AFL Rankings: Round 12 2022

The Suns finally emerge

The Gold Coast Suns have been a disappointing team since they joined the AFL in 2011, winning about 25 per cent of their matches, and only once finishing higher than fourteenth. In the past few weeks though, they have played some great football, even if their biggest wins have come against bottom sides.

In the past two weeks they have beaten Hawthorn and North Melbourne by over ten goals – the type of demolition performance that they usually been on the other side of. As impressively though they beat Sydney away and Fremantle, and had a relatively close loss in Ballarat to the Western Bulldogs. These performances make them by far the most improved team on the rankings over the past five weeks, improving by 20 points to be now rated around average overall.

The Suns are now for the first time comprehensively winning the territorial battle. They had an astonishing 81 inside 50s to 36 on the weekend against the hapless Kangaroos. On the season they are now ranked fifth overall for inside 50 differential, behind the gun midfields of Melbourne and the Bulldogs, along with Geelong and Fremantle.

Wings? What wings?

Over the past five weeks in particular the Suns have become contested possession beasts, barely seeming to relying on much of an ‘outside’ game at all. Their contested possession differential of +14.2 and clearance differential +9.2 (see table above) would rank above all teams bar Carlton for contested possessions if applied over the season. Their contested possession ratio for the season is 45 per cent, compared with a league average of 39 per cent. Touk Miller and Matt Rowell lead the way here, currently ranking third and tenth this season for average contested possessions, while ruck Jarrod Witts leads the league for average hit outs. (The highest for average uncontested possessions is Noah Anderson, and he doesn’t even rank inside the top 50.)

Contested possessions do often win games, but it is hard to know how far this ‘extreme’ game style can take them. For now the answer seems to be: away from the bottom of the ladder. After a decade of watching players depart and being seen as largely irrelevant, they may as well try it…

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How far ahead are Melbourne?

Reigning premiers Melbourne are the only undefeated team five weeks into the season, and they haven’t looked close to losing a match so far. Compared to their apparent closest competitor the Brisbane Lions, the Demons are considered three goals better on my rankings, and according to betting markets have double the probability of winning the flag.

Melbourne has compiled easily the most ranking points over the first five rounds of this season (see table below). This includes comfortable wins over the Western Bulldogs, Port Adelaide, GWS, and Essendon, who all finished in the top eight last year. The main note of caution here is that none of those teams currently sit inside the top eight this year, with three of them placed in the bottom five with two wins between them. Melbourne have been so dominant however that even if you shaved a couple of goals off their results they would still be considered the highest-performed team in 2022 so far.

As has been the case through Melbourne’s recent rise to becoming the preeminent team in the league, the Demons’ performances have been fuelled by a star-studded midfield being backed by a suffocating defence. The Demons have allowed only 60 points per game so far in 2022 from an average of 50 opposition inside 50s, so their opponents are scoring only 1.2 points per forward 50 entry – well below the league average of 1.6 points. Melbourne also ranks first in intercept differential (see table below), and second in contested possession differential, which are both good signs in being able to sustain another run at the flag.

A final note of caution though is that probably the last team to be this far ahead of the opposition was another team coming off a drought-breaking premiership: Richmond in the early rounds of 2018. The Tigers slowed down in the second half of that season, and did not end up winning the premiership – although they obviously more than made up for it with back-to-back flags in 2019 and 2020. Still, it is a reminder both that there is a long way to go in the season before the finals, and that the best team does not always win when you get there.