five-eighth – Wide midfielder

Advanced midfielder – Half-forward – Advanced midfielder

Deep-lying forward – Full forward – Deep-lying forward

Ruckman – Ruck half – First five-eighth

(First tagger) – (Second tagger)

Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part two

Teams in the major state leagues were first allowed to use a replacement player (generally labelled the ‘nineteenth man’) in 1930, with a second permitted in 1946. Like substitutes in soccer and replacements in rugby union, these could only be used once and the replaced player could not return to the field. They also tended to be used late in matches to replace injured or fatigued players – it was probably not until Ron Barassi’s switch of Ted Hopkins for the under-performing Westralian rover Bert Thornley at half-time in the 1970 VFL Grand Final that the sport awoke to the possibility of tactical substitutions.

The interchange bench was initially used sparingly: Geelong and Hawthorn made only eleven and twelve interchanges respectively in the 1989 Grand Final, but made eighty-one and eighty-two respectively when they next faced in off in the decider in 2008. The more cunning coaches pushed for a larger bench, particularly Kevin Sheedy, who at Football Park in 1985 caused Victoria to lose a State of Origin match on forfeit due to his illegal use of a third replacement. They got it: three interchange players were permitted from 1994, four from 1998, and even larger benches were utilised in pre-season and State of Origin matches.

With the rise of the cult full-forward in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it didn’t seem evident that football was headed towards an era of positional universality. In fact, with the exaltation of Dunstall, Lockett, Kernahan, Modra, and (after his 1993 conversion from wingman/flanker) Ablett, it felt like football was going back to the 1930s, when Coventry, Pratt, Nash, and Todd were their teams’ superstars.

Things, however, were changing. Tactics such as zonal marking and the full-court press were being borrowed from soccer and basketball (often pioneered on these shores by the aforementioned Sheedy) and the dribbling code’s three-way conceptualisation of player positions (defenders-midfielders-forwards), which arose in Brazil in the 1950s (what came to be known as midfielders were previously known as half-backs), began to be adopted in place of football’s traditional six lines of three. There were now six defenders and six forwards and in between them, five or six midfielders, depending on how one classified the ruckman.

This conceptual shift has changed the way the sport is seen and played. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the only player types that exist nowadays are ‘talls’ and ‘midfielders’: a team typically has a ruckman, a full-back, a centre half-back, a centre half-forward, a full-forward, and perhaps a second ruckman resting in a pocket; the remainder are ‘midfielders’. Players stationed in a flank or a pocket will regularly change into a midfield position, and the roles of the centreman, the ruck-rover, and the rover have blurred into each other so much that the three position names are seldom used anymore.

The watershed year in the evolution of modern football was 2000. In that year, Waverley Park was replaced by a boutique stadium in the Docklands with a retractable roof. Essendon adapted best to the new conditions and went one win short of a perfect season; their only loss was to a technically inferior team (Terry Wallace’s Western Bulldogs) who outwitted them with tactics (flooding). The artificial turf and lack of wind or rain made for a more sanitised brand of football, and with the new stadium hosting roughly one-quarter of AFL matches, teams now began to prioritise the recruitment of ‘talls’.

With modern football being characterised by rolling stoppages (the opening round of the 2015 season featured an average of sixty-nine ball-ups per match), the other priority of recruiters is on finding players with the athleticism to attend ruck contests in all parts of the ground. This focus has given us the generic ‘midfielder’: a player who can rotate between ruck-rover, rover, centre, wing, and flank positions in the course of a match (along with his regular spells on the bench) and who dominates Brownlow voting and Dream Team point-scoring. Not specialising in any particular position, he is classified as an ‘inside mid’ or an ‘outside mid’; terminology which brings to mind rugby union’s distinction between the ‘inside centre’ and the ‘outside centre’ and which therefore highlights the stoppage-centric nature of the modern game.

Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part one

In the early days of football, positions were vaguely-defined and in flux. This diagram from 1876 on a Carlton supporters’ wiki shows how teams lined up in those days. There were twenty players, and apart from some terminological differences, the eighteen traditional positions were all there, in addition to a ‘goal sneak’ and ‘goal keeper’, these each being a third type of what we would today call a ‘key (position) forward’ or ‘key (position) defender’.

