De Goey response a ridiculous overreaction, Port’s perfect half, and the wildest round in years – The Roar

And… breathe.

With only two games on Sunday afternoon – and three of the teams involved stuck in the bottom six – it promised to be a fairly dull day at the office.

But think again – two high-scoring thrillers would ensue, with Richmond and GWS putting on one of 2023’s most spectacular, dramatic final quarters that saw the Tigers finish a goal to the goods.

Following that up was a tough ask, but North Melbourne did just that to give Essendon the almightiest of frights, the Bombers only just pipping them in the final minutes for another six-point triumph.

Before this weekend, just three teams had lost games this year with scores of 95 or higher. That number is now doubled, with Hawthorn’s rapid second half against Port Adelaide joining the Giants and Kangaroos in that unwanted category.

But the round was already well stocked with talking points: Port established themselves as one of the AFL’s most fearsome teams, Jordan De Goey became a human headline once again, and Geelong proved that it will take more than their entire midfield succumbing to injury to stop being good.

So from pile-ons to Power surges, Origin debate to bad-kicking Bulldogs, let’s dive in.

1. De Goey pile-on an outrageous overreaction

Every year at some point, there’s an old-fashioned hit that sends social media into a frenzy and has talking heads weigh in with scorching hot takes galore.

2023’s edition appears to be Jordan De Goey’s high bump on Elijah Hewett on Saturday.

This has all the elements that usually trigger a massive overreaction: a Collingwood player, an ugly incident and a teenage victim. Add to that the fact that the perpetrator was Jordan De Goey, a man at the centre of more scandals than Nixon at this point, and you’ve got a recipe for explosion.

Let’s get the incident out of the way first: it was an incredibly dumb thing for De Goey to do, but as crude as the hit was, you couldn’t possibly say beyond doubt that it was malicious.

Everything about it looked awful, and it needs to be stamped out of the game. I’d wager it will probably receive two weeks, the same ban as Kysaiah Pickett received for his infamous Round 1 bump on Bailey Smith, plus an extra week for the fact it concussed Hewett. As I’ve said before, I strongly disagree with that outcome-based ban, but it’s the system we’ve got. There. Done.

All the same, I can’t help feeling like the pile-on on De Goey, from both the wider media and, more fascinating still, by West Coast players after the game, is a major overreaction. There have been multiple instances like De Goey’s this year, and the only difference between this one and, say, Griffin Logue on Will Day in Round 3, is that the Hawk luckily and fortunately avoided a concussion.

I can only imagine the Eagles received a serve, either from Adam Simpson on their leadership group, for not sticking up for Hewett and, in Greg Clark’s words, ‘remonstrating’, with De Goey at the time, and chose to make up for it with their words after the match.

I get that they’re concerned for the welfare of a first-year player, and can understand them being upset – but Dom Sheed advocating for ‘a month or two on the sidelines’ is a bit rich; as is others having a go at De Goey for a ‘weak’ act. Save that for off-the-ball snipes, or gut punches, or what Dayne Zorko did to Luke Pedlar last week.

Let’s not get sucked up into mass hysteria over this incident, as crude as it was.

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2. The wildest round of footy in years

Who would have thought after Friday night’s horror show between Melbourne and Carlton that the rest of the weekend would be as crazy as it was?

Scoring was back, and in a big way, in Round 12. Six of 14 teams cracked 100 points, while two others – North Melbourne and Hawthorn – lost, in markedly different ways, while scoring in the high 90s.

All up, just three teams failed to reach 87 points – the Western Bulldogs, who kicked themselves out of it against Geelong, West Coast, who are West Coast, and both the Dees and Blues.

What was great to see was teams previously renowned for their relative stodginess in Gold Coast, GWS and the Kangaroos putting pedal to the metal and attacking with all their might. Seeing the Kangaroos with such a ferocious intent to score has been a joy to watch in Brett Ratten’s three weeks in charge, and I can’t be the only neutral supporter slightly flat at another heartbreaking loss.

