The Tackle: Mark Robinson’s likes and dislikes from round 17 of the AFL season
Two years ago, he was inside the top-15 of Mark Robinson’s list of the 50 best AFL players. Today, he wouldn’t be in Robbo’s top 300. See all the round’s likes and dislikes.
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Collingwood got out of jail, Brisbane couldn’t find the escape hatch and Richmond shot itself in the foot.
And which St Kilda will turn up this week?
The race for the top four and top eight is getting tighter by the week, and the issue of players drawing high-contact free kicks is back in the spotlight after some confusing umpiring calls on controversial Magpie Jack Ginnivan.
See all Mark Robinson’s likes and dislikes from a huge round 17 below.
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DISLIKES
1. We have a problem with Jack
Collingwood coach Craig McRae calls it “taking it on the tackler’’ and his player, Jack Ginnivan, has made an art of it. He likes to lower the body and lift the arm and get head-high contact – and, as such, he’s the No.1 player in the league at getting head-high free kicks. But it is a lottery and that’s part of the problem. Umpires pay and don’t pay free kicks to Ginnivan for reasons not known. On Saturday, he had his head ripped off in the third quarter and no free kick was paid. In the first quarter, he was bowled over by North’s Aidan Bonar after he had missed a shot at goal and oddly no free kick was paid.
High or holding the ball?
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He’s a polarising player, Jack, and sometimes it’s difficult not to think the umpires are umpiring him differently to other players. The umpires will say that’s rubbish, but it’s all a bit strange why Ginnivan misses out on obvious free kicks. McRae said in the post-match: “The last time this happened against Hawthorn, we got the answers they (umpires) missed a couple. That’s fine, they’re able to miss a couple. It looked a high tackle which wasn’t called.’’ Asked if lowering the body was now a player’s prior opportunity, McRae said: “We don’t instruct our players to sort of lean into the tackle. It’s a skill, I said this five weeks ago, we haven’t changed our approach. It puts a lot of pressure on the tackler and obviously it puts a lot of pressure on the umpires as well.’’
The potentially bigger problem is, all this head-high contact is putting pressure on Ginnivan’s brain. If he plays 200 games and he continues to draw head-high contact, that’s a lot of head trauma, which no one wants. Does the game need to save Ginnivan from himself? By the way, Collingwood ranks fifth for high contact free kicks behind Adelaide, North, Gold Coast and Melbourne.
2. Lions are shaky
She’s a wild ride when the ball is kicked into the Lions forward line. Joe Daniher and Eric Hipwood are hit and miss and when they are miss, they are AWOL. And if Charlie Cameron is quiet on the same day, the Lions’ F50 is a box of chocolates. Daniher didn’t take a mark inside 50, Hipwood took two and Cameron one, and they combined for three goals. Worse, the Lions were terrible with the ball by foot – they went at 59 per cent efficiency, their worst rating of the year – and their pressure rating was 169, their lowest of the year. That’s diabolical from a top-four team, albeit they made nine changes to the line-up from last week. Still, it’s difficult to win a game of circle work when you struggle to find a teammate by foot. The Lions can list excuses, but the fact is their guns didn’t fire many shots. And from set shots, they kicked 6.6, including two misses from 30m in the final 10 minutes, while Essendon kicked 10.5 from their set shots. It was a shoddy afternoon from one of the flag favourites.
3. That wasn’t great from the Crows
The Crows are 2-8 over the past 10 weeks and this was the worst loss. They are already restless in Adelaide and watching the defensively troubling effort against Hawthorn was tough. They are young, and we say that every week, but it’s because of games like Sunday’s that clubs will never again cut to the core in a rebuild. And the AFL has already told clubs the long rebuilds are out. Adelaide has a crack, and they pressure, but they allowed the Hawks to run on Sunday, and Mitch Lewis (five goals) was a problem. A more general issue is that if the veterans don’t fire, the Crows struggle to score. Like, if Tex Walker (one goal) doesn’t fire, they lack scoring power. They have a go, the Crows, but they lack talent. Go on, who from the kids are you putting your house on to play 250 games at the Crows? Sam Berry has the heart and Riley Thilthorpe played his best game of the year. Who else?
4. Saints’ split personality
Last week they were emotionally charged and that produced a fierce contest and fierce pressure. Fast forward seven days, it was solid Saints in the first half and wimpish Saints in the second half. Their pressure last week against Carlton was 190 and on Saturday night against the Dockers, it was 175. Time and again, Fremantle players were able to move the ball freely after St Kilda coughed it up, and some of St Kilda’s skill errors by foot were laughable by AFL standards. They were outscored in the second half 71-22, which is diabolical considering the inside-50 count was 25-23.