By the time that the eight clubs seceded from the Victorian Football Association to form the Victorian Football League in 1897, it seems that teams had begun to re-deploy their extra two players as on-ballers. As the ‘ruck-rover’ position only came into being in the mid-twentieth century (Jack Dyer and Ron Barassi junior being its earliest exponents), this meant four ruckmen from each team crowding around the ball, attempting to tap it to a single rover. Not surprisingly, there were complaints that the game was becoming too congested (a familiar refrain throughout the sport’s history) and the League reduced teams to eighteen players for the 1899 season.

It was around this time that the fifteen positions other than the ruckmen and rovers came to be conceived as five banks of three – the backs, half-backs, centres/wingmen, half-forwards, and forwards. In Victoria, newspapers would list the eighteen players selected for a match in six rows of three, with the three ‘followers’ on the bottom row. In South Australia, the five lines were listed in the reverse order (i.e. the forwards in the top row and the backs in the fifth row), the first-string followers were labelled the ‘first ruck’, and a seventh row was added to the teamsheet. This was the ‘second ruck’, and listed the three players who played on the ball when the three first-string followers were resting in the forward and back lines.

(For an example of an old-fashioned team listing which shows the second ruck and which players they interchanged with, see this line-up in The Argus of the Victorian team selected for the 1930 interstate carnival in Adelaide.)

The pattern that existed from 1899 to the introduction of the interchange bench in 1978 was that a team would consist of twelve players who played permanently in one position and six followers. The twelve positional players were the full-back (called a ‘goalkeeper’ in South Australia and Western Australia until the 1950s), a ‘permanent’ back pocket, three half-backs, one centreman, two wingmen, three half-forwards, and one full-forward (sometimes called a ‘centre forward’ in South Australia and colloquially known everywhere as a ‘goalsneak’). The backup ruckman would start in the back pocket with the backup ruck-rover and rover heading to the forward pockets; the two ‘line shifts’ (to borrow a term from ice hockey) of followers would, according to this 1937 article in The Argus written by dual Brownlow medallist Ivor Warne-Smith, switch positions at least once per quarter.

The positional role which changed the most over the first three quarters of the twentieth century was the one which came to be known as the ruck-rover. After the fin-de-siècle elimination of two of the four ruckmen on each side, teams began to realise that it was more effective to use only one of the ruckmen to contest bounces and to use the other one to negate the opposition’s main ruckman. This so-called ‘ruck shepherd’ role, which seems to have been more prominent in South Australia than in Victoria, was umpired out of the game, but the division of labour at ruck contests remained. By the time that Ron Barassi was deployed in this position under Norm Smith in the great Melbourne side of the late 1950s, the clunky term ‘ruck-rover’ had come into use to describe the ‘first receiver’ of hit-outs at the ruck.

For most of this era, no single position on a football field was lionised in quite the manner of, say, the quarterback in American football or the number ten in Argentine soccer. The full-forward came close, however, during the late 1920s and 1930s. A change in the out-of-bounds rule in 1925 provided for a free kick against the team which last touched the ball (all out-of-bounds had resulted in a boundary throw-in previously; free kicks were first awarded for out-of-bounds on the full in 1969). This forced a change in tactics: teams were less willing to play along the wings, preferring instead to bomb the ball long to the forward line. The great full-forwards of the era became the stars of the game before the rule change was rescinded in 1939.

The complaints about congestion which accompanied the reduction of teams to eighteen-a-side in 1899 continued; for example, The Australasian’s chief football writer ‘Markwell’ complained of the VFL in 1908 that “…though there are nominally but two followers, practically the whole eighteen men are on the ball, and open work is impossible.” The VFA played with seventeen-man teams between 1908 and 1911 (by removing the second ruckman) and with sixteen-man teams between 1912 and 1918. The decline in spectator numbers during the Depression led to further questioning of the eighteen-man orthodoxy: in 1937, the Ballarat League proposed shifting to fifteen players per side, while in the same year the VFA considered replacing centre bounces with a kick-off, lessening the importance of ruck contests so that the two taller followers could be removed to make the game sixteen-a-side.

