As season 2025 rapidly approaches its crescendo, has the race for the eight ever felt tighter?
Extraordinarily, with three games to go (or four if you’re Gold Coast and Essendon), no team, not even table-toppers Adelaide, are 100 per cent locks for September action. And for everyone from Collingwood in second down to the Western Bulldogs in ninth, every single game, every single quarter, is now of the utmost importance.
Once again, none of those top nine stumbled – though Fremantle did briefly toy with their supporters’ long-since-frayed mental wellbeing against Carlton – while the three proper blockbusters between the remaining contenders featured a proper mixed bag – one flogging, one epic, and a Saturday night contest between Collingwood and Brisbane that nearly was great but never quite lived up to the hype.
From the Crows’ brilliance to another Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera special and everything in between, let’s dive in.
1. The dangerous precedent Adelaide’s rebuild could set
This weekend confirmed what we have suspected for at least the last few weeks: that we have a new number one seed in the AFL, and as of right now, a new premiership frontrunner.
Move over, Collingwood: it’s Adelaide’s turn in the spotlight as the season reaches its pointy end, even if Brisbane, by virtue of their top-four position, win over the Magpies and status as reigning premiers, remain the team to beat.
The Crows aren’t perfect, but their array of weapons is terrifying, their team perfectly balanced and their best footy as scintillating to watch as it is virtually unstoppable. It’s probably time we fully acknowledged a list built through shrewd drafting and impeccable trading is now the best in the AFL, too.
It would be silly to have any concerns about the Crows, who now seem on track for a next decade as fruitful as the better part of the last one – specifically, the seven years following their 2017 grand final appearance – has been barren.
My worry, though, is what lessons their incredible rise in 2025 rival clubs will attempt to glean for their own attempted bottom-up rebuilds – and the perils that lie within.
For starters, hopefully this breakout season from Adelaide, and any success it brings with it, doesn’t detract from the fact that up until this year, their rebuild was, in my view at least, behind schedule.
If you look at football as only designed to win premierships or strongly contend for them, then five years from rock bottom (2020) to heavyweight status is perfectly paced, to be sure. But it’s a rarity to go from only okay to devastatingly good as rapidly as the Crows have, and it’s a dangerous precedent to follow.
My concern is clubs right now beginning to retool, such as St Kilda, Carlton and Essendon, will point to the Crows’ success as a justification to preach patience to its supporters with limited on-field success for even longer than they are currently able to.
In my view, no team in history – not even North Melbourne and West Coast in recent years – has been bad enough to justify five consecutive years without finals, as was the case for Matthew Nicks’ Crows from 2020-2024.
There’s a reason Nicks’ seat was one of the hottest in footy going into the year, as long ago and far away as that now seems. And it’s not nothing that, should the Crows salute this year, he will be the first coach in the 21st century to win a flag with a career win-loss record in the red.
Adelaide’s is not a conventional rebuild, either. They are a big club with significant recruiting clout no matter their status on-field – and if the losses of Jake Lever and Charlie Cameron contributed to their fall from grace after 2017, the acquisition of Jordan Dawson, Izak Rankine and Alex Neal-Bullen in particular, the latter two arguably the Crows’ best players, has sped up their surge back to the top immensely.
Full credit to the Crows for identifying gettable talent and sticking the landing – but the truth is all came to them gift-wrapped and keen to play for them specifically. That’s a luxury the Saints will never know, and even Carlton and Essendon are rapidly discovering top-end talent wanting to return to Victoria are spoiled for choice for big clubs to join, with their lack of recent success counting against them for, as an example, Harley Reid.
None of this is to diminish what the Crows have achieved – if they do win the premiership this year, or even go deep into September, the previous seven years in the wilderness will have been worth it and more.
But to suggest this is the blueprint of an ideal rebuild, ignoring both the helping hands the fates have bestowed upon them and the fact it has taken substantial patience to reach this point, is a dangerous game for clubs to play.
Hopefully the lesson learned is that building a premiership team takes time and discipline, not that you have to accept being mediocre for a long time before you can become great.
Taylor Walker celebrates a goal with jubilant Adelaide fans. (Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)
2. The Saints can’t afford to lose NWM – and neither can the AFL
Watching Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera over the last few weeks has been to witness an athlete on a completely different playing field to everyone else around him.
In the context of a workmanlike but largely mediocre St Kilda team, he’s almost a god – and when it’s exacerbated by facing another ordinary team, like Melbourne last week or North Melbourne on Sunday, the result is dominance to a degree usually only seen at junior level by a youngster quickly on the fast track to higher honours.
Against the Kangaroos, a combination of North’s refusal to lift a finger to stop him and the Saints’ own limitations meant Wanganeen-Milera was essentially able to pick and choose which teammates to pass to, and when to go it himself and make the play solo. Which he did. Again and again and again, with skill frankly unworthy of the 1:10pm timeslot.
