The round isn’t over, but Round 6 has already thrown up yet more imponderables as a season that was just taking shape gets thrown into familiar chaos.
Melbourne are off the canvas, Gold Coast and Brisbane came crashing back to earth, GWS and Adelaide played the worst match of the year – and tipsters everywhere suffered.
Injuries have begun to bite, with two major ones making it a bad week to be a big fella called Sam – Sam Draper’s Achilles injury leaves the Bombers scrambling for ruck cover, while a potential ACL injury for Sam Darcy is an utter nightmare for the Western Bulldogs that does plenty to sour their win.
With one game to go, there’s still plenty to talk about, too. Let’s dive in.
1. Meet footy’s No.1 coach… again
In his first year as Collingwood coach, back in 2022, Craig McRae was named the Coach of the Year by his peers for guiding the Magpies from 17th in 2021 to a preliminary final.
He could easily have joined Mark Thompson and Luke Beveridge as the award’s only back-to-back winners the year after when he masterminded the Pies’ thrilling premiership.
And right now, he’s well on course to win the Allan Jeans Award for the second time. Because no coach is performing better right now in the AFL than Fly.
Faced with the defining challenge of his tenure after the Pies crashed out of the eight in 2024, McRae has his troops not only firing on all cylinders to start the season, but proving comfortably more than the sum of their parts.
To do so over the summer is impressive enough: to do it after the wolves were at the door following a concerning Opening Round loss in which GWS made the oldest side in the competition look every bit over the hill is an even more remarkable achievement.
This isn’t the Collingwood that marched to the flag in 2023: the chaos that underpinned their ball movement then is now more measured, though no less deadly.
Around the stoppages, too, what was once a Magpie weakness is now a source of unlikely strength – the Pies outgunned a star-studded Brisbane on-ball brigade, newly minted premiership medals and all, for a famous win at the Gabba on Thursday night.
It’s a surprising mix, that midfield: Steele Sidebottom and Scott Pendlebury, thought washed up barely a month ago, are key pillars yet again, with Sidebottom’s footy smarts, decision making and crafty skills seeing him take to a more inside role like a duck to water, having spent much of his career on a wing.
That’s without mentioning Ned Long, already firming as the best story of the year: in just two weeks, the one-time Hawthorn reject has proved the missing piece to the midfield puzzle for the Magpies, with his relentless tackling, ferocious attack on the ball and scrappy if effective kicking style the perfect foil to Nick Daicos’ much more marketable attributes.
Long has 50 disposals, 12 tackles, and probably zero Brownlow votes from his last fortnight – yet everyone at the Pies must know that without him, it wouldn’t be possible for Daicos to be doing Daicos things with such freakish regularity.
Down back, the Pies are a well-oiled machine; Darcy Moore is back to his best, and arguably better than ever as a pure backman even disregarding his famous intercepting attributes, while Jeremy Howe, Brayden Maynard and co. just keep on keeping on.
The Lions’ lethal forward line could muster just eight goals on Thursday, the fourth time in five weeks the Pies have conceded a score of 70 or lower. The outlier? Sydney scoring 78 in Gather Round – and from just 18 scoring shots.
This has all been achieved with minimal contributions from the Pies’ trio of off-season recruits that had many backing them to rise up the ladder: Dan Houston has been suspended for the past fortnight, Tim Membrey missed the Lions win, and while Harry Perryman plays an important Mr Fix-It role, filling in across half-back with occasional stints on-ball, the spot he seemed earmarked for has been occupied by Long.
Many coaches, even the ones who are successful right off the bat, are one-trick ponies, and when that plan is worked out can take years to devise another one and contend – if they’re given that chance.
Fly’s Pies needed a summer reset; thus far, sitting pretty on top of the ladder after six rounds of footy, things couldn’t be going more swimmingly.
Collingwood coach Craig McRae. (Photo by Daniel Carson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
2. Just because North suck doesn’t mean they should lose Good Friday
If there’s one thing that sucks about being a small Victorian club, it must be the steady murmurings following particularly heavy losses about your side’s irrelevancy, and even their spot in the competition.
Such has been the plight for North Melbourne over the last half-decade, with their horror run – I checked, and it’s the worst by any team in the VFL/AFL in living memory (yes, their last 111 games since early 2020 have a worse win-loss record than the last 111 games of Fitzroy) leading to questions everywhere from the work water cooler to footy talk shows about whether they still deserve to be here.
And when Good Friday comes around and the inevitable pummelling occurs, as happened again this weekend, the issue of whether the Kangaroos still deserve the marquee slot rears its head.
I despise this line of thinking – mostly because it’s holding the Kangaroos to a standard by which no other marquee match is measured.
Essendon, for example, have won just four of the last 18 Anzac Day matches, with four beltings by eight goals or more. No one has ever called for someone else to get a go there.