The VFA did opt for sixteen-a-side football in 1959, only reverting to eighteen-a-side in 1992. The two positions removed, however, were the wingmen, which created an end-to-end, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am style of play which endeared the Association to casual television audiences in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the next instalment, I will look at how positions have evolved since the introduction of the interchange bench in 1978.

Ultra-football

There’s nothing I love more than the crisp aroma of a fresh Wikipedia article. It would appear that Aspirex has taken time out from his wonderful series of articles chronicling each season of the VFA-cum-VFL to write the definitive history of a forgotten episode in the history of our great game: the period between 1938 and 1949 when the Victorian Football Association and allied district leagues in central and north-eastern Victoria, Gippsland, and north-western Tasmania permitted the so-called ‘throw-pass’ as a means of disposing the ball to evade a tackle.

Of the five rule changes brought in by the VFA for its 1938 season, three have since become permanent features of football (the prohibition against dropping the ball, downfield free kicks, and players being able to take free kicks on behalf of an injured teammate). The fourth was the re-introduction of the boundary throw-in (a free kick had been awarded against the last player to touch the ball before it went out of bounds since 1925; the modern distinction between throw-ins and set kicks for ‘out on the full’ dates from 1969). It was the fifth rule change which had the greatest effect: players were allowed to make a two-handed throw, either forwards or backwards, as long as their hands remained below shoulder height; in other words, the throw was not intended to be a means of advancing the ball (as per the rugby codes) but instead a means of getting out of danger. (Contemporary reports suggest that throw-passes usually travelled fewer than ten yards.)

Even more interesting were the proposed rule changes which were not adopted. First, teams would be reduced to sixteen players by eliminating the ruckman and ruck-rover (the VFA did go to sixteen-a-side between 1959 and 1992, however it did so by eliminating the two wingmen). Second, centre bounces would be replaced by a kick-off. Third, only two players from each team could contest boundary throw-ins. Fourth, umpires could send players off (complaints about rough play had become common in the 1930s due to the proliferation of scrimmages). Fifth, three points would be awarded for hitting the post (a rule trialled many years later in the AFL’s 1996 one-off revival of the lightning premiership, complete with [if I remember correctly] red flags waved by the goal umpires).

(An extended aside. Doing some ‘troving’, I found this set of rule changes proposed contemporaneously in the Ballarat League. Many are similar to the VFA’s ideas, except that the Ballarat administrators wanted to do away with behinds and award three points for a goal and one for a ‘poster’.)

The idea that the VFA’s rule changes constituted the formation of a separate football code is not a commonly-accepted one, and the split did not possess the social and political je ne sais quoi of that between the two rugby codes. Nevertheless, because the history of the sport has been written by the winners (i.e. the VFL-cum-AFL), the improvements made by the VFA have never quite gotten the recognition they deserve.

I use the word ‘improvements’ deliberately. In the first season of the new rules, the average score per team per match jumped from 84.74 points to 100.46. The 1938 Grand Final, played at Toorak Park between Brunswick (the Magpies; black and white stripes) and Brighton (the Cabbage Growers; white with red yoke) produced only six ball-ups, somewhat down on the 65.9 seen in the first round of this year’s AFL season, and thirty-eight boundary throw-ins. Furthermore, the VFA entered one of its golden eras, signing big names like Ron Todd, Bob Pratt, and Laurie Nash away from the junior circuit.

Until its abandonment of the throw-pass in exchange for a seat at the table of the sport’s governing body, the football produced in the VFA was fast, furious, and free-flowing. By contrast, the football played today is blighted by constant stoppages caused by players not doing enough to evade tackles and by the scrimmages which inevitably form at ball-ups and boundary throw-ins. The increasing number of ruck duels as well as the hard surface at Docklands Stadium has led to the dominance of tall players, and the art of kicking from set shots has declined due to the enforcement of a time limit.