With two key midfielders in Hugh Greenwood and Jy Simpkin missing the entire second half, and Luke Davies-Uniacke to return, the future is bright at North Melbourne – certainly brighter than some opportunists would have had you think in the days after Alastair Clarkson stepped away from the club. George Wardlaw and Harry Sheezel are worth the price of admission alone.

The Suns have unlocked a high-scoring, fast-moving style that is working a treat, with the nimble Jack Lukosius the biggest beneficiary with another haul of five. Ditto the Giants, who might have lost in the dying minutes to Richmond having looked set to pinch a match they’d trailed from the outset: with a remarkable 12 goalkickers contributing for 15 goals, this was a whole team buy-in to fast footy through the corridor and into an open 50.

The Tigers, to their immense credit, forced them into it by being so explosive in the opening quarter; this was a Richmond match of old, full of frantic pressure on the ball-carrier and slingshot footy. If that wasn’t enough of a blast from the past, having Jack Riewoldt kick five goals and pull off one crucial late one-on-one contest win to set up Marlion Pickett’s matchwinning six-pointer would have done the trick.

Geelong kicked 15 goals with just four coming from Tom Hawkins and Jeremy Cameron; Collingwood did Collingwood things to the Eagles; I’ll speak more about Port Adelaide in a sec. Even if the matches were one-sided, I don’t think I’ve seen the ball move quicker than it did this round in more than a decade.

If you take out Friday night, the rest of the round saw teams average 101 points – three goals up on the season average. I can’t help wondering whether the speedy ball movement of the Magpies in particular has begun to be copied by other teams in the hope of matching them, as I wondered would happen back in Round 2.

Whatever the cause, it was bloody awesome. More of that, please!

3. Port play the perfect half

Collingwood’s masterclass against Port Adelaide in Round 2 remains the gold standard for first halves in season 2023; but what the Power themselves did to Hawthorn on Saturday is right there on the podium with it.

Enough of the talk has been about Hawthorn’s abysmal defending and poor turnovers, but thankfully enough acclaim has been handed Port’s way for what was just about footballing perfection to half time. Indeed, the way the Hawks surged when the Power put the cue in the rack midway through the third term to turn a likely massacre into just a 55-point loss probably tells you how impressive it was to rip them to shreds in the first half.

When they play this way – and they’ve been doing it a fair bit in their new club record nine-game winning streak – the Power don’t have a weakness to their game.

Defensively, they’re a slingshot, filled with intercept markers and beautiful kicks to launch the ball back at the opposition at breakneck pace. Aliir Aliir is the biggest name, but Dan Houston might be the most underrated player in the game this year, and should be making far more mock All-Australian teams than he is.

In midfield, the Power have both the inside grunt of Ollie Wines, Jason Horne-Francis and Willem Drew, and the exquisite outside use of Connor Rozee and Zak Butters. Butters’ game in partcular is now so three-dimensional he can switch from the contested beast he was in rainy conditions against Melbourne a fortnight ago to the silky-smooth outside distributor he was against the Hawks, and be equally brilliant in both roles. He’s more than just a Brownlow smoky now.

Up forward, the Power are another team from the side that looked utterly lost 12 months ago with Charlie Dixon injured. Their spearhead has missed four games on the trot through injury, and it hasn’t made a lick of difference. Mostly, that’s because the speed of their ball movement has meant an open 50 to deliver into, rather than the congested scrums other teams were able to lock them down with last year, in which only Dixon was a realistic chance to pull down a big grab.

If it’s not Todd Marshall and Jeremy Finlayson using their size and mobility to terrorise opposition backs with marks inside 50 galore – they’d rack up 10 goals between them on the Hawks – then at ground level, it’s the creativity of Junior Rioli, the manic intensity of Sam Powell-Pepper, and the smarts of Darcy Byrne-Jones to keep the pressure up and the scoreboard ticking over.

By half time, the Power had a staggering 14 tackles inside 50 – if the bigs don’t get you, the smalls will.

From staring down the barrel nine weeks ago, Ken Hinkley has got his team humming like they never have before under his tenure, even in their run to the minor premiership in the COVID-impacted 2020 season. The only reason to not make the re-signing official is for fear of jinxing this epic run, and it’s a pretty good reason.

