Don’t rule the Tigers out completely
Friday night football should have seen it coming to be honest. For years it’s taken its status as the coolest kid at school for granted, thumbing its nose at the nerds and complacently assuming that everyone would turn up to its parties. Then along comes Thursday, the carefree kid from interstate who everyone wants to sit next to at little lunch.
Is it too late for Friday to make its charge? All those Carlton games and whitewashes in the first half of the season certainly didn’t help but tonight’s subtly enticing meeting of Sydney and Richmond kicks off a fortnight in which both Friday games (Collingwood and Hawthorn meet next week) are of genuine interest. The Eagles stopped Richmond’s stellar month-long winning streak last weekend and they’ll face a refreshed, post-bye Sydney, but with the defensive capabilities to control the likes of Lance Franklin and Kurt Tippett, the Tigers aren’t without a chance if they can manage the miniscule margin for error in midfield duels at the SCG.
Nathan Gordon and former skipper Chris Newman return for Richmond and Kane Lambert debuts, while the sagging fortunes of Steven Morris have continued with the hard nut receiving the chop. Flint-hard Zak Jones is a handy ‘in’ for the Swans. At ANZ Stadium last year the Tigers won this game – the craziest and most joyful of all their victories in that utterly bonkers run home to the finals – so how could you totally rule out an upset from the only side to defeat Fremantle this season?
The Bombers are in for a rough day
Here’s a bizarre scenario to recall: just 11 weeks back the Essendon football club – they of the goalless halves of football and the failure to reach 10 goals in six separate games already this season – actually beat reigning premiers Hawthorn. At football. Now half of them couldn’t get a kick in a stampede and people are putting aside their theories that the coach might be a terrible bloke in favour of the more pressing issue that he’s potentially a terrible coach.
The general malaise is proving hard to shake for the 13th-placed Bombers, who enter this game against the Hawks at least having managed to avoid defeat on their bye weekend. Injured Paul Chapman is one of five omissions from the side that lost to West Coast two weeks back but the bigger ‘out’ is that of pacey ball-winner Travis Colyer with a foot complaint. He’s been one of few shining lights this season.
As all that’s been happening, Hawthorn has managed to recover from its indifferent start to the season, easily accounting for Gold Coast, St Kilda and Adelaide either side of the bye. The Bombers have genuinely challenged them in the last few meetings but this time around it’s easier to see them dish out the kind of pounding that characterised this rivalry from 2011-13. You can never place much stock in these things but the sight of Michael Hurley at centre-half forward in Essendon’s selected side – sheer desperation aside – comes with the more alarming rider of James Gwilt being slotted into his place at the defensive end alongside Jason Winderlich. I have a hunch that Jack Gunston won’t mind forcing them to stride out and chase him up the ground.
Adelaide will be back in the winner’s column
There’s been far worse 6-5 sides than seventh-placed Adelaide, who enter Saturday afternoon’s Gabba encounter with Brisbane after a creditable loss to Hawthorn last week. The thing I love most about the Crows (oh geez, did I really just say I love them?) is the amount of sentences that new coach Phil Walsh starts with the words, “I’ll sound like a bit of a weirdo, but…”
This week it was the world of art from which he was drawing unique inspiration and with more effortlessly quote-worthy results. “When I was in Amsterdam I did go to the Van Gogh Museum and I’m not an art critic … there’s a man with great frustration,” he started. “I looked at that painting Sunflowers and for a bogan from Hamilton like myself, I could actually see the beauty in that frustration.”
“So although our fans are frustrated, we’re frustrated, we like to think there’s some masterpieces still to be painted this year.”
How could you not love this man? Let him run the entire league I say. Imagine the game-day experience of watching Marina Abramovic stare out Walsh’s former team-mate John Gastev in the middle of the MCG. Picture a football world in which the rules of the game were administered not by Mark Evans, Leigh Matthews and John Worsfold but David Lynch, Ai Weiwei and Damien Hirst. Even the Brownlow count could be spiced up with the winner stepping on stage in scenes of jubilation only to be given an atomic wedgie by Banksy.
What helps Walsh’s side in a football sense this week is that they’ll be facing a truly dismal Brisbane outfit whose nearest artistic metaphor at the moment would be Marcel Duchamp’s dirty urinal, only if it was one that had also seen heavy abuse from an entire week’s worth of nightclub revellers. If Adelaide lose this one the only honorable thing is for Phil Walsh to chop off an ear.
The Bulldogs must take St Kilda seriously
In most pre-season analyses it didn’t seem unreasonable that St Kilda were being spoken of with something close to pity, merely a rebuilding side who’d pump games into the kids and get flogged more often than not. That’s held true against a few of the top sides but for everyone else the Saints have proved a trickier prospect. Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast have all slipped on the banana skin, as did this week’s opponents the Bulldogs in round six, when they squandered a 55-point lead as David Armitage and a host of Saints midfielders ran rampant.
Of interest here is the fact that following the bye, St Kilda has actually dropped three players – Luke Delaney, Blake Acres and Cameron Shenton – who featured in the thrilling win over Melbourne a fortnight back. Into the side in their place come Adam Schneider, Sam Fisher and Dylan Roberton while the Dogs welcome back Dale Morris. Luke Beveridge’s side is right in the finals hunt this season – unexpectedly so – but if they drop another one to the Saints they make that job far more difficult than it ought to be.
Masochists queue here
Like an Adam Sandler film or a trip through the KFC drive-thru, games of football like Carlton’s clash with Gold Coast this weekend are not the kind of activities you want to be caught engaging in, but one imagines that a certain number of diehards will still perform the thankless task of half-filling Etihad Stadium on Sunday.
The Blues fans among them can enter the game with renewed confidence, to be fair. That thrilling win against Port Adelaide last week was actually foreseeable in a lot of ways and outright favoritism in this one is certainly an improvement on the shambolic first two months of the season. Vital to that has been not only the winds of change floating through Princes Park but the emergence of the staggeringly talented, possibly bionic Rising Star shoo-in Patrick Cripps. Would it be outlandish to say that after nine games of league football he’s already Carlton’s best player?
Bryce Gibbs is one of only a handful who’d disagree, but he’s missing this week on account of his controversial suspension and Andrew Walker is out with a knee injury, so others will need to step into the void. Stephen May and Harley Bennell return for the Suns but Gary Ablett didn’t quite get up, so this still qualifies as a ‘hit and hope’ mission for Rodney Eade’s poorly side. Not in a long time has a day of football promised so little.
