When discussion of recent or future AFL expansion arises, it is often followed by claims from various pundits claim that the addition of extra teams impacts on the quality of football by spreading the talent base too thin. At the most basic level, this makes easy logical sense – akin
Continue reading »
The inevitable coronavirus-driven shutdown of the AFL has come perhaps a couple of weeks sooner than the league would have expected or hoped. National and international events have dictated that a national sporting competition is now impossible, due to lockdowns and interstate travel bans in parts of the country. We
Continue reading »
If you are joining HPN now, it means that the 2020 AFL season is likely going ahead! For now! Round 1 at least! For now! The HPN preview ran this morning at ABC, and we think it’s worth a read – at least as a distraction. To deliver on the
Continue reading »Today, HPN (with the fantastic James Coventry) published this piece on what faces the major football codes with the impacts of COVID-19. We dug into annual reports to try to quantify the situation. This year, if football continues, HPN will be regularly publishing articles on ABC about football (and potentially other
Continue reading »
In the second half of the salary shedding deals at the trade deadline (after the Jenkins move), Collingwood have addressed their need to fit everyone in by tapping someone on the shoulder. Someone they paid two second rounders for in 2015. James Aish had a super hot start to his
Continue reading »
At HPN, talk of the Total Player Payments (and third party payment) caps is often only mentioned in passing around trade time. That’s because salary information is withheld from public knowledge almost all of the time. Thanks to the AFL’s annual reporting on the issue, there’s knowledge out there about
Continue reading »
Fun fact: one of the origin stories (probably apocryphal) for the nickname “shinboner” for the North Melbourne Football Club derives from the dire early Hotham/North Melbourne sides and Irish lads playing hurling in the same area. The story goes that some spectator shouted that the “shinboners” (a colloquial name for
Continue reading »
Before 2017, few knew of Dan Butler. Picked up late in the 2014 AFL Draft, to most outsiders Butler was a player that was on limited time in the AFL. In fact, in 2016 Butler was nearly delisted from the Tigers. Thankfully, they held onto him, and he repaid them
Continue reading »
It’s hard being just outside a top four team. It’s even harder when the team has a rude run of health, and you’re a utility that cover almost anyone. After playing at least 11 games a year for the past four years, Tom Cutler only managed three this year –
Continue reading »
Hope is conveyed to members of clubs in a number of ways. Sometimes it is a struggling side battling a bit harder against a top four team than they have any right to towards the end of a season. Or maybe it is multiple Rising Star nominations for the club’s
Continue reading »
