Good grief.
At 5:30pm on Sunday, I had this Six Points edition done and ready to go out at 6pm sharp – right on the final siren between Melbourne and St Kilda.
And then the Saints kicked nine goals in the last quarter to pull off the greatest three-quarter time comeback in VFL/AFL history, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera booted two in the final 20 seconds and the winner after the siren, and the Demons pulled off the most spectacular choke job I have ever seen in professional sport.
And it meant I had to begin work on this all over again. So farewell, my perfectly articulated point on Brisbane’s twin-ruck problem! Let’s begin.
1. The greatest choke job in AFL history – and who caused it
St Kilda didn’t snatch victory from the jaws of defeat on Sunday afternoon. That would imply there was anything to snatch.
Having looked utterly second-rate for the entire first three quarters at Marvel Stadium, and duly taken to the cleaners by a Melbourne team in the middle of a frustrating season of their own, the Saints’ run of five consecutive honourable losses looked set to end, because there was nothing honourable about this one.
So to bang on nine goals to none from 46 points down at three-quarter time is nothing short of an utter miracle. A big, beautiful miracle to save possibly the worst round of footy in the 18-team competition.
Were there heroes? You’d better believe it. Wanganeen-Milera’s two goals in the final minute to first draw the game and then win it, featuring a speccy that had Ross Lyon laughing his head off in awe in the coaches box, will ensure his name goes into Saints folklore even if he does break their hearts and head to Adelaide at season’s end. (As a side note: we’re all doomed if he does that, because the Crows might win six flags in a row if they can add him to their list.)
Rowan Marshall, soundly beaten for three quarters and 31 minutes, pulled off the best kick of his life from the final centre bounce, perfectly hitting NAS on the run inside 50 and leaving the Demons, who had anticipated he’d bang it long to the hot spot, red-faced.
Bradley Hill, Cooper Sharman, Jack Higgins, Mason Wood, and Jack Steele, the captain virtually anonymous for the first three quarters, all stood tall as well to nail clutch goals to set the stage for Wanganeen-Milera’s heroics at the death. All deserve credit.
But to be honest, as much as the Saints won this game, the elephant in the room is that Melbourne produced a butcher job that we will surely never see the likes of again.
The Dees’ first ten minutes of the final quarter, in which the Saints’ victory chances went from nonexistent to genuine hope with four quick goals, was as embarrassing a stretch of play as anything dished up by North Melbourne against Geelong.
Tackles were missed, Saints left free to stream out of defence and from the centre square – Wanganeen-Milera, their best player, most obviously – and the backline Swiss cheese to time and again turn defusable situations into St Kilda goals.
God knows why Jack Viney, a heart and soul player but not blessed for leg speed, found himself time and time again opposed to and exposed by Wanganeen-Milera’s pace at centre bounces when the game was trying to be saved.
But that all pales in comparison to the chaos of the final ten seconds, with the scores tied.
First of all, to concede a 6-6-6 violation and a free kick is an inexcusable sin of complete miscommunication. At that point, the Dees had a chance of snatching victory back with a quick centre bounce exit – suddenly, that went up in a puff of smoke. The best they could hope for was two points.
Then, with a minute to prepare as the umpires forced everyone back to their starting positions – though I’m sceptical they actually managed that from what I saw on the TV coverage – the Demons utterly, spectacularly botched it in every way imaginable.
First of all – there was no stipulation in the rules about WHO needed to be at the centre bounce, just that there needed to be four players in there. Why Max Gawn went back in rather than sending, say, Jake Bowey in instead while he sat back in the hot spot is nothing short of panic, plain and simple.
Howler number two – from that centre bounce, Gawn’s instant sprint back to the hot spot was a recipe for disaster, too. If he wanted to be back there, he should have started there – and his headless rush into defence basically meant a Saints midfielder was left free to run without an opponent breathing down his neck.
Most culpable of all is Kysaiah Pickett – with eight seconds on the clock, he inexplicably stops to look back at the kicker, Rowan Marshall, while Wanganeen-Milera shoots past him, then half-heartedly jogs back with NAS and Marcus Windhager both metres clear of him. If the former hadn’t marked, the latter probably would have.
Viney does his level best, but he’s blundered as well – his ball-watching earlier in the play leaves Anthony Caminiti all alone inside 50 too. Quite literally three different Saints were all on their own in the last eight seconds of a level game in which the Demons had had a minute to prepare.
