2025 Roundabout, #1

Fremantle and Port show how familiarity – and novelty – can both breed contempt.

Welcome to the first round review of the new season. For those of you who read them last year, they’ll follow a similar format in 2025: a look back at some of the interesting tactical and statistical themes which emerged from the weekend, supplemented by general notes from other games and some interesting facts and figures to round it out. However, I’m easily swayed! If you have thoughts about how these Roundabouts could be improved, please let me know (politely) either here in the comments, on social media (my Twitter/Bluesky handles are @onepercentas) or via email (hello@onepercenters.net.au).

Round 1 of the AFL season threw up some funky results. In fact, it feels like Round 1 always delivers high-variance results that aren’t necessarily indicative of what’s to come. I suspect it’s a combination of the warm weather, which leads to cramping players, and teams attempting to bed in new players and new structures on both sides of the ball. It can get messy. And that’s certainly an apt description for what happened to two sides most pundits predicted to feature in September; Fremantle and Port Adelaide. They are the subjects of this week’s Roundabout.

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Familiarity breeds contempt

Here are some words I wrote in my Fremantle season preview:

Despite ranking fourth for total disposals, the Dockers conceded the fourth-fewest turnovers and the fewest clangers. Getting lots of the ball and not losing it – sounds great, right? But despite this, the Dockers were only 10th for inside-50 entries. That’s because they’re too slow and risk-averse in possession. No team needed more possessions to move the ball from defensive 50 to attacking 50. Too often, by the time Freo had finally gotten the ball down there (if it made it at all), the opposition defence was well set-up to repel the attack. The boldness (or lack of it) of Fremantle’s ball movement is closely tied to how their midfield is performing in the clearance game. When they feel confident of starting with the ball in good positions, they’ll be more enterprising. It’s when they need to build from deep that they are fearful of being pinned in their back half. That risk aversion, ultimately born of a fear of losing the ball, made them too careful, too unimaginative, and too easy to corral into congestion or low-value parts of the ground.

Unfortunately, all of those troubling signs were once again on display in Fremantle’s first game of the season. The Dockers continually walked into the traps Chris Scott set for them and, in general, didn’t show many signs of fixing the deficiencies which have held them back since their stirring finals run in 2022. Take a look at the clip below:

Jordan Clark took a good intercept mark on the defensive 50-metre arc. He almost committed to an outboard 45-degree kick before reconsidering at the last second and instead chipping it sideways to Josh Draper* (An earlier version of this post mistakenly identified him as Brandon Walker, mea culpa). Immediately, Geelong pressed up with four men, restricting Freo to either another short kick or a long down-the-line. Draper opted for the former, taking the easy option to Jaeger O’Meara. The umpire, deeming the ball to not have travelled the required 15 metres, called play-on, forcing O’Meara to handball it back to Draper, who was corralled by Tyson Stengle and tackled over the boundary. Just like that, the Cats had a stoppage at half-forward. And although they didn’t score from that one, they scored from several others, eventually recording a +28 differential (and a +8 shot differential) in Freo’s traditional area of strength.

This clip is from the first meaningful possession chain of the entire game. I could have shown 10 others. The contrast between the slow, tentative Dockers and the fast, direct Cats was striking. Geelong regularly forced turnovers in dangerous parts of the ground by anticipating Fremantle’s preferred ball movement patterns (this is also why they laid 30 more tackles – Chris Scott knew where Freo would move the ball, and told his players to go there). The Cats know that the Dockers like chaining up by hand, even after moving the ball to the outside of the contest. One team’s method for getting the ball in the hands of designated kickers in good areas is another team’s opportunity to force a turnover either directly (by intercepting the handball or applying physical pressure to the receiver) or indirectly (by intercepting the ensuing kick). The Cats did both. 10 of the 64 turnovers the Dockers coughed up came directly from handballs. Even when they did succeed in chaining up and getting into space (Fremantle had 21 chains of three or more handballs, more than any other side in Round 1 – and 13 more than Geelong, who had the fewest), the Cats succeeded in turning it over and quickly getting it up the ground, where they continually won one-on-one contests.