Even worse has been Melbourne on King’s Birthday – they’ve won just three of the last 16, losing seven times by more than six goals. But that day is theirs, for better or for worse.
Why is it all of a sudden relevant how a team is performing on their marquee day when it’s the Kangaroos?
As for the argument that a bigger Victorian club would pull in a greater crowd – well yes, of course they would. The Magpies and Bombers regularly get 90,000-plus on Anzac Day.
But by that measure, you might as well give every public holiday over to two of the Pies, Bombers and Blues, because they’re guaranteed to out-draw everyone else.
In any event, I’d argue even that’s silly reasoning: Carlton versus, say, Essendon will get a huge crowd whenever it’s played, whereas the Kangaroos and Blues get a far more substantial crowd boost from it being a public holiday – 46,373 turned up at Marvel Stadium on Friday, while they got over 49,000 in 2023 and more than 47,000 in 2024. That’s a good 10,000 more than what they’d expect to get for an average match between them.
Frankly, I’m still irked at the Western Bulldogs becoming the only team ever to be rotated out of a marquee match – while Easter Monday, Anzac Day, King’s Birthday and Anzac Eve have all been between the same teams since their inception.
North Melbourne lobbied the AFL for years to implement a Good Friday game, and for all their on-field faults, they have done a magnificent job off-field with it, from their work with the Good Friday Appeal to ensuring kids battling severe illnesses have the absolute time of their lives on game day and during the week.
They’ve put in the legwork, and they deserve to retain their sole marquee day. No matter how much they suck.
3. The Dogs can survive losing Darcy
A week ago, the idea of Sam Darcy suffering a possible season-ending ACL injury would have been every Bulldogs fan’s worst nightmare.
It still is, to be fair, and with signs not looking good for the newly anointed best player in the game, the Dogs’ chances of making finals just got a whole lot tougher – especially with Jamarra Ugle-Hagan nowhere close to a return.
But there was enough on display against an admittedly woeful St Kilda to suggest losing Darcy isn’t a season-destroying blow.
For one thing, it helps to have the best player in the game return to the team for the first time this season. Sorry, Nick Daicos, but any doubts over whether Marcus Bontempelli still holds the crown should have just been dispelled.
It’s not a coincidence either that Aaron Naughton played his best game of the season as the number one banana, nor that delivery inside 50 was a lot more precise and thoughtful than when there was Darcy’s head to sit it on.
Rhylee West was superb, Ryley Sanders had the best game of his young career, and the midfield ran rampant with no ill side effects from Bontempelli returning to change the structure from how the side started the year.
The Saints were outclassed, but that’s not nothing – they’ve started the year in excellent fashion, but had no time and space on the outside and were smashed on the coalface.
The Dogs are no strangers to destabilising injuries. A looming season-ending Darcy injury is a bitter blow, but you know what? It’s a test that can be passed.
4. Some overdue Kozzie Pickett love
I’ve written about Kysaiah Pickett a few times in Six Points over the years, and it’s rarely been good.
In 2023, I argued his two-match suspension for a hideous bump on Western Bulldog Bailey Smith was about half of what he deserved.
In 2024, following a high elbow on Adelaide’s Jake Soligo that earned him another week off, I dubbed him the dirtiest player in footy – which got a predictable response from Melbourne supporters.
But if I’m going to devote content inches to calling out the bad stuff, then I’ve also got to acknowledge the good: and I can safely say Pickett’s performance on Saturday afternoon at the MCG was the best match I’ve seen from a player thus far in 2025.
It’s rare to see a player single-handedly win it for their team, but his first half against Fremantle quite literally destroyed the Dockers all by himself.
Whether buzzing around the midfield or one-out deep inside 50, everything Kozzie touched turned to gold, from smart hit-up kicks to leading forwards sprinting into space, to the four times where he went it alone for dazzling goals.
He leapt for speckies, he crumbed everything at ground level, his hands were clean, his agility exquisite, and his tackling pressure as ferocious as ever.
Since returning from suspension, Pickett has been outstanding in all three of his matches, but when the Dees lost to first Geelong and then Essendon, his excellence went under the radar.
But after five goals and 24 disposals, it’s clear he’s now Melbourne’s best player – overtaking Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver and just about pipping Max Gawn – and the price the Dockers will need to pay to facilitate a trade is growing bigger by the week.
I’m starting to think of Pickett like Toby Greene – you can acknowledge his penchant for cheap shots and his frequent overstepping of the line while admitting he’s a remarkable player who you’d absolutely kill to have in your team.
I shudder to think of what he could do to Richmond on Thursday night.
5. Where are Fremantle?
I wrote at length on Saturday about how Melbourne unleashed the shackles and pulled off a famous win to resurrect their season.
It’s now time to address the other major storyline out of events at the MCG: Fremantle once again fluffing their lines just when it seemed like their bona fides as a September or even premiership contender were about to be ratified.