All the while, every single Dees defender has bunched up in the hot spot, leaving the entire area between 30 and 50 metres out from goal free – perfect for a set play which Marshall was good enough to execute.
It’s the most shambolic thing I’ve ever seen in football. It’s honestly the most shambolic thing I’ve ever seen in professional sport.
And above all else, it was absolutely piss funny.
Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera kicks a goal after the siren to win St Kilda the game. (Photo by James Wiltshire/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
2. There’s only one spot in the eight up for grabs
For all the posturing about the miserable run of fixtures we’ve had over the last month, with the exception of Blockbuster Round a fortnight ago, there is a rather substantial trade-off.
And it’s that this finals series promises to be the most exciting, even, unpredictable September we’ve ever seen.
How many years have there been where it’s legitimately possible, with a month of the home-and-away season to go, to make a compelling case for eight different teams winning the premiership?
The only problem is that the weekend’s results – and in particular two massive Derby triumphs – have all but locked in seven of eight finals spots already. Granted, it’s not mathematical just yet, but it’s virtually impossible to see any of them missing out on September as it stands.
A week ago, Gold Coast were suddenly vulnerable: hit by injuries, coming off a thumping loss to Adelaide and facing a QClash against a reigning premier who they’d beaten just once in seven years and who handed them a football lesson barely two months ago.
But to watch the Suns in the wet on Saturday was to watch a team not just en route to its first ever finals series, but one with premiership aspirations. They utterly bullied a midfield that for the best part of half a decade has been the best in the business.
Matt Rowell and Noah Anderson are a perfect one-two punch – the inside bull and the silky-smooth outside runner – and are routinely fed by Jarrod Witts’ immaculate tapwork.
Throw in Alex Davies, seemingly brought in specifically to combat the Lions’ big bodies on-ball and who performed spectacularly in his first match of the season, and you have stoppage carnage that ripped this match off its hinges by late in the second quarter.
Assuming their make-up Opening Round clash with Essendon is the ultimate slam dunk, the Suns are realistically fifth on the ladder as it stands, and just percentage outside the top four. With just one game against a fellow finals contender – GWS at home in Round 23 – and the Bombers and Richmond to come, they are perfectly poised to capitalise on even a single slip-up from either the Lions or Collingwood, who as it happens have far tougher runs home.
Speaking of the Giants, their third quarter to steamroll a Sydney team that looked set to throw a major spanner in the works on Friday night is as good footy as any team has played this year.
That’s now six wins in a row, and eight of their past nine – it’s not ridiculous to say they’re the form team of the competition right now. Crucially, too, North Melbourne and St Kilda in their last month gives the Giants the chance to boost their percentage and turn that Expansion Cup showdown with the Suns into a top-four play-off – and even though a date with a desperate Western Bulldogs this Thursday night sans Toby Greene won’t be easy, they’d have to be tremendously unlucky to miss September even if they lose to both the Dogs and Suns.
Of the current top eight, the only one with even the slighest chance of falling out is surely Hawthorn. Two games clear of the ninth-placed Dogs they might be, but they’ve got each of the current top three in their final four, two of them – Brisbane and Adelaide – on the road.
Still, they’ve won six of seven going in, have recovered their mojo following a rough run mid-season, and those clashes with the Lions and Magpies now loom as distinctly winnable. Take both, and top four is well within their reach too.
The task, therefore, for the Bulldogs is simple: win all four, including clashes with the Giants and Fremantle, and hope the Hawks’ tough draw works against them.
Even as a diehard Dogs fan, though, I’ve got no hesitation in saying they are the clear weak link of that top nine. And also the only team who, should they squeak into eighth, I cannot give any chance at a premiership, or even in winning that first final.
Finn Callaghan celebrates a goal. (Photo by Matt King/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)
3. This is who Toby Greene was all along
You know all those claims that Toby Greene has become a reformed character?
The endless puff articles, positive comments in the media and glowing praise of his incredible skill and courage without needing to make mention of the negative side of his game?
That all rung hollow midway through the first quarter of the Sydney Derby, when Greene responded to being fended off by Isaac Heeney by rushing up to him and giving him a forearm to the head as he lay prone on the ENGIE Stadium turf after being tackled by Sam Taylor.