Let’s be blunt: the last thing the AFL needs in this era of haves and have nots, of compromised drafts and the limits of equalisation, to have a generational, club-changing superstar like Wanganeen-Milera leave a success-starved club like the Saints. Especially to go to an Adelaide team that would be stacked to a supernatural level if he chose them.
Is this Vic bias? I’d argue it’s the same situation as when Tom Lynch left a wooden spoon-bound Gold Coast en route to two premierships in two years with Richmond – except at least via free agency compensation, the Suns got a top pick for losing him.
If AFL intervention is possible – and it surely is – then they must make it all but infeasible for Wanganeen-Milera to go to Adelaide. Together with the Saints, who are pulling out all the stops both behind the scenes and from supporters on game day to convince him to stay, the league should deeply consider stepping in to help out for the good of the game.
Whether it’s a football ambassadorship of the kind Gold Coast and GWS players have received, to introducing retention incentives for players on every list, or something I haven’t even thought of, it’s no good for footy to have generational talent leave the clubs that need players of NWM’s calibre the most.
3. A most un-Freo win
24 points down at half time at Optus Stadium, Fremantle seemed about to, well, go full Freo.
On the brink of a finals berth in which they could give a premiership a serious shake, to produce the sloppy, undisciplined, atrocious football the Dockers did in the first half against a spirited yet undermanned Carlton was so antithetical to everything they’ve done over the past two months – and yet, a fitting result if you’ve ever paid attention to anything this football club has done in its 30-year history. It was only last year, after all, that they blundered away a likely top-four berth by losing their last four games to miss the finals entirely.
But then, Fremantle did something surprising. They … rallied.
The intensity was lifted after half time, the skill level and cleanliness improved – how could they not – and the Dockers began to play like, well, the top-eight team they are.
The result was an almost instant change in mood at Optus Stadium, with Freo narrowing the gap to eight points at three quarter time but in actuality well in control despite the scoreboard.
And it continued in the final quarter, with seven goals to one sealing an eventually comfortable 27-point win (though good luck telling any Fremantle supporter that), a nice little percentage boost with a late flurry once the result was beyond the Blues’ reach, and with it, fifth place on the ladder.
No team can be on top every single week. Everyone goes through peaks and troughs. Freo’s failing for so many years has been their inability to avoid being brutally punished every time they don’t produce their best.
Winning ugly is a trait all the best teams have. The Dockers might have just unlocked that.
4. The unlikeliest All-Australian in decades
I’ll admit, heading into Friday night’s game at the Adelaide Oval, I didn’t have Josh Worrell in my drafted All-Australian 22.
By the time the final siren sounded, he was pencilled into a back pocket, and frankly he could miss Adelaide’s last three games of the home-and-away season and not budge from that spot.
One of 2025’s biggest revelations, the 24-year old has become the most critical pillar in a backline that, for lack of a better word, is Moneyball personified.
There are no big names in defence for the Crows. Mark Keane, a pre-season supplementary selection two years ago after an aborted career with Collingwood to return home to Ireland, is now just about the most miserly stopper in the game. Nick Murray, another pre-season add-on in early 2021, is a hidden gem. Mitch Hinge was a Brisbane reject, Max Michalanney among the more anonymous father-son picks in recent years (compared to your Ashcrofts, Daicoses and Darcys, of course). Fresh face Hugh Bond, in to give Rory Laird a rest on Friday night, did more than enough to hold his spot – he’s a pick 50 from 2022.
Then there’s Worrell. The Crows don’t beat the Hawks without his sensational final quarter to time and time again deny the visitors, from his bold decision to leave Jack Gunston and force a spoil with the Hawks surging late, to his twin desperate tackles to hold up play with the match on the line.
He’s the rare breed of defender as good at ground level as in the air – and while he seems a size below the monsters that Keane and Murray can handle, he’s an ideal third tall who can mind a small forward when necessary, or drop off to assist with intercept marks and timely spoils – and as it happens, only Nick Vlastuin has more intercept possessions in 2025.
In addition, he’s a sound kick, a sensible decision-maker, and has a knack of being in the right place at the right time.
50 games into an AFL career that began with a solitary game in 2021, there’s more than a touch of Alex Rance about him – and I can give no higher praise than that.
5. The worst ‘interview’ of 2025
A bit of personal lore – the moment I decided a serious journalism career probably wasn’t for me came back in 2018, while I was interning for a major news network (I won’t say which one).
I was tasked with accompanying a cameraman to Melbourne Airport to capture shots of Andy Murray, who had just pulled out of the Australian Open due to a knee injury, and if possible pull off everyone’s most hated media tactic and ‘doorstop’ him – in other words, shove a microphone in his face and ask a series of questions for him to ignore.
I was dreading it with all my heart, and was probably the most relieved man in Australia when after an hour at the airport waiting for him he was a no-show – and it was in that grateful feeling that I knew I wasn’t cut out for that caper.
