August 23, 2026 — 7:40pm Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. AAA Sydney are the team everyone now wants to play in finals. Carlton are the team no one wants to play. Forget the Swans’ win over North Melbourne, it doesn’t change
Sydney are the team everyone now wants to play in finals. Carlton are the team no one wants to play.
Forget the Swans’ win over North Melbourne, it doesn’t change that. The Swans had to respond on the field after the week they had, and they were playing a bottom-five team whose season was over in two hours’ time. Sure, North weren’t playing for anything the past couple of weeks either, when they played very well, but this was the last round, feet were already being put up.
The Swans showed some spirit, as opposed to culture. But they are not a top-four looking team now. No side would be removing five senior players, three of them among their best five.
The Blues have now beaten three of the top four teams. The other one is Sydney, and even they admit they have torpedoed their season. Well, Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner, James Jordon, Riley Bice and Nick Blakey did that, then the Swans did the only thing they could do by suspending the five for the rest of the season for breaching the club’s behavioural standards, thus consigning the finals to an afterthought.
You might dismiss Carlton’s Brisbane win in round 21 as the back-to-back premiers having a mulligan and being due a loss. OK, that’s one. But they also beat the Cats. And now the Dockers. You could try to diminish the win over the Fremantle as the top side resting some players and others playing carefully to safeguard September. That would be unkind. The Dockers will be not be comfortable at having lost their past two games in Melbourne.
The Dockers kicked the first four goals of the game but Carlton didn’t panic.
Carlton has been playing with the unburdened freedom of a lack of expectation. The idea they would be here after sacking their coach after nine rounds was farcical. So, of course, whatever they do from here is a bonus. In fact, going further back, trading out Charlie Curnow and losing Tom De Koning altered the idea of what was reasonably achievable this season, and they have surpassed that.
But that doesn’t mean they are now completely unshackled. This is Carlton playing finals, of course there is expectation.
They still have holes in their list but not vulnerabilities in their game. Yes, you hold your breath when Lachie Cowan and Billy Wilson are kicking the ball coming out of defence. You also wonder if a DNA test needs to be done on Frankie Evans to make sure the bloke who kicked five goals against the top side and has been outstanding for the past three months was really the same Frankie Evans who kicked only five goals in the first 13 rounds of the season. Is he the same Frankie Evans who was cut by the Cats and Port? You wonder if Marc Pittonet can sustain this level of footy when he comes up against Max Gawn next week, and you have no idea just how far Wade Derksen can go. But right now, none of that matters.
The Blues are playing not just exciting footy but well-rounded modern footy. They are playing with speed and confidence, overlapping with handball and moving the ball with such assurance and pace there is no reason they cannot go on.
In the short term, whether you like the wildcard concept or not, what the new format has done this year is make sure the most exciting team in the competition for the past 15 weeks is playing in the first week of the most important games of the year. The only ones not thankful of that are the Demons.
It’s slightly annoying these two teams will play one another. Firstly because it means we’ve been denied the Collingwood vs Carlton Friday-night final it fleetingly looked like we were about to get, but more so because the Demons are the other wave-riding exciting team of the year. They are the club that jettisoned Christian Petracca, Clayton Oliver, Stephen May, their CEO, got a new coach and footy head and only got better and better. It is a clash of the team that entered the season without expectation playing the team that started again in round 10 without expectation.
Demons rue suspension
Were it not for the breathtaking stupidity (the most restrained of adjectives, but let’s not tread into legal territory, so we’ll leave it at that) of the Sydney Swans, the football conversation this week would have been dominated by two stories.
First, Josh Fraser’s appointment. It was less surprising than another Dave Hughes whiney video. In fact, the most surprising thing of his appointment was that he wore a polo shirt to his press conference not a hoodie. But still, it was Carlton, a team that could pull 42,000 fans to see them play Freo at Marvel. Appointing a coach should have been a big story. It was a footnote.