In reviewing the second round match between Port Adelaide and Sydney at the Adelaide Oval, this blog marvelled at the intensity of the first quarter of that match, labelling it (in an obscure reference to a line of dialogue from a Spanish film screened on SBS2 earlier that morning) ‘ultra-football’. What made that quarter ‘special’ (to use a Bruce McAvaneyism) was the constant defensive pressure applied by both sides. The ball was being jarred loose by the ferocity of the tackling, and players about to be tackled preferred to get rid of the ball rather than let their opponents get settled in at a ruck contest.

The VFA’s proposed rule changes of 1938 would go a long way to making every quarter of football like that one. My proposal is that the AFL adopt all of them, with the exception of the reduction of teams to sixteen players (we don’t want to eliminate ruckmen entirely, just reduce the exaltation of height in the modern game) and the granting to the umpires the power to send players off (let the tribunal handle that sort of thing).

But, of course, they won’t. Twenty-minute quarters and constant stoppages make the game more digestible for casual television audiences at the expense of the integrity and heritage of the sport. Perhaps a split like the one that existed between 1938 and 1949 is exactly what football needs.

AFL round 4 match review: Geelong v. North Melbourne at Geelong

The match started rather well for Geelong, with the home side bagging the first four goals, the quadruple book-ended by two from Mitch Clark, who is already looking like a Coleman Medal contender. But the ominous portents were already there: the breezy weather conditions and the hard-fought midfield battle would ensure that the match would be low-scoring, and Robin Nahas’s pouncing on a loose ball in the forward fifty to kick North’s only goal of the term showed that the Kangaroos were the better side at extracting the ball from the packs.

The other thing that went wrong for the Pivotonians was accuracy in front of goal: Tom Hawkins missed an easy one first up in the second stanza, and their inability to convert would haunt the Cats at the death. Ex-Carlton man Jarrad Waite was the key to a strong period for la albiceleste, as five goals ensured that they went to half-time four points up against an injury-ravaged Geelong side who sometimes looked as if they feared going in hard for the contested ball. When Ben Brown, the revelation of last season’s semi-final between these same clubs, torpedoed the first major of the second half, it was time to warm up the supersub, Steve Johnson.

The mid-section of the third quarter was characterised by more back-and-forth action in el centrocampo, scrappy but not as spectacular as when the likes of Port Adelaide, Sydney, and Fremantle do it, and a certain legend of the game in the commentary box was spot-on when he coolly remarked that neither of these sides look to be top-four material. It ended when Tom Hawkins marked and goaled in the forward line. There were misses at one end, rushed behinds at the other, but Johnson’s arrival was greeted with a visible lift by the home side, as Cameron Guthrie and George Horlin-Smith combined for a goal.

The Hothamites snatched two more behinds to lead by a goal at three-quarter time; both teams’ employment of a libero (or ‘loose man in defence’ as they say in Anglo-Saxon) making it difficult to break through the lines. Johnson kicked the first major of the final term, but Brown responded. Clark took a nice grab and goaled, but the dam broke from there on in, as North ran away with it, surviving a late-quarter flurry of biancoazzurri behinds to hang on by sixteen points.

Geelong 9.13.67 – North Melbourne 12.11.83

Goals: Clark 3, Johnson 2, Caddy, Duncan, Guthrie, Hawkins (Geel.); Nahas 3, Waite 3, Brown 2, Bastinac, Dumont, Goldstein, Petrie (N. M.)

Best: Bews, Rivers, Guthrie (Geel.); Cunnington, Waite, Tarrant (N. M.)

AFL round 3 match review: Geelong v. Gold Coast at Geelong

After two straight losses to start the season, things weren’t looking good at the Cattery. But Hawthorn and Fremantle are one thing, and a Gold Coast side who have so far posted losses to Melbourne and St. Kilda are another.

The home side began kicking towards the Gary Ablett Terrace end of the ground; the irony being the withdrawal of Ablett fils due to his recurring shoulder injury. Two opening goals to Josh Walker (in for Tom Hawkins) and Darcy Lang gave the false impression that Geelong were on top, and the Gold Coast’s Jarrod Garlett provided the highlight of the quarter when he arrested the Cats’ momentum by going on a four-bounce run for a goal. Steven Motlop responded by creating a seven-point play from a wayward Suns kick-in, but the visitors would kick the next three majors, aided by their domination of the centre clearances.