That’s a two-fold disaster. They couldn’t score when they got inside 50 and they allowed Fremantle to kick 11.5 from the Dockers’ 25 entries. My God, that’s a staggering number among a host of reasonably even numbers in other categories. Simply, the Dockers had too much class and class always shines when opposition pressure is mild.
Which St Kilda will turn this up week when they play the Bulldogs on Friday night? The meek and mild or the tough and the gritty? It’s a terrible way to play your football, not knowing which brand will pull on the jumper any given week.
5. The worst six minutes of football
When Richmond lost to Gold Coast in 2012, with a kick after the siren, then commentator Paul Roos said it was the “worst 47 seconds’’ he had seen in football. “I say that in all seriousness, I cannot believe they could lose that game.” If he was commentating now, he would probably say the final six minutes on Saturday night were the worst six minutes he had seen in football. From when Jason Castagna’s sloppy kick for goal was smothered by Charlie Ballard, to Jayden Short giving away 50m, to Dylan Grimes dropping a chest mark in the final moments of the game, the injury-ravaged Tigers inexplicably failed to kill or save the game.
A Castagna goal would have made the score 97-74 and, let’s be frank, he just had to be better in that situation, because five goals in six minutes is too big of an ask, even under Leigh Matthews’ famous theory of goals needed v minutes to play. It was an un ugly loss and could cost the Tigers a top-four spot. They would be kicking themselves. After being 40 points up against the Suns and losing, you could argue they don’t deserve a top-four finish. Still, they’ve won seven of their past 10 matches and the losses have been by a combined 11 points.
6. Please, what’s that Lachie Whitfield?
He had 10 touches in four quarters and for a player earning in the vicinity of $900,000 a year, that’s a poor return. After a sluggish season, Whitfield found form in recent weeks, and only last week against Hawthorn had 30-plus. But that was an easy kill and Port away was anything but. There’s some big decisions to be made at the Giants, not least being the appointment of a new coach. The next is to fix a salary cap that looms to be $1 million over in 2023, which clearly will require the Giants to shed some players, or a player. Clubs are chasing Tim Taranto, 24, but maybe the Giants might be keen to offload Whitfield, 27, even though they might have to pay some of his salary. Maybe it depends on how much they want to keep Taranto.
7. This is not a witch hunt but …
My most disappointing player this year is Liam Ryan, the same player who I had inside the top 15 in the top 50 two years ago. He wouldn’t be in the top 300 if we did a list right now. Can you remember the second half of the 2020 season? It was phenomenal, all marks and goals, and playing tricks with the opposition and the match-up between Ryan and Collingwood’s Brayden Maynard in the elimination final was a pleasure to watch. This season, he’s kicked 14 goals from 11 games and averages 10 disposals. When I say disappointing, I’m disappointed for him and for all football fans because he was the ultimate entertainer. Now, he just looks lost. Let’s hope he can get it back.
LIKES
1. Jye the stopper
Just when fans had given up on taggers, the Bombers employed Jye Caldwell to run with Brownlow medallist Lachie Neale, and Caldwell’s effort was considerable in victory. Tagging hasn’t been a tactic of coach Ben Rutten and maybe Sunday’s result could shape him and the team going forward. Caldwell (20 disposals) and Neale (16) were opposed for about 70 minutes, and at the end, Caldwell kicked a goal from a centre-square clearance to help ice the game. “Neale was averaging 39 and two goals in the past four times he played us, so it was about time we stood for something and try to restrict his influence,’’ Bomber Zach Merrett told Fox Footy in the post-match. “I thought Jye was amazing today.’’ So was Merrett, Wright, Laverde, Langford and Zerk-Thatcher, and two of them were in the key defensive spots. That’s three wins from their past four games – over top-eight teams Brisbane, Sydney and St Kilda – and if Essendon is true to its word, that improvement would come in the second half of the season, then Rutten’s position is not under any threat.
2. The quiet achiever
Hawks people are amazed that Blake Hardwick is never in the discussion for All-Australian selection. They have a point. This year the nugget small defender has kept Toby Greene goalless, Cody Weightman goalless, Izak Rankine to one goal and Bayley Fritsch goalless. All up, and give or take a goal or two, Hardwick, according to Champion Data, has given up only 12 goals to his direct opponents in 16 games this year. That’s sensational defending in a team that has won five games and is ranked 16th for points against. On Sunday, he played on an array of smalls and mid-sized players and, again, kept a clean sheet. He’s an unfashionable defender in the sense that he doesn’t go kick chasing, but every week coach Sam Mitchell picks up Hardwick’s magnet and asks his coaching group: Who are we sending the attack to this week?