The second story overlooked last week was Jacob van Rooyen being suspended for three weeks for his hit to Port Adelaide’s Aliir Aliir. The fact Melbourne chose to challenge the tribunal decision at the AFL Appeals Board with one of the most speculative cases you could imagine demonstrated their level of panic and desperation. It was the Hail Mary of futile appeals.
Without the Sydney story, the van Rooyen hit was big news. With Sydney, it was rightly another footnote in footy talk.
Van Rooyen has been excellent for the Demons this year, and the logical assumption after losing to the Bulldogs was that his absence was the difference. It was definitely one of the differences in the game. But whether it was the difference is doubtful. The Bulldogs did have the “Bont” back. Without van Rooyen Matthew Jefferson was poor, then injured, and they tried late to revive 2021 by throwing Tom McDonald forward.
Harrison Petty, who has kicked multiple goals in every game he has played since he was moved permanently forward in round 13, took eight contested marks. For context, that is the equal-most that any Demons player has taken according to Champion Data, level with David Neitz and Max Gawn (twice).
Since Petty moved forward, only Sydney’s Charlie Curnow and Brisbane’s Logan Morris have had more total scoreboard impact.
Melbourne took 14 marks inside 50m for the match, they average 13 a game this year, so they didn’t lack for a target. Yes, van Rooyen is averaging two goals a game, and they didn’t find the player who could give them those in his absence. And it is not for nothing that the Demons are chasing Calsher Dear hard because they know they need more variety and threat in their forward line. But the way they surged in that last quarter to scare the Dogs showed they still have potency forward, they just struggled across the field.
The bigger concern was not Melbourne’s attack, it was that the Dogs kicked 16 goals from 50 inside-50s.
It was that Max Gawn – against what would most kindly be described as an undermanned Dogs ruck combo of Rory Lobb and Ryan Gardner – had one of the all-time great games in the ruck. He had 59 hitouts, 10 clearances, 10 score involvements, eight inside-50s, 28 disposals, 15 of them contested, yet they still lost. He could scarcely have done more, but Melbourne could not capitalise.
Roos win from their loss
North Melbourne losing to Sydney means they finish in the bottom five and stay below the Gold Coast. OK, so, who cares? Hawthorn does.
The significance of the Suns winning and North losing is two-fold. Firstly, it means North is certain to get an extra compensation pick. Under the new AFL system, the bottom five teams get compensated with an extra draft pick at the end of the first round if – and when this year – a team matches a bid on a father-son or academy player in the first five picks.
So, with early bids certain to come for Dougie Cochrane and Cody Walker, the Roos will definitely get an extra draft pick as compo. And the Suns won’t.
But it also has complications for Ben King. His tears in the rooms after the Suns win on Thursday night (an upset in more ways than one) were the most emotional pointer to the inevitability of the restricted free agent telling the Suns he wants to go to the Hawks.
After the Suns season went into freefall they raised doubts about whether it would be worth matching a bid for King in the event he asks to go, and so force Hawthorn into a trade for him, or instead just accept the first-round compensation pick they would get for losing him and let him walk.
Finishing 13th now, outside the bottom five (and with Cochrane and Walker coming into the draft) that is not such an automatic assumption.
They might still decide that compo pick (around pick eight or nine) might be better than anything the Hawks could offer, but that is no guarantee. And while they will be pragmatic to do what is best for them, doing a rival a favour is no incentive to accept the compensation.
Ranking Rankine
In his past three games, Izak Rankine has had 110 touches, kicked six goals and 33 clearances.
Importantly, he has not been suspended for a homophobic slur, as he was on the eve of finals last year, or had any other reports that will see him missing from action in September.
Rankine’s form all year has been good – career-best statistically – but his last three games have been outrageous. He’s fourth in the AFL for score involvements per game with 9.8, behind Errol Gulden (10.0), Max Hall (10.2) and, ahem, Isaac Heeney (10.7).
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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