This had Chris Scott going bananas in the coach’s box, and matters weren’t helped by Jimmy Bartel getting himself injured. On came number ten draft pick and archetypal mercurial Territorian speedster Nakia Cockatoo (pronounced, I have only just discovered, Na-kigh-a and not Nar-key-a), shedding the bright green vest for the second week running. The Pivotonians got the next two, the first an end-to-end manoeuvre from the kick-in finished off by Jackson Thurlow, the second a snap from Walker who crumbed when the giallorossi defence had Mitch Clark well covered. But an Aaron Hall supergoal put the Suns up 41-33 at the break, after a rollicking first term in which solid Geelong defensive work prevented the Gold Coast from further cashing in on their control of the stoppages.

The centre clearance count was 10-1 in favour of the pineapple-munchers when Michael Rischitelli opened their account in the second term. I biancoazzurri were given a reprieve by the town’s notorious weather; thousands of pivotonians reached for their brollies in unison as the pace of the game was slowed and with it the visitors’ momentum. Clark got the next goal, and there was something of a dry period (if you’ll pardon the pun) until Walker snapped the one after that. Cockatoo had what the Argentinians call a ‘lyrical moment’, grabbing a bouncing ball with one hand, running down the wing, and kicking it inside fifty to no-one in particular; the margin was twelve points at half-time.

Like the Giants against Sydney the previous evening, les blancs et bleus marines piled on the goals after the sides returned to the hallowed turf. Walker and Steve Johnson kicked truly to level the scores, and Corey Enright pulled off a sensational smother to turn a certain Tom J. Lynch goal into a boundary throw-in at the far behind post. The man from Kimba combined with Harry Taylor, Tom Lonergan, and first-year backman Cory Gregson to soak up pressure and hold the scores at sixty apiece, before a flurry of goals to Josh Caddy, Joel Selwood, then Caddy again. Selwood had a blinder of a third quarter and Cameron Guthrie, who switched into a long-sleeved guernsey at the long break, put in a three-Brownlow-vote-worthy performance with a top-notch display of being everywhere the T. W. Sherrin happened to be and then some.

Gregson kicked his first league goal from the centre square to make it six in a row, but the seventeen-point lead the Cats took into lemon time didn’t seem a big enough buffer given their casualty list. With Bartel having opted for the très haute couture red vest look in the first quarter, and Mathew Stokes milling about the dugout on crutches, the sight of Lonergan being stretchered off after a collision with six seconds left on the clock had Scott and the home fans nervous. With nineteen fit players against twenty-one, the final term would be a test of the veracity of the various claims and counter-claims made over the last few seasons about interchanges, substitutions, rotations, etc.

Sam Day took an Andrew Strauss slips catch and opened the scoring for la roja y amarilla; Gregson responded straight away. By the mid-way point of the final term, the margin was down to four points after goals to Touk Miller and Brandon Matera (an ominous surname, given 1992 And 1994 And All That). A shot from Matt Shaw looked to be sailing through but forced James Kelly to resort to the hoops’ first rushed behind of the afternoon. After another forward thrust by the surging and pacy giallorossi, a turnover at the half-back line was moved upfield through Guthrie, Mitch Duncan, and Motlop, and the Territorian kicked his second of the match, putting the home side nine points up and proving that a beer or two in Colac never hurt anybody.

Geelong tried to kill the clock by forcing stoppages but could only keep it up for a minute and a half of regulation time before Claremontonian midfielder Jack Martin pulled the banana-benders’ deficit back to three points. There was one minute and twenty-five seconds to go, and we had the requisite clichéd tense finish. An all-too-rare Cats centre clearance ended up on the boot of Selwood and Cockatoo saved the day with an easy mark in or about the fifty-metre arc on a tight angle. A tired Suns outfit somehow left Mark Blicavs unmarked, providing the substitute with an opportunity to eat some more clock by chipping the pill to the Lithuanian Marvel, who, in a manner reminiscent of Ablett père or Brownless of old, lined up for a set shot and sent the pigskin soaring in the general direction of the pristine, azure waters of Corio Bay.