Quickly, the reaction was disappointment – the general consensus from most was that it was thought Greene was past this type of conduct, that he had changed his ways, and that he had let down his team by receiving a one-match suspension to rule him out of this Thursday’s crunch clash with the Western Bulldogs – a ban that the Giants have elected not to send to the Tribunal.
And to be honest, it’s giving him far more credit than he deserves. This is who Toby Greene is as a player. This is who he has always been.
It should be entirely possible to accept that he is this generation’s biggest grub by the length of the straight, without even needing to reference his obvious brilliance as a form of cultural mitigation.
Greene saw a player already taken down by a teammate, arms pinned and the ball safely neutralised, and cheap-shotted him to the head. Plain and simple.
I can’t think of any other footballer who would do such a dirty thing for no reason whatsoever – even the most significant suspensions doled out this year, from Conor Nash concussing Gryan Miers to Tristan Xerri’s high hit on Tom Sparrow, have happened in footballing incidents where careless clumsiness was the cause. Ditto Steven May on Francis Evans last week.
To compare it to Darcy Moore’s sliding knees into Josh Treacy last week is also ridiculous. For one thing, I noted in Six Points last week that Moore should definitely have faced a week off, and it’s a flaw in the system that such unnecessary contact doesn’t trigger anything in the Match Review Officer suspension guidelines.
But Greene made this rod for his own back: had he even cheap-shotted Heeney in the back or in the kidneys, he’d be free to play on Thursday night. He chose to target Heeney’s head, and with it brought the full force of laws designed to protect the head on him.
Does the good outweigh the bad with Toby Greene? Probably. He plays with an edge that is undoubtedly inspiring to his Giants teammates, and he’s the sort of player any supporter would love to have on their team.
But it’s time to separate appreciation of his footballing talents with criticism when he oversteps the mark – which, as he heads into the 16th week of his career in which he has been suspended, has been more frequent than any other player in modern football.
This wasn’t out of character. This wasn’t a lapse into his bad old days before he straightened himself out. Greene doesn’t deserve the leeway, frankly, or this being treated as anything other than the latest dog act from the dirtiest footballer of his generation.
4. Nick Daicos is 2025’s best player
Back on Friday, former Roar expert Adrian Polykandrites posed a question on X: who is the best footballer of 2025?
It’s not a question that’s easy to answer: the league is chock full of gun players who have either gone through prolonged lulls in form (Caleb Serong, Noah Anderson and Isaac Heeney for instance), or spent sufficient time on the sidelines through injury to have their eligibility questioned (Marcus Bontempelli, Bailey Smith, Kysaiah Pickett and Zak Butters spring to mind).
But on Sunday afternoon at the MCG, I think we got our answer. It’s Nick Daicos – and the crazy thing is, he’s actually having a down year by his standards.
Part of the issue with judging Daicos is that he’s a magnet for tall poppy syndrome on a number of counts: he plays for Collingwood, he wins a lot of free kicks because teams try to clamp down on him, often illegally, and in the most complete team system in the competition he tends to attract a lot of best afield votes simply because he’s the best and most eye-catching of an even bunch.
Having made the shift to near full-time inside midfielder, his contested possession and clearance numbers aren’t quite what they were in 2024, his first year as a permanent mid, while he doesn’t rack up disposals by the score on the outside as much as when he played at half-back.
Because of that, he tends to get judged by his own impossible standards – and it takes something truly special to break the mould. Something like, for instances, 42 disposals, 912 metres gained and three absurdly good goals to break a spirited Richmond in drizzly conditions at the home of football.
No player in the competition can match Daicos for both volume and quality. Bontempelli is a strong contender for the latter, while any number of players have bigger disposal tallies, or clearance numbers, or contested possession wins, if that’s what you’re looking for. But to make an AFL side look thoroughly second-rate, as Daicos did to the Tigers all day, is in the Gary Ablett zone of greatness.
If the umpires judge Daicos to his own standards, there’s a chance he won’t win the Brownlow Medal. If the AFL Players Association don’t mind him missing the first month of the season, Bontempelli stands a good chance of winning another Leigh Matthews Trophy. And it seems like, while the AFL Coaches Association Award is his to lose for the second year running, that award has less significance in the eyes of many fans because of the conspiracy theory that Craig McRae rigs it to inflate Daicos’ votes.