I suspect that incidents like that first clip led to the Dockers overreacting and taking the wrong kinds of risks in the back half. Here’s a clip of Brandon Walker at half-back, early in the second quarter:

This was just a bad risk-reward calculation. Even if the kick came off, it would only have yielded a small attacking benefit for the Dockers. I don’t want to single out the player. Perhaps it was just a momentary lapse of reason. Or perhaps it was a young player’s response to his coach’s quarter-time injunction to his side to take more risks with the ball in the back half. Longmuir’s side need to improve a lot about how they play in possession. They need to avoid getting camped in their defensive-50, they need to improve their retention from down-the-line kicks, and they need to find more inboard 45-degree kicks. Taking risks like the one shown in the clip above won’t get the job done.

Another theme I touched on in my Fremantle season preview is that part of the reason the Dockers underwhelm as an attacking force is because they’re also too passive on the defensive side of the ball. In short, they don’t force anywhere near enough turnovers. Saturday continued this trend. The Dockers forced the third-fewest turnovers of any side in Round 1, level with West Coast and only ahead of North Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs, who played basketball at the Marvel Sauna on Saturday night. That passivity meant the Dockers couldn’t adequately defend their own turnovers and couldn’t win the ball back in the spaces that – given their trouble in moving the ball from deep positions – they needed to in order to generate scores. From afar, it looked like another example of not getting the risk-reward balance quite right. We’re only one game into a long season. And Geelong’s speed and directness make them an unusually difficult test. But in an era where it feels increasingly as though the best sides are the sides that are best at transitioning the ball, Fremantle’s stodginess looks increasingly like a hindrance which may prevent the club from getting where they believe they can.

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While novelty… also breeds contempt?

A few hours later, approximately 90 kilometres away, another talented non-Victorian side was prized apart by ferocious pressure from a tough, experienced home team. There’s been a fair amount of talk in the Alberton area across the pre-season about how Port Adelaide had rejigged their ball movement scheme, both to adapt to Charlie Dixon’s retirement and also to generate higher-quality shots at goal (they were 18th in the AFL last season for expected score per shot). Those tweaks were apparent at the MCG on Saturday night against Collingwood – but almost exclusively in a bad way. Port did record the fifth-highest expected score per shot of any side across Round 1 (yay?). And they noticeably changed their balance of kicks and handballs. Port kicked with just 52.6 percent of their disposals. That ratio was not only about 11 percent less than their 2024 average, it was lower than every other side’s average last year. Port constantly tried to access players in better positions by hand – and constantly came undone. Here’s a clip from early in the first quarter, when the game was still live:

Port actually turned the ball over by hand twice here. Joe Richards’ initial handball was gathered by Dan Houston, who kicked it up the line to Bobby Hill. Josh Sinn did a good job to worry Hill out of it, turning in the tackle to handball it to Willem Drew. Drew, while attempting to avoid Houston’s tackle, slipped over – and conceded a holding the ball free kick. Brody Mihocek goaled from the ensuing kick and mark. Port handballed before conceding a turnover 26.6 percent of the time against Collingwood, a higher share than any other side. The Pies converted those 21 turnovers from handballs into 38 points – part of a gargantuan 99 points they scored from turnover over the course of the game (there were some huge totals in this column in Round 1 – coaches, focus on defending turnover!). Port fans: is it better to have old tactical breakdowns, or these new ones? You tell me. Here’s another clip:

Kane Farrell gathered the spilled mark. Normally, his first instinct would be to kick it. But without Dixon standing a kick up the field, and with more of his teammates surrounding him, he instead handballed to Jeremy Finlayson. Finlayson quickly dished it off to Ollie Wines running past him. Wines unsuccessfully tried to break the tackle from Lachie Schultz rather than handball to Jackson Mead on his left shoulder. Brayden Maynard kicked yet another goal from the ensuing advantage. Perhaps this was just an individual error instead of a systemic breakdown – but I can’t help but think that, last season, one of the three Port players who had the ball would have chosen to kick instead of handballing.

