A forgettable AFL season has hardly been one for the ages, as months of predictable results and dead rubbers have provided fodder for the easily outraged and wildcard round campaigners. The damp squib has meant the slowest of burns while fans wait for an endless stream of Thursday and Friday night fizzers to pass, and for jeopardy to return.
But the season is set to be ignited by do-or-die clashes between premiership fancies arriving a week early, and could even be saved by a finals series to be played out between eight evenly matched teams. The all-too familiar late-season collapse from Fremantle has set up a winner-takes-all encounter with Western Bulldogs on Sunday, as the AFL pulls off its annual trick of waiting until the final round to get its fixturing right.
A day of drama that the season desperately needs will be centred around the showdown between the Dockers and Dogs with the winner to book their place in the finals, while the loser will likely claim an unwanted slice of history. Fremantle could become the first team to miss the top eight with 15 triumphs on the board, and even Western Bulldogs finishing the season with their current 14 victories would claim the record from Collingwood after last year’s reigning premiers dropped to ninth with 12 wins and two draws.
All that is dependent on Gold Coast finally shaking off their tag as a laughing stock and securing at least one win from their last two matches against Port Adelaide and Essendon that would secure a club-first finals place. The Power have already put the cue in the rack but have shown across 13 seasons under Ken Hinkley that they can feed off emotion as well as any side to pull an unexpected victory out of the bag. The last game of the Power coach’s tenure looms as a danger game for the Suns, while the season-long wait to play the postponed match against the now injury-ravaged Bombers should mean the four points are a mere formality if not for the weight of history.
Fans have suffered, as has the season as a whole, after a great divide opened up between the nine finals contenders and as many sides stuck in the bottom half of the ladder. The same nine teams have shared the top eight spots since St Kilda dropped out of the finals places after round five and Western Bulldogs finally started to live up to expectations and move the opposite way.
The gulf in class has been even more apparent week-to-week than on the ladder, with the top nine sides enjoying a near flawless stretch of matches since round 14 when facing the teams that had by then all but fallen out of contention. In the 45 matches between finals hopefuls and lesser lights since the mid-season bye rounds began, the top-half teams have won 43 times.
Sydney were widely expected to be in the mix again but after early injuries to star players and a sluggish start to the season, last year’s beaten grand finalists have had to settle for trying to put disappointment aside to become the great disruptor. The Swans have proven to be the best of the rest with impressive wins over the Dockers and Lions that are the outlier for all finals contenders in the second-half of the season, but even they were exposed for being well off the pace when comprehensively beaten by the Cats last Sunday.
The Swans are already assured to finish in 10th place which is largely seen as no man’s land under the current finals system but would be enough for the club to still be alive if a wildcard round existed. The contentious finals expansion would mean the 10 remaining games would only hold significance for the shuffling of places rather than deciding which high performer has their season end early.
Instead, every finals place is still up for grabs, as well as the dreaded ninth spot that will earn one club a place in the record books. Ladder-leaders Adelaide and perennial contenders Geelong would have to suffer almighty slip-ups against the lowly North Melbourne and Richmond respectively, to tumble out of the top-two spots and lose their grip on a home qualifying final. GWS Giants did the hard work to come out on top in a must-win game on the road against Gold Coast and only need to overcome St Kilda at home to perhaps snatch a top-four spot or at least host an elimination final.
Reigning premiers Brisbane could finish between second and eighth, depending on the outcome of their match against Hawthorn who could land between third and eighth. Early pacesetters Collingwood are in freefall after five defeats in their past six matches, but could still climb as high as third or drop to eighth with another loss to Melbourne on Friday night.
The AFL season has taken the longest of roads to get to this point, but with a dramatic final round now on the cards, as well as the Crows returning to the finals for the first time since 2017 and the Suns on the brink of history, the destination might mean more than the journey.
