The 2015 AFL season, which starts today, promises to be a hotly contested race to make the Grand Final on October 3. Andy Ryan previews this year’s competition.
How the season works
The AFL has 18 teams Australia-wide competing over 23 home-and-away matches at the end of which the top eight on the table meet in a four-week finals series with the last two teams standing facing off in the Grand Final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on October 3. The fixture, therefore, has a much greater influence than it should.
Main contenders
Hawthorn (the Hawks) in their colour-challenged brown-and-gold jerseys are attempting to become only the third team in the 118-year history of the competition to win more than two “premierships” in a row, but the main contenders from last season – Sydney, Geelong, Fremantle and Port Adelaide – will have plenty to say about it. Traditionally, at least one other team will defy the pundits and make a dramatic rise, for which there are several contenders.
Players to watch
Sydney’s Buddy Franklin, pictured above, remains the game’s most compelling player and is sure to be prominent, but the draft system ensures all teams have at least one star to bring in the crowds. One standout is Port Adelaide’s Chad Wingard, considered by many to be a great of the game in waiting.
The scandal
Australia’s national anti-doping agency (Asada) is considering whether to appeal a sports tribunal’s decision to acquit 34 AFL players of drugs charges. The AFL’s anti-doping tribunal on Tuesday found the 34 former and current players of the Melbourne-based Essendon Football Club not guilty of charges of taking a banned supplement. The verdict comes more than two years after the agency and the AFL launched a widely criticised joint investigation into the club’s supplements regime.
Anything else?
Australian rules is the most-watched sport in the country down under, and crowds of 90,000 regularly attend games. It is played on the biggest arena of any football code and is a contact sport with no offside that takes superior fitness, and skills with hands and feet on both sides of the body, to play at the elite level. Sometimes it does not look pretty, but it is always tough.
aryan@thenational.ae
Follow us on Twitter at our new home at NatSportUAE