A potentially Rocky road trip for Geelong
Still a way off their blistering best, Port Adelaide have at least done a decent job of pulling themselves up off the canvas in the past two weeks, firstly against Melbourne a fortnight ago and also in running away from the Bulldogs in the final term last week.
At home against Geelong tonight, Ken Hinkley’s side has the chance to set up the second half of the season because following this one they have Carlton and then the bye, which is about the most comforting schedule in football right now.
The pleasing thing for Port last week was the way that Travis Boak, Brad Ebert and thunder-thighed game-breaker Ollie Wines tore through the Dogs midfield when the game was there to be won. When Wines is in one of those moods he’s a fearful sight, like the lovechild of Ivan Drago and Greg Williams.
A little harder to peg are Geelong, who embarrassed Essendon in the first half before running out 69-point victors last week. Away against the Power they’re just as likely to get pummeled at Adelaide Oval. In the last month they’ve alternated between dishing out and receiving thrashings. Could that trend continue tonight?
Bonus: this game will be coming to you live via the Guardian goal-by-goal live blog.
Way out west
In blatant mismatch news, not even Fremantle’s shock loss to Richmond last week will give Gold Coast much hope of registering their second win in 2015, especially when you look down the Suns injury list. Rodney Eade probably sent Mick Malthouse a bottle of Grange every week for the first two months of the season, such has been the shambles of his side’s season so far.
Charlie Dixon’s return from a club-imposed ban this week is timely given that stalwart defender Michael Johnson is out of action for the Dockers, but you’d be hard pressed to call even that a difference-maker.
Elsewhere in Western Australia, things might actually get worse for Essendon on their away trip to face the Eagles this week, which is a little hard to believe after watching them go goalless in the first half against middling Geelong last week. The Bombers were barely sentient during that period of the game.
Paul Chapman – a legitimate champion of the game to be certain - might actually be a dead person controlled by animatronics at this point. He and Adam Cooney produced three goals between them against the Cats but their combined presence feels like far less than the sum of its parts.
The Eagles probably should have taken their chances against North down in Hobart, but you get the feeling they’re due to beat up on an opponent in Perth and the Bombers shape as a very soft target.
Goal-kicking indiscretions aside, Nic Naitanui is flying at the moment while the Bombers patchwork forward structure is faltering. That places the visitors at desperately long odds.
North Melbourne might come straight back to earth against Sydney
Like all struggling sides, North have been forced to talk about concepts like attitude, desire and hard work for the last few weeks, but what they showed against the Eagles is what they can achieve by harnessing their natural ability, a resource in which the Roos list is rich.
Hard-nosed midfielders Andrew Swallow, Jack Ziebell and Ben Cunnington had 30 tackles between them against West Coast (they murdered them 91-69 in that stat) and what a difference 4-goal hero Shaun Higgins makes with his composure and class. Maintaining that hunger this week is the key because 2nd placed Sydney in far better shape than most sides right now.
Only ladder-leading Fremantle and the surprise-packet Bulldogs have beaten the Swans this year; it’s safe to say that they’re not in the habit of losing to inferior sides, of which North Melbourne is currently one. When a muted three-goal effort from Kurt Tippet is your biggest problem as a side, you’re doing okay, especially with forward colleague Lance Franklin pinging them through from impossible angles. Put simply, a four-quarter effort from the Swans will be more than enough in this one.
As one hero departs, others emerge
There comes a time in every sports fan’s life where, having long attached absurd and unhealthy levels of personal meaning to the causal relationship between our own fandom and the results of games, we also start with those pitiful, self-indulgent pangs that come when players our own age are starting to fade from the game like Blues maestro Chris Judd did this week. The dual Brownlow medalist hobbled away after a magnificent career that seems to have flashed by as quickly as the man did himself in those thrilling first games for West Coast. It’s enough to make a sports blogger feel old.
Real old.
At a basic level it’s also just sad to see Judd go, even the late-career model that was so far from the pack-destroying, jet-propelled ball magnet who’d made us reassess what a midfielder really was capable of in the mid 2000s.
But there’s always hope around the corner for those who turn up on the weekend hoping to see something explosive and transcendent. Something we could never do ourselves in a million months of Sundays.
Collingwood’s Jamie Elliott isn’t even the best player on his own team right now but right as Judd crash-landed into retirement, one couldn’t help but marvel at the way the Magpies livewire inserted himself into so many moments of his side’s clash with Melbourne last weekend.
The statistical analysis of 13 disposals, 9 marks and 3 goals isn’t anything revolutionary but it’s the way he gets them, the carnage he creates even without the ball and the things he does once he’s hit the ground running. Elliott just looks faster, stronger, better overhead and possessed of too strong a boot for a man his size.
Nearly everything he does is like a heaving, lung-draining breath of life into the games in which he plays and he never looks surprised when he does it either. This week he and his side face the Giants, the club that sent Elliott Collingwood’s way. For his presence and other reasons beside, it might be the game of the round.
The Consolation Cup
We should end by taking a moment to thank Melbourne football club for their efforts last weekend; for the first time in a couple of years they did immeasurably improve the sports quotient of the Queen’s Birthday weekend in their plucky loss to the Pies.
Dees coach Paul Roos rightly pointed out that it wasn’t his side’s inability to pick up Adam Oxley in the second half that cost them that game but their faultless and frequent ability to hit Oxley’s chest with lace-out passes during the same period of time. Like Carlton’s now-infamous 35-tackle debacle, conceding a remarkable 13 of 17 goals from turnovers at least gives the Dees a target for improvement.
Perhaps a few more could also follow the lead of first-year midfielder Angus Brayshaw, who eye-balled Paul Roos as he accepted his Melbourne guernsey on draft day and ever since has seemed keen on going toe-to-toe with everyone else in his path too.
For all their gains, Melbourne encounter something of a mental roadblock against the Saints this week at Etihad Stadium, a venue at which they’ve lost a staggering 20 games in a row leading into this encounter.
It seems almost perverse that a stadium as soulless as Etihad - with its architecture and food outlets that bring to mind a particularly bleak airport hangar – could foster such a hoodoo. Pigeons don’t even bother shitting on Etihad Stadium. Somehow Melbourne needs to finally avoid stinking it up too.
To do so they might need to curb the output of David Armitage, the Saints midfielder who was spoken of like football driftwood a few years back.
This season he’s a bona fide star of the competition and along with Jack Steven, put in another solid display last week against the Hawks. Despite losing that game, St Kilda’s been a quiet achiever in past month or so. Jack Billings continues to reveal his considerable talent, Nick Riewoldt is defying all kinds of logic and Jack Lonie has more heart than common sense.
Both sides will fancy themselves but is this the day Melbourne banishes their Docklands curse?