So I’ve got some sympathy for the 7 News Adelaide reporter given the task of doorstopping Jack Ginnivan on the way into Adelaide Airport on Saturday – no doubt, after he flipped the bird at Crows fans during Hawthorn’s Friday night loss, she was given the job absolutely no one likes doing.
That’s as far as I’ll go on that, though, because how it unfolded is as bad as footy media, and indeed most media, gets.
It was designed, pure and simple, to provoke a reaction out of Ginnivan, and provide fodder for social media and the nightly news – so mission accomplished, I guess. But it’s nothing more than cheap, shallow reporting where we can see the story being made in real time.
It would have been one thing had the reporter not repeatedly gone back at Ginnivan’s dismissive responses with yet more baiting – and fair play to him for handling it as well as he did.
If it had just been one or two questions ignored on his way into the airport, one biting response back from Ginnivan, in the standard of most of these doorstops both in and out of the sporting world, few people would have cared – but then again, it wouldn’t have got more than three-quarters of a million views on X if it had been done like that.
The proof of the pudding was in how quickly comments were disabled on the video post, and how the few comments that did get through tearing the network a new one, and racking up scores of hearts in the process, vanished into the ether. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Stuff like this gives everyone in footy media a bad name. It’s this sort of grubbiness that helps to invalidate legitimate, hard news reporting of important, or at least interesting, issues from player movement to off-field controversy and everything in between, and bundles it all under the banner of shameless click-chasing.
At the end of the day, Seven got what they wanted, and I’d be surprised if the reporter wasn’t congratulated by her higher-ups on a job well done.
But the least we can do is call it out if we don’t want to see it again moving forward.
6. What’s with all the Pie pessimism?
Remember a month ago, when Collingwood were unbackable premiership favourites?
Since then, they’ve lost three of four matches, all to fellow teams in the top nine, two of them against visiting teams at the MCG – and the gloss has well and truly come off.
Right now, following their defeat to Brisbane on Saturday night, they’ve lost top spot, fallen behind Adelaide and the Lions in the flag markets according to the bookies, and are in real jeopardy of not just losing home qualifying final rights, but even falling out of the top four entirely.
It’s not just everyone else anticipating an end-of-season slump, from media outlets dissecting the problems with the Pies’ now-vulnerable defence to gleeful opposition fans revelling in the downturn of the most hated club in the land – even Collingwood supporters are getting exceedingly restless, if social media comments can be believed.
Suddenly, Craig McRae’s selections and game plan are being questioned, the form of key players – in particular big-money recruit Dan Houston and mature-aged sensation Ned Long – under serious scrutiny, and a backline that has proved miserly all year facing serious doubts from the Pies’ own supporter base.
And I’ll be honest – I’m not buying it for a second.
Sure, the Pies are in a bit of a rut, and with a tricky fortnight ahead will need to turn things around in a hurry to avoid dropping out of the top four. Sure, key figures are down on form, injuries mounting up, and a few of the lesser lights whose performances this year have contributed to their resurgence after missing the eight last year have come back to earth of late.
But you know when all of those things were true as well? At the end of 2023. We all know what the Pies managed to pull off in September then.
The cavalry will return. Billy Frampton and Jeremy Howe will improve the backline immeasurably; Beau McCreery’s tackling pressure and forward craft were dearly missed against the Lions; Jordan De Goey and Bobby Hill will be better for the run after their minutes were managed on Saturday night.
An upcoming trip to the Adelaide Oval to face the Crows looks a nightmare ask on paper – but the Pies haven’t lost against that opponent since 2016, at that venue since 2017, and against a combination of both in six consecutive outings. Red-hot the Crows may be, but that’s a seriously formidable record on enemy territory.
Anyone, Pies supporter or rival, expecting them to miss the top two, let alone fall out of the four, is playing a very dangerous game.
Not only is it prematurely writing off the team that proved for the first two-thirds of the season to be the best one in it, but risks exposing themselves to the most toxic thing in footy: a smug Collingwood supporter getting to revel in throwing all that schadenfreude back in everyone’s face.
Darcy Moore leads Collingwood players from the MCG after their loss to Brisbane. (Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
Random thoughts
– Thursday night footy is officially cursed. Collingwood and Hawthorn this week will inevitably be a massive letdown.
– If Geelong get Jeremy Cameron to the ton by spoon-feeding him at every chance, does it not dampen the achievement a little bit?
– There’s a player in Campbell Chesser. Hope he gets a clean run with injuries in 2026.
– Having now watched him rack up 36 disposals firsthand, I can safely say that not only is Lachie Ash nowhere near any legit All-Australian team, he might be this year’s most overrated player.
– Wonder if anyone has ever had three midfielders with the same name at a centre bounce before?
– Harry O’Farrell doing a knee would suck immensely. Had been a rare great story in a miserable Blues year.
– Ken Hinkley’s four biggest losses as coach have all come this year. Grim.
– One for Saints fans: is it not a bit of a mood-killer after a thrilling win to have Robbie Williams’ Angels start playing right after?
