It hasn’t taken long for the first big injury news to hit 2009 fantasy teams… it’s barely even November 2008! Matthew Egan is now considering retirement after getting bad news from a specialist in Sydney about the foot he broke in round 22 of 2007. (more…)

I’ve been assuming for the purposes of the Fanplanner feature on FanFooty that draftees and rookies playing their first game of senior AFL football are going to score 50 fantasy points… let’s look at some historical data to see if that’s true. (more…)

As Barack Obama prepares to take over as the next US President from George W. Bush, there are a few more power shifts on the minds of fantasy coaches this off-season, with older players looking like they will give up their spots in the senior 22 to younger upstarts… with a few at the Power! (more…)

Sometimes you can congratulate yourself for zigging when others are zagging when it comes to fantasy footy, be it though luck or good planning… or a bit of both. (more…)

One of the less well understood aspects of the move to 17th and 18th teams in the AFL - with Gold Coast scheduled to debut in 2011 and Western Sydney possibly the year after - is how it is going to affect fantasy competitions.

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Fantasy coaches look at the AFL draw a little differently to normal football fans. We don’t particularly care about how many interstate trips each team gets, whether they start with a home game or how many times we have to play at the new Jihad (sorry, Etihad) Stadium. For 2009, what we were most worried about was round 1: were the AFL going to schedule two Thursday night games to kick off the season as they did last year starting at 6.10pm AEST, which in conjunction with the 5pm cutoff for round 1 teams to be published led to the now-infamous 70 minutes of madness?

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A rather underwhelming trade week is over for 2008, with only six trades made. Let’s go through each of them and look for value in the manner of Jordan McMahon, Martin Mattner and Brad Symes from this year. (more…)

The Eagles are one of the teams I expect to see using the cluster to great advantage, especially in playing against it. Subiaco is not all that suited to the cluster due to the wide wings, and the Eagles historically have had no problem playing that chip-chip game spotting up leading targets along the wings in home games so it shouldn’t hold that many fears for them. I was disappointed that the Eagles couldn’t continue their 400-possession-per-game style this year but I expect them to get somewhere near that again next year - not necessarily winning a lot of those games, but certainly embracing the new high-possession norm with open arms.

The centres have a lot of interesting players. Like others, Sam Butler (61/5) is going to have to win back my trust with a bloody good pre-season. Daniel Kerr (77/11) is going to be in a lot of spud sides this year, but looking at his history, I can’t see his ceiling being close enough to 100 for mine. Andrew Embley (94/21) is tempting, but I probably wouldn’t unless he is somehow shoehorned into the backs (highly unlikely, I know). Brad Ebert (65/15) will probably have the usual second-year blues. I could see Matt Priddis (90/18) being 09’s Cross in terms of fantasy popularity!

Outside the mids, the kids are probably more attractive than the veterans but I don’t like either. Personally I like Josh J. Kennedy (63/7), mainly because I hate Ashley Hansen with the burning passion of a thousand suns. His upside is probably not enough for me to pick him though. Mitch Brown (0/0) is probably more of an SC play. Eric MacKenzie (55/7), Ben McKinley (56/18) and Jamie McNamara (66/11) are overpriced. Many would have been burned once too often by Beau Waters (69/8).

It will come as no surprise that Dean Cox (107/22) is my third lock. I don’t think he’s a lock to stay at 107, but I think his median is pretty much to slide back to 100 and that’s good enough. The Eagles are still going to struggle in 09, with a lot more games put into kids for the future, particularly in the backline. That means Cox will continue to get a lot of cheap ball across halfback, and if anything that role is going to get more lucrative for DT because teams have just about worked out already to let it happen for structural reasons because they know unless the kicker has elite disposal a la Hodge, most likely he’ll turn it over kicking into a rolling zone.

