AFL is back but scoring dips alarmingly in the year of COVID

Swans star Lance Franklin was the last AFL player to kick 100 goals in a year but now reaching the ton is proving beyond clubs in regular matches.

Richmond spearhead Jack Riewoldt is averaging a goal a game in 2020. Picture: Michael Klein

Over the past decade, the pursuit of a 100 in the AFL has become football’s version of mission impossible. But in 2020 it is not only the champion spearheads struggling to score.

The century goalkicker has gone the way of the Tasmanian tiger. Lance Franklin was the last forward to manage the feat back in 2008, but only after playing through September in a Hawthorn premiership season.

With games shortened in the coronavirus-riddled year, ostensibly to allow matches to be played at an increased frequency in coming weeks, kicking 100 points in a match is proving beyond sides.

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Fremantle’s 20-point win over Adelaide on the Gold Coast on Sunday was arguably an outlier in terms of the error-riddled football played but not in terms of scoring.

The Crows avoided their lowest ever score to halftime only when Myles Poholke kicked a goal after the siren to end the second quarter.

It was the 30th game in succession this season that neither side in a match has managed to reach 100 points, a trend dating back to Port Adelaide’s thumping of the Crows in Round 2.

Scores have been dropping in recent years. The Lions were the highest-scoring side last year when averaging 91 points a game in the home-and-away season.

A year earlier, Melbourne scored just over 100 points before hitting the brick wall in a preliminary final. The Crows were kicking 111 points per match on average in 2017 before everything fell apart from the grand final defeat against Richmond onwards.

The now annual debate in regards to the standard of football is here earlier — in matches played as opposed to the actual date given the COVID-19 season — than usual given the low scoring.

Concerns have arisen at a time where the NRL, due to a rule tweak, is drawing plaudits for exciting, high-scoring matches.

Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson led the charge after the Hawks’ narrow win over North Melbourne last Sunday when he savaged how the game is played.

As Brisbane legend Jonathan Brown said this week, scoring has been “on a slippery slope for the last 15 years”.

“I’m a bit more half-glass full, but the game needs plastic surgery,” Brown said on Fox Footy.

“It doesn’t need the nuclear option I don’t think at this point, but it needs a bit of tinkering.”

Amid a defence from AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan, the league ordered umpires to tighten their interpretation of “prior opportunity” for holding the ball decisions this weekend.

The evidence is anecdotal, but there appeared to be more space in several matches on the weekend, even if there was not a major rise in scoring. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the type of football the Lions, which moved to second when thrashing the previously unbeaten Port Adelaide, are playing.

The Saints and Western Bulldogs, which kicked a round-high 87 points, also played eye-catching football when running amok at Marvel Stadium. Whether there is a decrease in stoppages in coming weeks as a result of the tinkering in the holding-the-ball interpretation only time will tell.

So, too, the impact this has on scoring as the AFL continues an extraordinary 2020 season in all mainland states except Victoria.

What is certain is the century goalkicker will not re-emerge in this season of the pandemic.

In an abridged season of 17 rounds, it seems possible the Coleman Medal will be claimed with a tally not seen since World War I.

Ern Cowley managed 35 goals for Carlton in 1918, a year the Spanish flu savaged the world.