Early Tackle: Sam Landsberger’s Likes and Dislikes from round 2
Ollie Hollands covered more ground than any other player in Carlton’s first two matches. But a key moment showed the No.11 draft pick is a much more special player.
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There was a lot of chatter entering this season about what if the results didn’t fall Collingwood’s way in the close ones like last year.
That won’t be happening if opposition teams fail to get a handle on their contested ball dominance.
Young Lion Will Ashcroft took his game to new heights before the lights went out at the Gabba, while the midfield of the reigning premiers simply can’t get their hands on the Sherrin.
Check out all Sam Landsberger likes and dislikes.
LIKES
COACHING KINGS ARE BACK
Ross Lyon and Alastair Clarkson are undefeated in their second comings after a Saturday night that felt like a strep back in time for the 2013 grand final coaches.
Lyon’s Saints played 99 consecutive minutes (across rounds 1-2) without conceding a goal under the Marvel Stadium roof.
They’ve given up just 93 points in two games. Sound familiar? The 51-point win was their biggest against the Western Bulldogs since 2012, despite most of their forward line sitting in the stands injured.
Last week boozy St Kilda fans chanted: “Ross the Boss! Ross the Boss!” at Platform 28 hours for hours after the gutsy win against Fremantle.
How on earth did they up the ante for their second consecutive win against a finalist?
Over in Perth it was a classic Clarkson-inspired against-all-odds road trip one-point beauty as North Melbourne downed 0-2 Fremantle.
The desperate defending in the dying seconds showed how committed they are to the Clarkson cause.
Luke Davies-Uniacke (30 disposals, 11 clearances and a goal) will soon be a top-five player in the AFL while Jaidyn Stephenson’s booming goal from inside the centre square in the third quarter was critical. Lyon’s Saints are on top of the AFL ladder while Clarkson’s Kangaroos are third and every chance to go 3-0 against Hawthorn next week.
FLAGPIES
Collingwood has all the ingredients of a premiership team and deserves to be favourites for the flag, and the AFL should be quietly barracking for Craig McRae’s Magpies because they are so damn fun to watch.
The narrative surrounding the so-called fluky Pies entering this season was what would happen if they were on the wrong end of a string of close matches after recording a magical 11 victories by less than two goals last year? That narrative was wrong. It should’ve been what will happen if the Pies pop this season and are able to punch out stress-free wins of 22 and 71 points, as they have in the first two weeks.
Last year’s art form of closing out matches came off the back of midfield numbers that were ugly.
The Magpies found ways to win while losing, for example, contested ball by 54 against Carlton in round 23 and 24 against Melbourne in round 21.
On Saturday they won contested ball by 57 to set up a 71-point win where they had 13 individual goalkickers. It was the largest contested possession differential in any game since the start of 2020.
Ruckman Darcy Cameron and Tom Mitchell led the way with 16 apiece while the pressure applied in the first half was frightening. Don’t worry about last year’s close-game record flipping — if the Pies keep putting up contested ball numbers like Saturday there won’t be a team that gets close to them.
DUTCH COURAGE
The word out of the Blues over summer was they had found a two-way runner who could slot straight on to a wing to stiffen the club’s defensive system in No.11 draft pick Ollie Hollands.
That’s been franked – Hollands clocked a game-high 14.5km against Richmond and a game-high 15.2km against Geelong.
What we didn’t know was that this kid’s guts would steeply outshine his GPS numbers. In the last quarter on Friday night, and with the Cats coming, Hollands dropped into Jeremy Cameron’s leading lane, raised his right fist and executed a critical defensive spoil. Hollands weighs 72kg, Cameron weighs 94kg. He didn’t know what was coming. It was a fearless act, and one that would’ve earned so much respect from his teammates.
MANE MAN
Brisbane Lions seriously wanted Will Ashcroft to be allowed to play in its AFL team last year once he committed as a father-son. Ashcroft was ready to be an AFL midfielder at 17 and at 18, in his second game, he led the Lions’ onball fightback. Last week they lost contested ball by 34 and against Melbourne they won it by 12.
Ashcroft was at the heart of it. His 31 disposals ranked No. 2 on the night while his 15 contested possessions and nine clearances both ranked No.1.
Those numbers came for a kid who attended only eight centre bounces – well short of Lachie Neale (27) and Josh Dunkley (28).
Is it too early to declare this year’s Rising Star race over? Perhaps most pleasingly for the Lions was how they defended full-ground ball movement, given how easy they have been to score against since the halfway mark of last year.
Last week Port Adelaide took the ball all the way from defensive 50m to inside 50m an alarming 34 per cent of the time – but the Demons managed only 12 per cent on Friday night.
KING JEZZA
Jeremy Cameron might be the best player in the AFL. He is certainly the hardest match-up in the AFL.
His goalkicking is ridiculous, his field kicking is ridiculous and his motor is ridiculous, often powerfully running up to the halfback line.
As Carlton coach Michael Voss said: “I’m sitting there for the last part and I’m thinking, ‘Surely he has to miss one’. He was incredible tonight. Just a really classy player, and even as an opposition coach it’s hard not to admire what he’s doing”.
