Can Collingwood and Geelong salvage Friday Night Football?
Friday night footy has been an entertainment wasteland so far this season. West Coast thumped Carlton by 69 points, Collingwood romped home by 74 against St Kilda and 75 against Carlton, while only Melbourne’s very unblockbustery 32-point upset win over Richmond provided something close to an interesting contest. This week the Pies and Geelong are the teams we pin our hopes on but you wonder whether this pairing is currently capable of producing something worth looking up at from the bar.
Both of these sides are engaged in what amount to partial-rebuilds having lost key contributors to their respective Premiership successes and seen the productivity tail off to varying degrees in others who near the end. In that sense Collingwood’s 4-1 start to the season has been just as noteworthy as Geelong’s marked nosedive, but where Geelong’s running repairs have often come unstuck, Collingwood’s inspired performances can be viewed as a happy byproduct of their need to invest in youth as injuries blighted their 2014 campaign.
The kids who needed to improve in order for the Pies to do any real damage this year have, but the young hopefuls in Chris Scott’s teams have struggled to make quite such an impact. Hunger helps too; the Collingwood has won more contested ball than any side in the comp this year, a category in which this unrecognizably timid, uncertain Geelong side sit dead last. If football sides are a reflection of the character of their coach, you’d have to say that the Cats aren’t playing much like a Scott brother right now. If that continues tonight they’re in for some pain.
You thought we’d use a Beveridge pun here, didn’t you?
Is there anything left to say about the Bulldogs’ near-miracle win over Sydney last weekend? The emotion and almost tearful joy shown by coach Luke Beveridge as he talked his way through it all in the aftermath said all you needed to know. Dogs fans probably want to rename their children and pets after him at the moment given the way the first-year coach has managed to unburden them of that constant internal turmoil that besets supporters in grim times.
It’s not all good news - much-improved Lin Jong will miss the next two weeks with a hand injury and Mitch Wallis one with his back complaint – but mostly it is. In the next month only Fremantle present a major obstacle for the Dogs, with winnable games against Melbourne and GWS following this weekend’s clash with lowly St Kilda, a team they really should have beaten late in 2014 as well but didn’t. This is a vastly different Bulldogs side though, one in which the tireless veterans like Bob Murphy and Matthew Boyd have been hoisted onto sedan chairs by younger teammates rather than left to manfully stem the tide alone.
This won’t be a cakewalk, but high performance creates expectation and with the momentum now behind the Bulldogs, you’d hope fans flock to this traditional 2:10pm fixture on Saturday. Everything old is new again.
Fletcher - the 40-year-old version
Essendon’s walking museum Dustin Fletcher turned 40 yesterday and on Saturday night against Fremantle, will become only the second league player after St Kilda’s Vic Cumberland (more on him here) to grace the field in his fifth decade. If you’re a little wearied at this point by all of the Fletcher milestones, stop for a minute to consider how it must feel for the man himself. Like attending your funeral over and over again, one would suppose.
Fletcher’s AFL Tables page is now one of AFL football’s great fetish objects, a sight that always leaves you gobsmacked and asking yourself questions out loud; he’s only kicked 15 goals in the last 14 seasons? He really has played against Mark Mickan, Earl Spalding and Dale Weightman, and on the same team as both Anthony Daniher and his son Joe, hasn’t he? At training this week Kevin Sheedy presented him with a birthday cake to mark the occasion and you half expected the ghost of John Coleman to come leaping out of it.
One concept with which Fletcher is probably familiar after 23 years of league football is that travelling to Perth is rarely much fun, especially to face a Ross Lyon team. The Dons played room temperature footy to scrape over the line against the Saints in round five but Fremantle might hard boil them this week. A repeat of last year’s 53-point Subiaco defeat, or something even worse, looms a little ominously.
How do you solve a problem like Brisbane’s?
Now 27 games into his AFL coaching career, Brisbane boss Justin Leppitsch has only seven wins to his name. None of them has come in 2015 in a season that has ignited in all the wrong ways, like a dumpster fire in a post-apocalyptic alleyway. Speaking of which, this week they’ll face fellow-strugglers Carlton in game featuring two coaches at opposite ends of the experience scale battling through the same universal feelings of frustration and barely-concealed anger.
Malthouse normally lashes the media. This week Leppitsch took it out on a Reserves player Zac O’Brien, who honestly sounded like he deserved what he got; a mild repositioning of his team jumper and instructions to pull his head in, his finger out and to possibly step down from the bench on top of which he surveyed the increasingly-crimson Leppitsch.
Someone somewhere decided that everyone everywhere else would be so appalled by this time-honoured display of coaching assertiveness that Leppitsch should apologise immediately for giving a damn about the attitude of his players. He duly did before adding, “Everyone’s human, everyone makes errors along the way and hopefully it’s made all of us better for it.” If Brisbane’s playing list is indeed becoming better on account of the errors it makes along the way, Carlton don’t stand a chance on Sunday.
The best and worst of the rest
Both flakey and borderline coach-killing performers this year, Richmond and North Melbourne rather deserve each other at the moment. They’re both 2-3 and operating nowhere near their optimal levels but history is firmly against Richmond here. They haven’t triumphed in this fixture since 2011, back when Ben Nason was still a thing. With Luke Hodge and Jordan Lewis on unscheduled holidays and an entire line of key defenders crocked, Hawthorn aren’t exactly certainties against GWS and will have learned from their clash last season (hey Brendon Bolton) that you can never switch off against the Giants.
Adelaide face the Gold Coast Suns, who are at home but currently boasting an injury list the size of an Ashes touring squad and only recently off their duck for the season. Phil Walsh looked like a genius a few rounds back but if the Crows lose this one, Adelaide talkback callers will give him a week-long roast. After last week’s loss to the Bulldogs, Sydney might take out some frustration on the solid but unspectacular Dees while Port Adelaide’s home game against West Coast shapes as a far more enticing clash to end to the round than one might have expected five weeks back.
