Special Interest

There’s something strange happening in Fremantle.   With the new rule changes, footy is having a Woodstock season. It’s all free love and forward handballs baby.   Sydney is the AFL’s Hendrix leading the charge with the 755 metres gained by handball per game over their last five, which is more than 200 more metres than the second leading team, but others are doing it too.   We saw it on Thursday night with Hawthorn, for example. The Hawks are a run and gun team but under Sam Mitchell they’ve historically relied on long wide exits from defence by foot, then short, sharp and aggressive…

Do you have a seat at the Table?  What table? It’s like the High Table in John Wick. All of the most powerful teams in the AFL are on this table together, as equals and as competitors. Among them, they’ll decide who gets to win the premiership.  But what is it?  The Table is a group of six teams that can win the premiership. That’s it. Only six. I will check in on the Table at about the ¾ mark of the season and then on the eve of the finals and, if all goes well, one of the teams on the Table will win the premiership.   You…

I remember going to Dusty Martin’s 300th game a couple of years ago.   Just like old times, hordes of Tiger fans flocked to the MCG to watch the person that lay at the heart of so much of our happiness over the previous five or so years play.   But it was about much more than watching him play again, which we’d all done a hundred times.   It was more about saying thank you. Thank you for all the memories you brought us. Thank you for the brightness you brought after a long fallow period.   He spoke to Jack Riewoldt over the loudspeaker after yet another…

Heading into this year, it felt like we kind of knew who the good teams would be and who the bad teams would be. For the most part, we were right.   Everyone expected Sydney to bounce back and they have, sitting pretty on top of the ladder. By the same token, Richmond was expected to be terrible.  Mission accomplished in that regard.   Even teams like the Saints, who most were lukewarm on despite a big season, have been worthy of that tepidness as they currently sit 9th and at 5-5.  But what are the teams that we were just wrong about? Who changed the narrative on their season?   Let’s look into it.  Melbourne …

I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 the other night. My official review is that I loved the original.   To celebrate the second one coming out and at the very least not being the worst legacy sequel in living memory (Anchorman 2), I thought I’d run through Andrew Whelan’s premiership metrics using lines from the original, which is one of the most quotable movies since Goodfellas.   But what are the premiership metrics? The premiership metrics are a series of numbers that have been mostly closely associated with winning the premiership over the last 15 years.   Essentially, the numbers combine stats that capture your performance with and…

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…