The Power aren’t just in this premiership race up to their eyeballs – right now, they deserve to be second-favourites for the flag behind Collingwood. Their Round 19 clash with the Pies, on their own turf at the Adelaide Oval, under the Saturday night lights, just can’t come around soon enough.

4. The Bulldogs have a Bailey Smith problem

It’s been a good long while since I left Marvel Stadium as frustrated with the Western Bulldogs as I did on Saturday night.

Against a Geelong team seemingly ripe for the picking, with their entire first-choice midfield wiped out and on a three-game losing streak, the Dogs showed every single one of the bad habits that have repeatedly cruelled their chances to add to their 2016 premiership in an era where they have consistently had as much talent on their list as anywhere in the league.

Fans and opposition critics will likely point to yet more inaccuracy in front of the big sticks; but the Dogs’ problems extend beyond what they do when kicking for goal. And Bailey Smith is at the heart of a lot of it.

A fortnight ago, Smith was best afield in the Dogs’ most impressive win of the season against Adelaide; moved into a full-time on-ball role with Adam Treloar out injured, he attended 75 per cent of centre bounces and used his explosive acceleration from stoppages to lethal effect in a 37-disposal performance. A week earlier, he’d had 10 clearances in a similar role against Carlton.

But with Treloar back, Smith moved back to a more outside role, and it just isn’t working. By AFL standards, his kicking and decision-making are far below the standard for a player with that much uncontested ball.

Just four of Smith’s 14 kicks against Geelong were considered ‘effective’ by Champion Data; yes, as was brilliantly pointed out in an ABC article this week, that stat is limited, but it matches well with what the eye tells you when watching the Bulldogs’ number 6. He blazes away under little pressure, rarely lowers his eyes, and then when he does sends pass after pass over the heads of leading teammates.

Even after losing Josh Dunkley to Brisbane, the Bulldogs have too many midfielders to play them all in their best positions – you can’t fit Marcus Bontempelli, Tom Liberatore, Jack Macrae, Treloar and Smith, plus this year’s new addition to the group in Caleb Daniel, around every stoppage.

But none of the above are cruelling the Bulldogs as much as Bailey Smith is when asked to play on the outside. The Dogs’ ball use is once again sending their season spiralling of course, and Bazlenka is a big part of the problem.

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5. ‘Northern Suns’ a legitimate option

Dwayne Russell pondered on SEN this week whether the AFL should consider rebranding Gold Coast as the ‘Northern Suns’, and having them divide home games across Darwin, Cairns and Heritage Bank Stadium.

Unlike most polls you see on SEN, the idea had a pretty positive response.

Most bizarrely of all, given my previously strong stance against clubs merging, relocating or otherwise sacrificing an established identity, I really, really like this idea, for a number of reasons.

For starters, the Suns have always had an issue establishing a supporter base on the Gold Coast. Queensland is rugby league heartland, and the glitter strip is famously a sporting graveyard. 11 years on, crowds are just as sparse at most games as they were when the venture began (not that that should in any way call into question their right to exist, mind you).

But Darwin especially is a footy heartland, and in many ways the lost cradle of the game. I was right behind a bold prospect last year to make a 20th AFL club once Tasmania becomes the 19th a Darwin-based venture to try and tap into the rich football and cultural history of the Top End, and having more games up there – and an established team to call it home, rather than just cash-poor Victorian clubs selling the occasional home match there – can only be a good thing for the soul of our game.

Adding to that, the crowds in the two games the Suns have played up there have been full, invested, passionate, and notably pro-Gold Coast. Darwin seems to have got behind the team after three years of semi-regular games up there – imagine if they had four or five home games there and not just a two-week stretch?

The other reason is that the Suns have established a bit of a fortress at TIO Stadium. As I rote on Saturday night, their kick-heavy gameplan is perfectly suited to the humid, slippery conditions, as are their contested-ball beasts in midfield. That’s now two years in a row they have gone 2-0 there, and while 2022’s games being against Hawthorn and North Melbourne has an obvious quality asterisk, their victories in the last fortnight over finals contenders the Western Bulldogs and Adelaide were bursting with merit.