Geelong 16.9.105 – Gold Coast 13.18.96

Goals: Walker 4, Caddy 2, Gregson 2, Motlop 2, Blicavs, Clark, Johnson, Lang, Selwood, Thurlow (Geel.); Lynch 3, Martin 3, Matera 2, Day, Garlett, Hall, Miller, Rischitelli (G. C.)

Best: Selwood, Kelly, Enright (Geel.); Rischitelli, McKenzie, Lynch (G. C.)

AFL round 3 match review: Sydney v. Greater Western Sydney at Sydney

While the result of the seventh bi-annual Fibros v. Silvertails Sydney derby was never really in doubt, the Greater Western Sydney Giants showed the rest of the league how to take the game to the defending minor premiers. Let down by some inaccurate kicking which left them thirty-five points adrift at half-time despite equality between the teams in terms of the number of scoring shots, the visitors nevertheless departed the Sydney Cricket Ground with their heads held high.

The diminutive length of the grand old stadium forces teams to move the footy droit au but (as they say in Marseille), with the result that whomsoever dominates the centre corridor gets the bulk of scoring opportunities. Lance Franklin understands this, and his first goal, the Bloods’ second, was a sensational long-distance snap from inside the centre square. Isaac Heeney is also learning quickly, and picked goals like the pumpkins for which his hometown is famous – his brace either side of Franklin’s stunner propelled them to a fifteen-point lead after a first quarter played at a more measured tempo than the frenetic opening stanza witnessed last week at the Adelaide Oval.

Most of the scoring in the second quarter came via set shots, and it was here that the Cherry-pickers were punished for their propensity for, in the words of coach ‘Arks’ from the 2002 film Australian Rules, “finessin’” and “buggerisin’ ‘round the flanks”. The highlight-reel moment of the quarter belonged to Luke Parker, who crumbed a marking contest in the forward pocket, lost his footing (though he never really had it in the first place), dropped the Sherrin, and soccered it in mid-air. It rolled through and survived a tense score review. (There was also a bit of good old-fashioned argy-bargy with around five minutes of regulation time to go, but nowhere near as good as the show put on by Carlton’s Chris Yarran and Melbourne’s Bernie Vince in the two other games played the same day.)

The Giants came out firing in the third quarter. They kicked three goals – two to Cameron McCarthy and one snap from the flank to Ryan Griffen – and la albirroja responded with three behinds. Rhys Palmer goaled and the comeback was well and truly on, though matters were not helped by the limping off with an injury of the well-hair gelled Dylan Shiel. Then, as if regaining their proverbial mojo, the Swans slipped into gear. They got numbers back, they moved the ball well through the midfield, and Lewis Jetta pulled off a slick move on the wing to goal from outside fifty. After dominating the second half of the quarter, they went into lemon time thirty-nine points in front.

But la naranja mecánica weren’t done yet, and piled on some more early-quarter six-pointers to again threaten a repeat of their upset in the opening round of last season. Palmer let Tom Scully’s effort roll through, then was ably assisted by ex-Swan Shane Mumford for one of his own. Stephen Coniglio became their seventh goalscorer of the day, and Tomas Bugg prevented the frosty-haired prodigy from Maitland from getting his fifth major by slamming him into the behind post and into the deep red substitute’s vest. But they again couldn’t overpower the men in red and white, who right now are looking as if they can beat anyone in the league on whatever terms they care to offer.

Sydney 15.16.111 – Greater Western Sydney 12.18.90

Goals: Franklin 5, Heeney 4, Parker 2, Bird, Hannebery, Jack, Jetta, McGlynn (Syd.); Palmer 3, Cameron 2, Griffen 2, McCarthy 2, Coniglio, Scully, Whitfield (Gtr. West. Syd.)

Best: Hannebery, Franklin, Heeney (Syd.); Whitfield, Smith, Palmer (Gtr. West. Syd.)