But even if he goes through the year without winning any of the major individual accolades, don’t let that fool you. He’s been 2025’s best player – and to be honest, while there’s a big pack of stars behind him, the gap from Daicos to the rest is starting to feel significant.
Or at least it did, until Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera did THAT.
5. Port have done Ken Hinkley a disservice
I’ve written frequently in Six Points this year about the futility of Port Adelaide’s year-long coaching handover from Ken Hinkley to Josh Carr, and the associated struggles it has either helped cause or hasn’t solve throughout 2025.
Most of all, though, my aversion to it has been the disrespect of handing Hinkley, the club’s longest-serving AFL coach, such a long, slow walk to his own doom – and nowhere has that been more apparent than in Saturday night’s Showdown humiliation.
The Power have been able to ride the wave of emotion that has punctuated so many of their biggest wins under Hinkley on sporadic occasions this season, but as a whole there has been a malaise around this club that has only grown stronger the longer the season has gone.
The result of a second half at the Adelaide Oval that embodied just how dispirited this playing group has become is that Hinkley, for all he has achieved and failed to achieve at the Power, is now the owner of the biggest ever Showdown loss, and only avoided a 100-point embarrassment by the clock running out on the Crows.
It’s impossible to say just how much of the reins Carr has taken this season, but this whole year has felt utterly pointless for Port from the moment it was announced that Hinkley would have a 23-game farewell lap.
Frankly, Ken deserved better than what he has been given. Even an off-season sacking would have been cleaner, and prevented such a hollow season unfolding in the manner it has.
6. It’s time to ditch the floating fixture
I’ve spent far too much time in this column defending the AFL’s ever-widening array of missteps this season, so hopefully this will be the last time: Round 20’s fixture wasn’t that bad.
At least, it wasn’t bad for anyone engaging in the time-honoured tradition of actually going along to the game.
For anyone watching on TV, today’s bizarre double-header featuring overlapping games at the MCG and Marvel Stadium respectively, starting just an hour apart and using a 2:10pm start time for the first and only time all season, made absolutely no sense.
But for any Collingwood or Richmond supporter going along to the MCG, they got to enjoy the spectacle of mid-afternoon football in the best timeslot of all. Not too early that many kids playing Sunday morning football can’t attend, and not so late as to have to travel home in the darkness and chill of Melbourne’s winter.
As for the Western Derby, I can only assume a rare genuine Saturday afternoon match in Western Australia was equally beneficial for Fremantle and West Coast supporters – certainly, it didn’t stop a capacity crowd descending on Optus Stadium.
And as for the TV issue, and specifically the glaring lack of Thursday or Friday night blockbusters of any quality, it’s probably time to realise that there are some things that even the AFL cannot micromanage.
Midway through the season, when the second round of fixtures were released, it wasn’t as ludicrous as it is now to put Carlton and Essendon in prime time slots galore: and as we learned this week, even tantalising games on paper like the Showdown, the QClash and the Sydney Derby can swiftly become unexpected fizzers.
In that spirit, it’s time for the AFL to make things easier for themselves, and end the floating fixture.
No one likes the floating fixture – it makes things tougher for spectators, specifically those with families or travelling interstate, to plan trips to the footy. And as we’ve learned this year, it hasn’t in the slightest helped push great games into prime time.
The AFL simply has too many vested interests to stack the best games in the biggest timeslots: from marquee games to the pre-existing inequities in the fixture, and most of all the player union-mandated limits on five-day breaks, mean scheduling good Thursday night games in particular is a crapshoot.
The only way it’s possible to make sure prime time is consistently a spectacle is to only select which games get that treatment a week or two in advance. And that’s a suggestion not even the AFL are silly enough to follow through with.
Random thoughts
– It’s very funny that Fox Footy have apparently issued an edict that commentators can’t use their nicknames anymore, because that’s one of the few things about their coverage basically no one had a problem with.
– Genuinely thought Sam Berry’s AFL career was over 12 months ago. Now a crucial cog in one of the best midfields in the league.
– Imagine if an AFL match was decided like this. There’d be a riot.
– If Lachie Sullivan has injured his PCL, that sucks immensely. A fantastic story of perseverance – hope he back on the park for a crack at a flag with the Pies this year.
– Murphy Reid is so, so good – but Dan Curtin’s still my Rising Star favourite. Sorry, Freo fans.