To be clear, the jury was still going to be out on the Dockers even if they’d, as expected, won on Saturday: a 4-2 record would have looked nice, but featured wins over West Coast, Richmond and the Dees, three of the bottom four as it stands.
But while four points was about as much as they could have gained, squandering them has cost Freo a hell of a lot more.
And it’s about time for some serious scrutiny on Justin Longmuir and his team.
This is Longmuir’s sixth season in charge. They have never been terrible, but just once – in 2022 – have they featured in September.
As an added point against Longmuir, his arrival wasn’t at the traditional stage of a team’s development (i.e. rock bottom or fast approaching it); since the Ross Lyon era of flag contention blew up spectacularly in 2016, they had been steadily developing, accruing talent, and needed more a fresh voice at the helm than a complete retooling.
But six years in, after spectacularly blowing it last year to turn a potential top-four finish into missing the finals, then starting a season in which they were among the flag fancies with a mediocre 3-3 record despite a favourable draw, there are still more questions than there are answers.
This is a team with substantial talent, one that lacks for nothing – they’re defensively sound for talls and smalls, have dashing rebounders, a star-studded on-ball brigade, two good ruckmen (what a luxury replacing the injured Luke Jackson with someone like Sean Darcy should be), a star key forward in Josh Treacy and an army of nippy smalls, including boom recruit Shai Bolton (quite easily their best on Saturday, by the way).
Yet if Collingwood are greater than the sum of their parts, this team is significantly less than theirs: something is going horribly wrong for a team like this to leak 15 goals to a side that could barely score for the first five rounds, regardless of how aggressive their new style was.
Longmuir doesn’t need me to tell him he’s in trouble if the Dockers miss the eight again this year – he has a rolling contract hanging over his head that can be slashed at any time to do that.
But this goes beyond worrying about Longmuir, and more worrying about the club as a whole.
This is a team whose time should be now: blow it, and there’s no guarantee that things will eventually come good in 12 months’ time, or two years, or longer.
Of the Dockers’ 23 on Saturday, only Jaeger O’Meara is the wrong side of 30. This isn’t a team for whom the cliff appears to be imminent.
But with every loss like this one, it gets harder to see just why so many people – including me – were so excited about their chances going into this season.
Maybe this is just a mediocre team that plays mediocre football, with the occasional brilliant performance to tease everyone some more.
It’s up to Longmuir – and more importantly, his charges – to prove they’re more than that. That is, of course, if they’re capable of doing so.
Justin Longmuir. (Photo by Jono Searle/AFL Photos/via Getty Images )
6. Fixing the farcical 15m rule crackdown
If you haven’t noticed by now that the AFL’s umpires have changed their attitude towards the 15-metre kick rule from ‘anything goes’ to ‘this is a military dictatorship surrender or you will be shot’, then you haven’t been watching too many matches.
Particularly evident on cross-field passes in defensive 50, it’s abundantly clear that the league, probably to try and stop the relentless chipping around of the football some teams do (the replacement to the endless stoppages and ball-ups that were once footy’s resident eyesore), have gone bananas with this rule, and in the process created confusion galore among both players and fans.
When you combine a crackdown with one of the AFL’s many arbitrary rules – the umpire has no idea just how long a kick has travelled and no way of finding it out in real time – you get umpiring on vibes. Which is exactly what’s going on at the moment.
With that in mind, let’s see if we can tweak the rule so that it causes less confusion – assuming, of course, that just going back to the way things were isn’t an option.
Here is my suggestion: any kick that doesn’t travel forwards is deemed play on, rather than it only being a mark if the umpire believes it has travelled, and let’s be honest here, far enough beyond 15 metres that it would be impossible to not pay it (which is probably around the 25-metre mark at this point).
I’m not entirely wedded to this idea, but at least it’s iron-clad, and easier for umpires to determine than the distance a ball travels. It also won’t be a complete surprise to players when play on is called.
Plus, it addresses the issue the AFL seem hellbent on fixing: making it just a little tougher for teams to retain possession of the ball, especially in defensive 50.
If it makes the game slightly easier to umpire, gives everyone a clear guideline on what’s a legally markable kick and what isn’t, then it’s worth implementing in my book. Because anything would make more sense than the chaos we’ve got now.
Random thoughts
– Adelaide-GWS being the worst game of the year was not on my Round 6 Bingo card.
– Maurice Rioli Jr is just incredibly fun.
– I’m a fan of a Western Bulldogs-St Kilda Easter Sunday evening match becoming a regular fixture. Can’t wait to see the AFL take it off one of them next year and give it to one of the big dogs.
– THOUGHT
– Let’s get this out of the way: Noah Balta was excellent on Saturday night, Richmond probably don’t win without him, the Tigers were always going to play him… and it’s an absolute disgrace that the AFL didn’t put their foot down and deem him unavailable until his sentence was handed down.