AFL round 2 match review: Port Adelaide v. Sydney at Adelaide

The Farriss brothers of INXS might have revved up the home crowd with ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, but to the Port faithful the first quarter sounded more like a Joy Division song (Jetta / Jetta will tear us apart again). The aforementioned Lewis kicked two of the Swans’ first three and was the standout performer in a sensational quarter of footy.

The men from the Wheat State could never quite get back into the contest after the visitors took a two-goal lead into the first change. The second stanza saw the midfield open up somewhat, as both sides were able to string together chains of possessions. Paddy ‘There’s Only One Flo and One’ Ryder, Chad Wingard, and Justin Westhoff all goaled to even things up, but Dan Hannebery’s effort from fifty-two metres out while sporting a bandaged head (courtesy of Robbie Gray’s knee earlier in the quarter) summed up the night.

I biancorossi came out firing after half-time, with Kieren Jack, Jake Lloyd, and Hannebery scoring successive majors. Ryder broke up their run with a free kick and goal, but a Port turnover at centre half-back led to Jay Schulz missing a crucial set shot, and not for the first time in the match. Jarrad McVeigh kicked the final goal of the term, but the Power’s Matthew White (late of Punt Road) pulled off a brilliant play in the final two minutes which will be analysed further below.

The fourth quarter comprised more of the same. Adam Goodes had plenty of time to ponder pointless constitutional reforms from the bench, remaining in the bright green substitute’s vest until called upon to replace Gary Rohan. Lance Franklin, whose effort and impact weren’t fully reflected on the scoresheet, nabbed his third, pouncing on a tapped-down boundary throw-in with a mid-air soccered banana kick checkside (if that makes any sense).

For this blog, the most interesting individual passage of play ended with the downwards-counting clock (a Seppo-imported sacrilege!) showing 1’12” or some such figure remaining in the third quarter. Port substitute Matthew White was on the wing with no-one to whom he could kick or handball, and two Swans bearing down on him. He had enough speed to skirt the boundary line and run past one but needed to dispose of the ball lest he be tackled by the other. So he handballed past his opponent, ran around him, regathered the ball and only then was forced into touch. The result was a boundary throw-in, and the ingenious manoeuvre meant nothing in the great scheme of things. But White gained fifty metres, and perhaps showed us the possessionless style in which the football of the future might be played.

Not since Fremantle’s third quarter in their home preliminary final against Sydney in 2013 have we seen anything like the football played in the first quarter at the Adelaide Oval. Except that on this occasion, not one but two teams were playing it. Over a period of twenty-eight minutes and forty-seven seconds, the two teams combined for twenty-five inside fifties (14-11 in favour of los porteños) but only six scoring shots (the Blood-Stained Angels left the field up 3.1 to 1.1, and the first major was registered at sixteen minutes and forty-eight seconds). The defensive pressure was intense, both teams treating any movement of the ball into their backline as a personal affront, and quickly disposing of the intruder from whence it came.

The long-assumed divine right of players to cleanly mark and dispose of the T. W. Sherrin was consigned to the dustbin of history as dramatis personae as eminent as Gray, Wingard, Boak, Kennedy, Franklin, and Tippett were tackled, spoiled, and one-percented into the turf. The night before the match I watched a Spanish romantic comedy on SBS2 in which the character played by Norma Ruíz convinces a small-time actor to masquerade as her friend’s fiancé, telling him that this is all part of a new, avant-garde style called ‘ultra-theatre’. When asked “what does ultra-theatre seek?,” she utters the line “ultra-theatre seeks itself”, to which her pretentious hipster interlocutor replies “of course it does”.

This was ultra-football. It seeks spoiled mark attempts, congested corridors, low scores, and defensive pressure. But above all, it seeks itself. Of course it does.

Port Adelaide 6.8.44 – Sydney 14.8.92

Goals: Ryder 2, Monfries, Schulz, Westhoff, Wingard (P. A.); Franklin 3, Hannebery 2, Jetta 2, Towers 2, Jack, Lloyd, McVeigh, Rohan, Tippett (Syd.)

Best: Pittard, Carlile, Gray (P. A.); Kennedy, Jack, Smith (Syd.)