Cameron kicked 6.0 from set-shots, including two in the first four minutes of the last quarter, and led Geelong for disposals.
The Cats would’ve lost by eight goals without ‘Jezza’. It was a seriously special individual performance.
RACHELE RIPE
Adelaide has made some questionable calls with early draft picks in recent years. Josh Rachele is not one of them.
Boy, this kid – taken at No.6 in 2021 – is a jet. Still a teenager yet he commands the ball in big moments like a seasoned star.
He wants to be the man. He’s got X-factor, poise, dancing feet and a sweet right foot. Rachele was the man who razzed up the Adelaide Oval crowd and lit up the third-quarter fightback as a 45-point lead shrunk to a solitary point.
Rachele is a bums-on-seats sort of drawcard and teaming up with Izak Rankine is a devastating prospect.
DISLIKES
DEFLATED DOGS
Not sure how a midfield containing Marcus Bontempelli, Tom Liberatore, Bailey Smith and Tim English can generate just 37 inside 50s under the Marvel Stadium roof.
The Dogs’ ball use appears busted. Smith turned it over six times against the Saints, Jamarra Ugle-Hagan kicked 0.2 and even Caleb Daniel has been vulnerable.
The Dogs slotted four goals in one burst before half time and just two for the rest of the match.
They rarely looked like scoring. Re-signed coach Luke Beveridge has the equal-oldest list, along with Geelong, and sits on the bottom of the ladder at 0-2 with a percentage of 51.2. Next up are games against Brisbane Lions, Richmond (MCG), Port Adelaide (AO) and Fremantle (Perth), all of which they will likely start underdogs in.
They couldn’t go 0-6, could they? On Saturday night the top five GPS numbers all belonged to Saints players — Bradley Hill, Mitchito Owens (both 14.4km), Jack Sinclair (14.2km), Mason Wood and Callum Wilkie (14.1km). Is that work rate?
LOST DOGS
Last week the Dogs came up against their own premiership star and father-son Lachie Hunter (Melbourne).
Last night they faced premiership player and father-son Zaine Cordy (St Kilda), whose pair of third-quarter goals finished off his former side. On Thursday the Dogs will face premiership player and reigning best-and-fairest Josh Dunkley (Brisbane).
Last Thursday Carlton’s Lewis Young, who largely went unused at Whitten Oval, showed more signs of his steep development as a reliable defender. The list of Bulldogs who decided they didn’t want to be at Whitten Oval is long.
Throw in Pat Lipinski, Marcus Adams and another premiership quarter in Luke Dahlhaus, Jordan Roughead, Joel Hamling and Jake Stringer (although Stringer was booted out) plus some premature retirements and it’s rather vexing. It’s been more of an annual trickle than one deluge of departures. But why are so many seeking fresh starts under this regime?
CALLS TO ABANDON GABBA
Can’t understand the debate on whether the AFL made the right call by playing out Friday night’s game once the lights came back on.
Last year Carlton missed finals by 0.6 per cent while the year before the Lions made the top four by 0.5 per cent.
Who knows what impact Melbourne slamming on the final five goals will have on the ladder at the end of the season? Whether both teams were afforded parity when it came to on-field warm-ups before the resumption is a valid concern.
But finishing the game for ladder integrity purposes is not.
In January a Boston Celtics-Denver Nuggets game was delayed for 35 minutes as workers desperately tried to fix a crooked rim in the last quarter. There was no talk of a walk-off in the NBA.
CAT NAPS
Geelong’s wounded backline has been well-publicised. Perhaps of greater alarm is the fact its full-strength midfield comprising the likes of Tom Atkins, Cam Guthrie and Patrick Dangerfield simply can’t get their hands on the Sherrin. In round 1 the Cats lost disposals by 57, uncontested possessions by 63 and marks by 36, while in round 2 they lost disposals by 54 (including 49 in the first quarter), uncontested possessions by 37 and marks by 41.
The Pies and Blues have been able to spread the MCG with relative ease against the reigning premiers, whereas Geelong’s brigade seems powerless to sprint into space to register uncontested marks or to shut down the opposition’s.
It’s hard to remember a Geelong team that has lost its full-ground formation so easily. Premiership coach Mick Malthouse took aim at Dangerfield, and peculiarly he has played just 66 per cent game time … down 10 per cent from last year.
Perhaps that is because Dangerfield is playing as a permanent midfielder (97 per cent) compared to last year’s 70-30 split between onball and attack.
PIES FANS
C’mon, Collingwood fans who booed Jason Horne-Francis. Leave the kid alone. Can’t possibly understand the motivation for Magpies fans to get stuck into a 19-year-old who was traded from North Melbourne to Port Adelaide last year.
Hope this doesn’t become a habit every time Horne-Francis returns to Victoria.
BROADSIDE
Nathan Broad has already apologised to coach Damien Hardwick and will follow that up by saying sorry to concussed Crow Patrick Parnell.
Not sure that excuses his sling tackle. Broad picked up Parnell and dumped him into the turf. It was ugly, and the Match Review Officer will ensure he won’t be playing for a while.
With Josh Gibcus and Robbie Tarrant injured and games against Collingwood, the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne to come that is going to sting.
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