On the other hand, I’m a little worried by a couple of things. One is his fitness, which was great this year despite the foot problems but can’t last forever. Two is the committee situation: even though Mark Seaby has left now, I think that might actually hurt Cox because Seaby was clearly on the nose with the Eagles hierarchy and thus was shafted for TOG this year in favour of working Cox like a dog, whereas if they draft NicNat then he’s going to eat into Cox’s rotations. Three is the rise of Embley playing a similar role in the second half of 08: I could definitely see Embley as a permanent BP link-man removing the need for Cox to float back… though admittedly it could just mean kick-to-kick with Cox and Embley every game.

This has to be the most disappointing team of 2008 for me. Flying at 15 and 1 or something ridiculous when they played the Cats, then copped one bad quarter in that game and didn’t give a yelp for the rest of the season. Serious issues in their leadership group, I think. All that crap with rebuking Aker for being Aker, that didn’t sit right with me. It was amazing how they all dropped their heads after that one quarter and gave up on the season, just about.

Obviously they need tall forwards, which is why the hype around Jarrad Grant (0/0) is going to be huge (or at least huge in the context of the Dogs), especially if he has a good game or two in the NAB. Assuming the Dogs don’t go crazy at trading time and get another Welsh type, Grant is the Great White Hope for that team. I’d need to see some pretty good things out of him to believe he’d live up to the expectations though.

Elsewhere, it’s becoming a little bit of a problem how easy it is to sit on Lindsay Gilbee (77/21). Like the Saints with NDS, teams are learning that you can ignore a lot of other players and concentrate the tagging efforts on Gilbee and shut down a lot of the Dogs’ rebounding. Contrast that with Birchall, who did get some tags in the middle of this year but that fell away as Hodge attracted a lot more attention. The Dogs really need Andrejs Everitt (49/9) and Tom Williams (47/6) to get fit and strong to take the load off Gilbee and free up Ryan Hargrave (72/22) next year. I like Everitt more from a fantasy perspective but probably not enough to buy him due to his ceiling not being of Mattner/Symes proportions.

I am going to be fascinated to see what the fantasy coach consensus on Daniel Cross (96/22) is next year. Does that last two-month stretch scare everyone away? Does the fact that Cross only scored 7 tons mean he’s no longer captaincy material? Thoughts, please.

Also, as I said in the Geelong entry, I think Brad Johnson (87/22) is no longer reliable as a fantasy premium. Yes, he was injured for most of the year yet played every game, but that’s what happens when you’re 47 years old. Give me Stevie J every time.

It’s easy to predict a big slide for the Swans, everybody’s doing it. I’m not so bearish on them though, because even if their flooding gamestyle is anathema to the new cluster paradigm, what is the ultimate goal of the cluster? To force turnovers, or at least stoppages. The Swans still have a distinct advantage over most teams when it comes to stoppages - their big loss to the Hawks was about losing the clearances, for instance, not the cluster per se - so I think they’ll do fine, especially at home and against bottom eight teams.

There are two unanswered questions for mine. One, will the Swans effect still hold steady in 09? There were signs of it cracking a little towards the end of this year, e.g. the Lions game where the top three or four Brisbane mids still got tons or thereabouts. It’s certainly true that the AFL is far less prone to matchup trends than, say, the NFL, but I think this is one trend that will hold up to a large extent, at least for this year (injuries to key inside mids notwithstanding). Perhaps the one aspect that will change is that we might start fearing other matchups more for certain player types, like the Richmond and Carlton matchups vs inside mids, as per the Breakdown table.

The other issue is whether Roos is going to continue injecting youth into the 22. That might mean Daniel O’Keefe (0/0) and maybe Daniel Currie (0/0). The Patrick Veszpremi (65/4) train has already left, I’m afraid, unless he gets a 40% discount. Obviously their 08 draftees will be keenly scouted for fantasy value, given what happened this year.

Otherwise it’s all about the injured stars from 2008: Nic Fosdike (58/1), Nick Malceski (67/9), Adam Goodes (81/19) and even Barry Hall (80/13). Lot of debate to happen around those four names in the pre-season, I bet.