Two friends and I were at the pub yesterday and, as is the want of men in a pub setting, we got to talking about footy.
One friend, a St Kilda supporter, explained how 2-5 isn’t 2-5 when considering how close the five losses have been.
We all have to cope somehow.
Anyway, the conversation pivoted to the rollicking affair that was the game between Carlton and Geelong on Saturday afternoon and that game’s best player, Jeremy Cameron.
A special day for Jeremy Cameron, kicking his 600th goal in the win over the Blues 🙌#AFLCatsBlues pic.twitter.com/gyz0BXhjt0
— 7AFL (@7AFL) April 27, 2024
We built a little game where we tried to find some comparison for Jeremy Cameron in the modern AFL.
He’s a long and rangy athlete who is good in the air but remarkable on the ground.
His kicking in general is almost perfect, as is his footy IQ.
We confined the comparisons only to the AFL we weren’t allowed to use superheroes or Ethan Hunt.
The closest modern player to him, we decided, was probably Charlie Curnow.
Even though Curnow’s game is nothing like Cameron’s, neither of them are hulking, Tom Hawkins-style forwards and Curnow has a similar electricity factor both in the air and on the ground.
The better comparisons are historical.
The obvious one is Buddy Franklin, but Cameron is fractionally better field kick. Cameron is also not, however, as dominant a goal kicker or physical presence as Buddy was.
FOUR POINTS: Harry McKay was terrific on Saturday, while Charlie Curnow is the most exciting forward to watch. Yet neither plays like Jeremy Cameron. https://t.co/gBH50X3R8W
— Real Footy (AFL) (@agerealfooty) April 28, 2024
The other one that sprung to mind was Nick Riewoldt – at least for the Cameron of the last few years – with their shared ability to work up to the wing, then burn a streak in the grass as they run back toward goal.
What occurred to me as we were having that conversation, though, was how much Cameron’s game has changed as he’s been handed to the best coach in football.
He went from a stay at home forward at GWS, to a roaming wing/forward in his latter years to take advantage of his extraordinary running power.
He’s sacrificed virtually nothing in terms of goal kicking in the process.
Who else is that true of? Matthew Richardson? Nick Riewoldt maybe, but he wasn’t a true winger like Cameron sometimes is. There aren’t many.
What you see with your eyes is borne out in his numbers.
At GWS, Cameron was an athlete who played forward.
He had three of his four most prolific goal kicking seasons, averaged the most marks of his career on the lead and inside 50 and was involved in the highest proportion of scores for his team, while launching fewer scores than he has at Geelong.
He was a star, but he was a star forward only.
In 2021 at Geelong, his first year at a new club, it was a bit the same.
The change in Cameron’s game came thereafter.
For seasons 2022 and 2023, Cameron spent some time at centre bounces presumably because of his athleticism, going to just over 2% of them over those two years.
Commentators mentioned it incessantly, but probably more for the novelty of it than anything else.
A bit like they did with Buddy and/or Cyril Rioli when Alastair Clarkson experimented with them as part-time midfielders in the late 2000s-early 2010s.
In the end, he didn’t do it enough to see truly how good he could be as a pure midfielder.
It would have been a waste, anyway.
This season, he hasn’t attended one (though he is averaging about one stoppage clearance per game, also a career high).
Now Geelong uses Cameron like an alien: they put him in space.
He’s averaging the most marks and the most uncontested marks of his career. He’s also averaging the most inside 50s and the most metres gained for his career.
In fact, his three most prolific metres gained seasons have been 2024, 2023, and 2022 in descending order.
Chris Scott has been building toward this, and this year he’s taken Matthew McConaughey’s advice and let it rip.
It’s working.
Cameron is well over his career high in disposals and uncontested possessions.
At the same time, he’s involved in about 30% of Geelong’s scores and launches one score per game and if that was not enough, he’s setting his career best for goal assists per game through the seven games of this season.
All the while he’s still kicked 19 goals for the year. If that average holds up, it would be the fourth best return of his career and his most prolific goal kicking season at Geelong.
Geelong Forwards Goals + Goal Assists Table.
Jeremy Cameron 25
Oliver Henry 22
Tyson Stengle 20
Brad Close 17
Gryan Miers 16
Oliver Dempsey 13
Tom Hawkins 12— Rory Kilpatrick (@AflGlicko) April 28, 2024
Simply, he’s working harder up the field but still kicking as many goals as he ever has, because he has the freedom to do everything at once.
That’s a coach who fits his game around the strengths of his personnel.
All of this is in his age-31 season, his 12th season of league football.
If Cameron has lost a step, nobody can tell.
He’s still a superlative athlete who might be getting better as he builds his tank and loses nothing from his explosiveness.
What is the comparison for that? Barry Bonds? (I’m not suggesting anything, Cameron’s head hasn’t quintupled in size)
Normal people don’t get this much better as they get older.
I’ll finish with perhaps the most instructive comparison of what Cameron is and how he has changed.
I used to watch Damien Hardwick press conferences religiously – so much so that saying “the reality is” and the “the fact of the matter is” embarrassingly crept into my day-to-day vernacular – and there was one game where the Tigers played Geelong.
Hardwick made the point that, from the coach’s box, it was often hard to tell the difference between Isaac Smith and Jeremy Cameron.
Cameron is a full 10cm taller than Smith and I would bet a fair amount heavier.
He’s such a good athlete that a coach can’t tell him from one of the most prolific runners in recent league history.
Cameron is as good of an athlete as we’ve ever seen in footy, and it’s been a joy to watch him released up the field this season.
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