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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

It’s no secret why the Saints couldn’t compete at the pointy end of the season: the bottom third of their best 22 is poor compared to most other top 8 teams. Their top-up players mostly haven’t worked out, or more to the point they won’t last until the Saints have another serious shot at the flag. (more…)

I’m bullish on the Tigers next year, at least from a fantasy perspective. A lot of teams are going to play zone defence - with differing levels of competency - and Richmond’s game style is suited beautifully to playing against it, as evidenced by their performances against Hawthorn this year. They are in their element when their halfback flankers can ignore their men and drift up the ground. (more…)

Chad Cornes (86/13) has to be a lock. Has to be. Come on. It’s Chad. (more…)

Now this is another situation I really do not like. (more…)