The Suns might never have a strong enough contingent of fans to get the benefits home-ground advantage brings to most other sides in the league, especially the non-Victorian ones. But like Hawthorn have done with Launceston, or the Bulldogs with Ballarat, if the Suns can develop a strong conditions-based home ground advantage, it makes sense for them to play as many games as possible there.

So here’s my proposal. The Suns play five home games every year, plus any home finals they earn on the Gold Coast; have a month-long, four-week stretch of consecutive games in the middle of the year, when conditions in Darwin should be at their best, at TIO Stadium. The other two home games can be played in Cairns if the AFL want to really go the whole hog on this ‘team of the north’ concept, which I don’t think is necessary but don’t think it does any harm either.

For reasons both on- and off-field, expanding the Suns’ reach makes too much sense to be dismissed out of hand.

6. AFL Origin will never work

Like clockwork, every year as the NRL enjoy State of Origin action, calls come for the AFL to revive representative footy of its own.

I’ll stop it there: it’s a nice idea, but not only is it never going to happen, there’s also next to no chance it could become as big a staple on the calendar as it is in rugby league.

For starters, our game is more widespread than rugby league, of which the playing pool nearly all come from New South Wales or Queensland (or from outside Australia). This makes one-off games problematic – the biggest issue in the two Origin games played during my memory, in 2008 and the bushfire appeal game in 2020, has been that it has staged Victoria, a proud team with a hundred years of tradition, against a combined Frankenstein of a ‘Dream Team’, with no tradition and heritage to speak of.

That heritage is what makes State of Origin such an event in rugby league; to replicate it, you’d need to make a carnival involving Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia (a combined ‘Allies’ team from the other states and territories like they used to have can get in the bin as far as I’m concerned). And that instantly detracts from another thing that makes rugby league Origin great: a two-state, single-minded rivalry is always going to trump a three-way competition as far as intensity goes.

Notably, AFL Origin crowds dwindled during the 1990s as more and more of the game’s star players opted out of games in favour of club footy. Of course that would happen again if the AFL revived these games during footy season (and the reaction when the NRL, because of COVID, staged Origin after their grand final in 2020 should be reason enough to play it at any other time).

The NRL has done a phenomenal job keeping alive the culture and prestige of representative footy, and it’s time we acknowledged that it’s something that, for all the reasons above, the AFL can’t hope to match.

But there’s another point here: the AFL doesn’t need State of Origin.

Our game already has marquee matches and tradition to spare without needing to copy the NRL. Anzac Day between Collingwood and Essendon sells out year on year, just like Origin games do. King’s Birthday and Easter Monday blockbusters in the AFL comfortably outweigh their NRL counterparts in terms of significance and attendance. There are more of them, too: the AFL owns Anzac Day eve on its own, the traditional Richmond-Carlton season opener is now a staple, and I’m sure the Blues and Bombers will be keen to make this year’s King’s Birthday eve Sunday night clash a permanent fixture.

Would AFL Origin footy be great? Of course it would… if you can get the same buy-in from players that the NRL has, and spend 15 years building back the history and prestige the games once had. But that horse has well and truly bolted, and the stable is more than full enough as it is.

Random thoughts

– This is just the best.

– Clearly West Coast missed my Anzac Day article pleading with someone to lay a hand on Nick Daicos.

– Three weeks after his debut and I still have no clue exactly what James O’Donnell did to convince Luke Beveridge he’s an AFL-standard player having not played the game for three years.

– It’s a packed field for the Rising Star, but Bailey Humphrey is coming with a bullet.

– I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 18 months ago that a 63-point loss at home, for their tenth defeat in a row, would spark the reaction ‘Oh well, at least the Eagles tried this week’.

– The Liam Duggan suspension is the most fascinating dangerous tackle yet. Will be very interested to see what the Tribunal thinks of it when the Eagles inevitably challenge.

– Classic ruckmen.

– Just quietly, Kieren Briggs is a very, very handy ruckman.