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I think there’s a slightly deeper point to be made here, beyond “side struggles to implement new tactics”. Coaches like Craig McRae and Chris Scott approach the game in a fundamentally different way to Justin Longmuir. The Fremantle coach uses his side’s strength in the clearances as a means of fashioning elaborate possession chains and, ultimately, high-quality scoring opportunities. Geelong and Collingwood, meanwhile, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Instead, they view every opposition disposal as a chance to force a turnover and launch upfield – and every one of their own disposals as a chance for the opposite to occur. The Cats move the ball faster up the ground (measured by metres per second) than any other side. Collingwood, meanwhile, require the fewest possessions to do so. Longmuir’s Dockers struggle on both metrics. Only Essendon required more possessions per chain last season. There’s nothing innately wrong with Port Adelaide’s apparent desire to introduce more handball into their game. Indeed, with the high-quality kicks in their team, it seems like a good ploy to penetrate the opposition’s first defensive layer by hand and then find forward targets by foot. But when you’re taking fewer metres per disposal (Port took the third-most metres per disposal in 2024, but the second-fewest in Round 1), you risk turning the ball over closer to your goal. Ken Hinkley, or Josh Carr, or whoever’s running things down at Alberton, should perhaps consider whether their side’s backline (at least in its current, depleted state) is good enough to withstand that.

One last thing: the countless number of footy panel shows, all now apparently featuring Kane Cornes, have shown footage of the DAMNING lapses by individual Port Adelaide defenders. Those lapses did happen. But not running back hard enough when you’re already 12 goals down wasn’t nearly as significant to the outcome of this game as Port’s poor implementation of it – and Collingwood’s highly effective response. Footy games are determined by the intersection of three forces: talent, tactics, and luck.

Semi-fun facts and figures:

• Here’s a question: name the three top-rated players (who’ve played at least 10 senior games) from the 2023 National Draft. Number one is logical, if unintuitive: Shaun Mannagh. The 2023 Norm Goss Memorial Medallist has slotted in seamlessly at Geelong, recording a 13.28 player rating in his 12 games to date. Number two – hardly a surprise – is Harley Reid. Although the #1 pick didn’t have a great game against the Suns, his 11.17 career rating from 21 games is still the highest among all non-mature aged players from that year’s cohort. The third step on the dais belongs to… Joel Freijah. Bulldogs fans were already talking about him last year, but an excellent game against North Melbourne might just propel the winger/half-back to greater renown across the league. A 9.24 career rating thus far is extremely good value for Pick #45. Kudos to the Bulldogs recruitment team.

• A full 60 percent of Gold Coast’s 368 disposals against West Coast were in the forward half – six percent higher than the Suns’ best return last season. The Suns’ ability to regularly win the ball forward of centre resulted in them scoring a whopping 82 points from chains originating forward of centre. As abject as the Eagles were (and they were), this was a new calibre of performance by Hardwick’s side.

• Adelaide recorded 429 disposals in their 63-point win against St Kilda, 25 more than any other side managed during Round 1 and the second-most under Matthew Nicks. Interestingly enough, the only time they managed more was also against the Saints, back in Round 9, 2023. They won that game by 52 points. The 190 handballs the Crows managed on Sunday was also the third-highest count of the Nicks era.

• Following his excellent game on Sunday, Josh Rachele has now recorded four of the eight highest-rated games of his career in his last 10. Although he’s not yet rediscovered the heights of his sparkling debut, he appears to be building nicely. Perhaps Matthew Nicks and senior Crows’ players need to publicly humiliate him more (this is a joke).

• Carlton’s loss to Richmond in Round 1 may have been slightly unlucky according to the statistics, but it continued a deeply worrying trendline. The Blues have only beaten North Melbourne and West Coast in their last 10 games. Injuries are a partial excuse. But it’s still hardly the form of prospective flag contenders.

• There were 132.2 intercept possessions per game in Round 1, a far cry from the 2024 season average of… 132. North Melbourne recorded the fewest, managing just 51. Alastair Clarkson will want to see rapid improvement: that number represents a decline from their 2024 season average of 59.7 intercept possessions, which was already 18th in the AFL. Somewhat surprisingly, given how dysfunctional the rest of their game appeared, Carlton recorded 83 intercept possessions, the most of any side in Round 1 and a significant improvement on their 2024 season average of 65.9 (12th in the AFL).

• At a soggy MCG on Sunday afternoon, Melbourne recorded almost twice as many hit-outs as Greater Western Sydney (51-26). However, that overwhelming dominance in the ruck only translated to a +18 differential in scores from stoppage. Subtract centre bounces, and the Giants actually went +1 in that metric. Max Gawn is probably the best ruck in the history of the game and one of the best value draft picks of all-time (Pick #34 in 2009). However, clubs are learning that the position itself is perhaps the least valuable (or, stated another way, the least predictive of success) on the ground. The days of rucks being taken with the first pick are a thing of the past.

‘Til next week!

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