{"id":85467,"date":"2026-04-27T08:19:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T22:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/?p=85467"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:29:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T00:29:27","slug":"melbourne-and-the-myth-of-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/2026\/04\/melbourne-and-the-myth-of-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Melbourne and the Myth of Conservatism\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I went down to the G on Friday night to watch Richmond get eviscerated by Melbourne.\u00a0Before the game, I was talking to another Richmond supporter\u00a0friend\u00a0and I was doing my usual thing,\u00a0complaining\u00a0about how Adem\u00a0Yze\u2019s\u00a0conservative\u00a0game style\u00a0makes me want to spew.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friend, another Richmond supporter, pushed back. He asked \u201cwell\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0it possible that\u00a0he\u2019s\u00a0trying to set a defensive foundation up first, especially with how short-handed we are?\u00a0And even then, Melbourne has just released the shackles and have no structure to fall back on.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t win the title because jump shooting is necessarily unserious.<\/a> The idea was that shooting teams just weren\u2019t physical enough to hold up long term and shooting jumpers is too high variance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of Tim Pool, not many have been more spectacularly wrong more quickly.<\/a> Jump shooting, especially three-point shooting, is essentially the only way to win in the modern NBA. It\u2019s such a dominant meta that the NBA is looking at making it harder for teams to get threes off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just ten years ago it was gimmick basketball. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aggression in transition is going to be our game\u2019s three-point shot. It\u2019s going to be the thing that the early adopters reap the benefits of while the recalcitrant clubs who want to focus on \u201cdefence\u201d and \u201csystem\u201d get left in the dust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a0kept the ball\u00a0in play,\u00a0and\u00a0the ruck rule has tried to drive more explosive stoppage exits to just go through last offseason’s rule changes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You still need to defend of course, but today you need to defend aggressively and otherwise create conditions where you can kick goals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the returns were diminishing rapidly, so they fired Goodwin and brought in Steven King from Geelong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

King brought Geelong\u2019s voracious appetite for space with him. The Dees get the ball into space from contest as quickly as anyone, generally unlocked by Jack Steele\u2019s 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 Winds<\/a>or\u2019s hands to go inside 50 at pace. That requires Melbourne\u2019s mids and backs to cheat forward and wide on the assumption that Melbourne will win the ball.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It makes them exciting but also high variance because when they win the ball at contest, they\u2019re so aggressive at attacking the 50, but when they lose it, they can get burned badly going the other way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That pace and space mentality has driven dramatic improvement in pretty much everyone\u2019s game, but the one I want to note is Jacob van Rooyen who has thrived on the space that King\u2019s system has afforded him inside 50. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s used that space to become the player he always threatened to be.<\/a> He\u2019s kicked 10 goals for the year and is also on a career high pace for score involvements with 5.5. Crucially, he\u2019s taken 1.4 marks on the lead per game this year which is double what he\u2019s ever done before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the whole, Melbourne is scoring 100 points per game, up from 82 last year, and are 5-2.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Melbourne pivot into modernity required a new coach, but even some of the AFL\u2019s most hardened defensive senior coaches are also sensing the shift.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alastair Clarkson has finally given his Roos a licence to take territory and bite off tough kicks, a mentality shift he\u2019s supercharged by sending both Cam Zurhaar and Luke Parker to half back.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/a> Instead, he\u2019s almost playing Liam Ryan as an old school full forward who barely leaves his 50 to try and encourage more space to transition into. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dean Cox, in year 2 at the helm of the Swans has them playing borderline kamikaze footy especially with Justin McInerney\u2019s running lanes.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Collingwood, who have nothing in terms of attacking talent but are the best in footy at making teams play left handed, destroyed Essendon on Anzac Day with hyper corridor aggression that the Bombers just couldn\u2019t match.<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s simply not true anymore.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rules have been set up to drive aggressive ball movement so heavily that if you aren\u2019t leaning into that at least a little bit, you\u2019re going to get left behind.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went down to the G on Friday night to watch Richmond get eviscerated by Melbourne.\u00a0Before the game, I was talking to another Richmond supporter\u00a0friend\u00a0and I was doing my usual thing,\u00a0complaining\u00a0about how Adem\u00a0Yze\u2019s\u00a0conservative\u00a0game style\u00a0makes me want to spew.\u00a0 My friend, another Richmond supporter, pushed back. He asked \u201cwell\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0it possible that\u00a0he\u2019s\u00a0trying to set a defensive foundation up first, especially with how short-handed we are?\u00a0And even then, Melbourne has just released the shackles and have no structure to fall back on.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 We continued the discussion and eventually watched the game where we saw Melbourne, predictably, spread hard out of contests and essentially destroy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":85468,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8298,598],"tags":[8260],"hub_post_cat":[],"class_list":["post-85467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australian-rules","category-guywholikessport","category-special-interest","tag-guywholikessport"],"acf":{"md_tip_date":"","md_tip_date_end":"","md_market_url":"","tip_date":"27\/04\/2026","event_country":"Australia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85467","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=85467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85467"},{"taxonomy":"hub_post_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neds.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hub_post_cat?post=85467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}