3. Guns of Navarone
The AFL has two sets of key forwards, one is Tom Hawkins and Jeremy Cameron and the other is Harry McKay and Charlie Curnow. To win the flag this year, I’d take Hawkins-Cameron and beyond this year, it would be McKay and Curnow. On Sunday, they blew up the Eagles in the first quarter, when the game was to be influenced, and kicked 3.1 between them. When the game was tight in the third quarter, Curnow kicked Carlton’s only two goals, the best of them a 52m bomb from near the boundary line when the margin was just 10 points. In the last quarter, McKay kicked two goals in the first five minutes, and three for the quarter to kill the game. With those two players – they kicked 10 goals between on Sunday – and a midfield led by Walsh, Cripps, Cerra and Hewitt, anything is possible for the Blues. Can they truly win the whole thing? Maybe, and we’ll find out how more when they play Geelong at the MCG on Saturday night. That’s a 75k crowd and the G will be pumping.
4. Who’s got the moves?
There’s not an award for this – the best coaching move of the year – but the moment someone in the Port Adelaide coaches box suggested in round 5 to get forward Connor Rozee into the midfield, well, that person is in the running. Port just lost that round 5 match to Carlton, but it unearthed a brilliant young midfield player in doing so. From that round onwards, Rozee’s split has been 68-32 mid-forward and he has won more than 20 disposals in every game.
It’s not about quantity with Connor. He’s electric, a smaller and less powerful commodity than Patrick Dangerfield, but with the same burst as Dangerfield. He’s also a better kick than the Cats champ. Dangerfield is a contested ball beast and clearly Rozee’s getting better with every season in that regard. Still would take Sam Walsh in the same 2018 draft, but Rozee – who had 24 and kicked four goals against the Giants – is coming with a bullet.
As for moves of the season, there’s Mitch Duncan to half-back, Tom Atkins into the middle, Jack Crisp to permanent midfielder, Dan Rioli to permanent back flank, same with Gus Brayshaw at the Demons and Nick Blakey at the Swans, and Paddy McCartin from obscurity to key defender head the list.
5. The kids become men
The beauty and misery of footy played out in a pulsating final six minutes at Metricon on Saturday night. The beauty enveloped the Suns and Noah Anderson was clutch. We’ve known for some time he’s part of the sprinkles of gold, as is Matt Rowell, and Ben King, and this year Izak Rankine and Ben Ainsworth have found their groove. Amid the wild scenes on the siren, and the pile-on on Anderson, Ainsworth continued to build his breakout season. The 24-year-old was pick No.4 behind McGrath, Taranto and McCluggage and has been a slow burn. On Saturday, he had 26 and kicked two goals, took 14 marks and had 12 score involvements. To borrow a line from Luke Darcy, I will say that again, Ainsworth took an incredible 14 marks as a roaming small forward. He’s at the 90-game mark and has 200 games written all over him.
6. Chad Warner
Say hello to the next star midfielder, if he’s not a star already. In the 2019 draft, Sydney went with Dylan Stephens (pick 5), Will Gould (26), Elijah Taylor (36) – and he’s already been and gone – then Chad Warner was still standing at No.39. What a find and what a bargain. He has it all: combativeness, talent and run. In fact, at this early stage, a reworked 2019 draft would have Warner at No.1, Noah Anderson at No.2, Luke Jackson at No.3, Matt Rowell at No.4 and Caleb Serong at No.5, although a decent argument could be had about Warner or Anderson. Others of note in that draft include Sam De Koning, Cody Weightman, Kosi Pickett and Tom Green. The argument that Warner is No.1 is strengthened by the fact that only two midfielders in the competition rate elite for goals and score involvements. The other is …. Christian Petracca. So not only is Warner an accomplished ball winner, he’s a devastating ball user.
7. The back flanks at the Dockers
Jordan Clark is one of the finds of the season and Nathan Wilson is the forgotten flanker. Clark has had 29 and 30 touches in his past two weeks and plays an interesting position. He’s like an outside back, which is probably not a position, but he certainly has a license to run and create, more than lock down and contest the ball. He arrived from Geelong for pick No.22 and a future third round selection, which is proving to be a good trade for the Dockers. Wilson has played the past two matches after being injured early in the season and then playing eight games in the WAFL. Not sure he will keep his spot, but he does offer, with Clark beside him, a dynamic back pairing. Wilson’s never afraid to switch or kick the 45, and he loves to run and bounce. Those two had 46 possessions between them on Saturday night and they could be huge weapons for the Dockers going forward.
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