I went down to the G on Friday night to watch Richmond get eviscerated by Melbourne. Before the game, I was talking to another Richmond supporter friend and I was doing my usual thing, complaining about how Adem Yze’s conservative game style makes me want to spew.
My friend, another Richmond supporter, pushed back. He asked “well isn’t it possible that he’s trying to set a defensive foundation up first, especially with how short-handed we are? And even then, Melbourne has just released the shackles and have no structure to fall back on.”
We continued the discussion and eventually watched the game where we saw Melbourne, predictably, spread hard out of contests and essentially destroy Richmond with their run and attacking dynamism.
It occurred to me that the discourse around the AFL is in the same position now that NBA discourse was in during the mid 2010s just before the Warriors won their first title. The assumption, most famously espoused by Charles Barkley, was that jump shooting teams just can’t win the title because jump shooting is necessarily unserious. The idea was that shooting teams just weren’t physical enough to hold up long term and shooting jumpers is too high variance.
Outside of Tim Pool, not many have been more spectacularly wrong more quickly. Jump shooting, especially three-point shooting, is essentially the only way to win in the modern NBA. It’s such a dominant meta that the NBA is looking at making it harder for teams to get threes off.
Just ten years ago it was gimmick basketball.
Aggression in transition is going to be our game’s three-point shot. It’s going to be the thing that the early adopters reap the benefits of while the recalcitrant clubs who want to focus on “defence” and “system” get left in the dust.
Teams still need systems, but the system has to work both ways. You need to have a clear method to get the ball into space and on the move just like you have to have a way you want to defend the whole ground.
That aggression has been demanded by the AFL, who have changed rules across the board to keep the ball moving, and moving in more aggressive ways. The stand rule has opened the corridor, the lasso rule has kept the ball in play, and the ruck rule has tried to drive more explosive stoppage exits to just go through last offseason’s rule changes.
Those changes mean that trying to build defence only and add a layer of attack on top of that later is just not reacting to modern conditions.
You still need to defend of course, but today you need to defend aggressively and otherwise create conditions where you can kick goals.
No club has shown it more clearly than Melbourne, with their move from Simon Goodwin to Steven King, which is a Jack Antonoff going from Lena Dunham to Margaret Qualley standard of levelling up.
Melbourne under Goodwin was the standard for old school footy values. They were defence and contest first and they were good at it, winning a premiership.
But the returns were diminishing rapidly, so they fired Goodwin and brought in Steven King from Geelong.
King brought Geelong’s voracious appetite for space with him. The Dees get the ball into space from contest as quickly as anyone, generally unlocked by Jack Steele’s inside work. From there, they run and spread like a high school team, stretching defences before trying to get the ball into Pickett, Chandler or Windsor’s hands to go inside 50 at pace. That requires Melbourne’s mids and backs to cheat forward and wide on the assumption that Melbourne will win the ball.
It makes them exciting but also high variance because when they win the ball at contest, they’re so aggressive at attacking the 50, but when they lose it, they can get burned badly going the other way.
That pace and space mentality has driven dramatic improvement in pretty much everyone’s game, but the one I want to note is Jacob van Rooyen who has thrived on the space that King’s system has afforded him inside 50.
Rather than having to compete with 12 defenders for another Melbourne bomb entry, van Rooyen and the other forwards have had real space to work with. He’s used that space to become the player he always threatened to be. He’s kicked 10 goals for the year and is also on a career high pace for score involvements with 5.5. Crucially, he’s taken 1.4 marks on the lead per game this year which is double what he’s ever done before.
On the whole, Melbourne is scoring 100 points per game, up from 82 last year, and are 5-2.
The Melbourne pivot into modernity required a new coach, but even some of the AFL’s most hardened defensive senior coaches are also sensing the shift.
Ross Lyon has done the same thing as his Saints have played in banger after banger, enabled by Lyon abandoning his usual willingness to let teams exit their D50s easily and deploy all his numbers in his own defensive 50. Instead, he’s almost playing Liam Ryan as an old school full forward who barely leaves his 50 to try and encourage more space to transition into.
The prevailing myth of footy is still that stern, conservative, defensive teams are the most serious ones and the ones that embrace variance are just playing for fun.
It’s simply not true anymore.
The rules have been set up to drive aggressive ball movement so heavily that if you aren’t leaning into that at least a little bit, you’re going to get left behind.