{"id":81698,"date":"2026-01-12T08:57:45","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T22:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/?p=81698"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:29:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T00:29:34","slug":"why-history-suggests-the-suns-could-win-the-2026-afl-premiership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/2026\/01\/why-history-suggests-the-suns-could-win-the-2026-afl-premiership\/","title":{"rendered":"Why History Suggests the Suns Could Win the 2026 AFL Premiership"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You can chart the course of how football has been played over the last decade or so through the last three great runs in the AFL over the last decade: Hawthorn\u2019s threepeat from 2013 to 2015, Richmond\u2019s three in four years from 2017 to 2020, and Brisbane\u2019s back-to-back in 2024 and 2025.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look in broad strokes at the way those teams played, you can understand how footy has moved and where it might be going.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hawks were doing surgery when they had the ball.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With their collection of raking, pinpoint left foot kicks and Matt Suckling, the Hawks picked the eyes out of defensive zones like Tony Soprano needling Janice about her son.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They knew where the pain points were and could access them easily, often by foot.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their threepeat years, they were always top-5 in mark and disposal differential. They had a lot of the footy, and they slowly killed you with it.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richmond, unsurprisingly given Damien Hardwick\u2019s was pruned off Alastair Clarkson\u2019s coaching tree, tried that. You can actually see it in 2015 and 2016 in mark differential.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Damien Hardwick realised \u201cmaybe I don\u2019t have 18 of the best 25 kicks in the AFL in my team need to do something different.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, the Tigers were +5 in mark differential in an awful year, fifth in the league. They played boring, regressive, Hawthorn-lite footy not dissimilar to what Clarkson has had North Melbourne doing for the last two years.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, they went from fifth in to 14th<\/sup> with -6.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tigers embraced the imperfections of the game.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They got the ball forward a lot more art than science and moved with a surge mentality, dictating the game with more outward aggression than Clarkson\u2019s passive aggression.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between 2017 and 2020, Richmond was bottom-6 every year in mark and disposal differential. They didn\u2019t want or need a lot of the ball because they had so many teeth when they did get it. It was brutal, but not scientific, efficiency. They were also, given that emphasis, an extremely low stoppage and low clearance team.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Clarkson\u2019s Hawks were Tony Soprano needling Janice, Hardwick\u2019s Tigers were Tony Soprano beating the piss out of the Muscles Marinara.<\/a>   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we get to Brisbane who also, unsurprisingly given Chris Fagan also came off the Clarkson tree, tried to do the Clarkson thing of ball control but extended that emphasis to a dominant clearance and contested ball game <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2019, the year of Brisbane\u2019s initial explosion up the ladder, they have been top-4 in mark differential every year.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where Brisbane between 2019 and 2023 controlled the ball, they were relatively slow with their ball use, never taking the ball from D50 to a score more than 10.9% of the time, which is a strong but never league leading number.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What changed in 2024 and 2025 was the addition of Dayne Zorko to the back half.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zorko supercharged it with his hyper aggressive kicking out of the back half. He made them more dangerous than ever, sitting over 11.5% in each of their premiership years. Their mark of 13.3% in 2024 is the best rate in the history of the stat.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their heavy ball control thinking also informed the decision to get Lachie Neale ahead of the 2019. Since then, they\u2019ve never been lower than third in clearances.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the three dominant teams in this piece, they\u2019re the only one that deeply prioritised clearance dominance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in 2024 and 2025, they scored less from stoppage than they had in every year from 2019.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They deprioritised stoppage scoring – underscoring how much of a ball movement game that footy has become – until the 2025 finals series.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lions had two of their three best stoppage scoring games of the season in their preliminary and grand final wins in 2025. With that shift, they went back to the future with their footy, with Will Ashcroft particularly showing his craft around the goals in congested situations.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also speaks to a wider AFL trend. The league wide average for stoppage scoring has gone up about a point every year since 2021, from about 29 points per game in 2021 to 34 in 2025.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brisbane leant hard into it in their last two finals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The AFL is a copycat league. I wonder if those two games \u2013 particularly the way that Brisbane forced stoppage after stoppage in Collingwood and Geelong\u2019s respective back halves \u2013 as well as that wider trend is instructive.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where we return to Damien Hardwick. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ahead of the 2023 season, Hardwick seemed to see that eventually the worm would turn back to contested and clearance-based ways to win football games, which he had eschewed to that point, and went out and got Hopper and Taranto as a way to modernise the dynasty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It failed miserably, a fact for which I\u2019ll never forgive him, but aside from my being a scorned fan, note that he went to Gold Coast. The Suns already had the best contested player since Nat Fyfe in Matt Rowell, but also the archetypal propulsion mid in Noah Anderson, who can get his hands dirty.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My bet is that Hardwick wasn\u2019t wrong, he was just early.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of building the team that could respond to the trend that he foresaw, he used his juice as a triple premiership coach to just get <\/em>one, like Tom Cruise demanding fat hands and dancing for Tropic Thunder<\/em>.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As teams try to clamp down on ball movement coming out of the back half, we\u2019re going to go back to grinding kinds of games where teams are able to force more stoppages in the front half like Brisbane did in the 2025 finals series.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that happens, Gold Coast are well positioned to capitalise with their personnel that\u2019s uniquely suited to the modern game. Last year, the Suns were fourth in clearances, third in getting first possession, but crucially were second in turning first possessions into clearances.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That cleanness in the clinch drove them to being the third heaviest scoring stoppage team in footy, that just added one of the most destructive stoppage scoring players in footy, Christian Petracca.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They have elite talent, are well spread out, and look ahead of the next evolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arc of footy history is bending toward the Suns. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\t\t\t\n Bet Now: 2026 AFL Premiership<\/a>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can chart the course of how football has been played over the last decade or so through the last three great runs in the AFL over the last decade: Hawthorn\u2019s threepeat from 2013 to 2015, Richmond\u2019s three in four years from 2017 to 2020, and Brisbane\u2019s back-to-back in 2024 and 2025.  If you look in broad strokes at the way those teams played, you can understand how footy has moved and where it might be going.   The Hawks were doing surgery when they had the ball.   With their collection of raking, pinpoint left foot kicks and Matt Suckling, the Hawks picked the eyes out…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":81700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8298],"tags":[8260],"hub_post_cat":[],"class_list":["post-81698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guywholikessport","tag-guywholikessport"],"acf":{"md_tip_date":"","md_tip_date_end":"","md_market_url":"","tip_date":"12\/01\/2026","event_country":"Australia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87722,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81698\/revisions\/87722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81698"},{"taxonomy":"hub_post_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hub_post_cat?post=81698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}