Time for a staging crackdown, and what to do about Quaynor booing: Five takeaways from AFL Finals Week One

The first round of finals is done, eight has been whittled down to six, and after the most even home-and-away season in many a year, we officially have two major premiership frontrunners.

Collingwood and Geelong, by virtue of emphatic qualifying final wins over Adelaide and Brisbane respectively, secured an all-MCG second-last week of the season, and with six of the last eight preliminary final hosts winning through to the grand final, have the inside lane in the race towards the last Saturday in September.

The Crows and Lions, meanwhile, must lick their wounds – literally, in Brisbane’s case – and deal with being found wanting in the finals heat as they prepare to face dangerous rivals in the semi finals. Hawthorn head to the Adelaide Oval full of beans after an epic, exhausting elimination final win over GWS, while Gold Coast’s fairytale season extends to a QClash final after their death-defying win over Fremantle in the west – and remember, they pummelled their state rivals the last time they played.

We saw thrilling finishes, brilliant goals, brutal tackling, plenty of booing, and of course, umpire controversy galore on the way.

Here’s what we learned from Finals Week One.

Home-and-away form has never mattered less

Much of the debate around the pre-finals bye has centred on the impact it has on the advantage earned by the top four, and in particular the two qualifying final winners facing two weeks off in the space of a month.

What isn’t spoken about as much is how irrelevant it makes home-and-away form at the business end of the year – and I’m not sure if that’s for better or for worse.

Fremantle headed into September with a better record than everyone bar Brisbane against the top eight, and successful recent history in tight games. But their elimination final date with Gold Coast saw the Dockers regress to the mean on both counts – and as heartbreaking as David Swallow’s final-minute winning behind was, the truth Freo must face is that had they held on, it would have been a heist. They were the inferior side for the majority of the match.

The opposite was true of Hawthorn – they had yet to take a significant scalp on the road in 2025, while their 4-7 record against their fellow finalists was quite clearly worse than anyone else. It proved irrelevant, because a backline bolstered by Josh Battle and Tom Barrass at the end of last year specifically for a moment such as this held firm against GWS’ remarkable territory domination for long enough to ensure that the Giants’ seven-goal burst on either side of the three-quarter time wasn’t match-deciding.

No team had a worse form line heading into September than Collingwood, who scraped into the top four in the most unconvincing fashion and lost time after time in top-eight clashes. But a team that barely got over the line against Melbourne a fortnight ago returned to their devastating, manic best at the Adelaide Oval, suffocating the Crows with a pressure worthy of finals and as dangerous in attack as they have looked for months.

The most obvious example of finals being a different game entirely came at the MCG on Friday night; Geelong, who had been bossed by Brisbane’s run from defensive 50 in three consecutive games against the Lions, shut it down entirely, while leading the reigning premiers’ backs a merry dance inside 50 for a VFL/AFL finals record 13 individual goalscorers.

Chris Scott’s deployment of Oisin Mullin to tag Hugh McCluggage was so successful you had to wonder whether not pulling that lever in their two previous home-and-away matches was a ploy to keep a trick up his sleeve for a big final. But this was a team-wide effort to deny the Lions the corridor use and quick, meaningful short-kicking game that has underpinned Chris Fagan’s tenure.

The result was a fitting first week of finals: after a year where so little could split the teams from first to eighth (and, arguably, ninth too), we saw three underdogs strike gold, all of them interstate.

If this keeps up, we’ll be in for the best September in a generation.

It’s time for a crackdown on staging

Everyone has had their say on the twin downfield free kicks handed to Cam Rayner just before half time on Friday night at the MCG.

Unsurprisingly, the consensus was emphatically against the umpire who penalised Mark O’Connor for the lightest of shoves on the Lions star from behind, some 150 metres off the ball, as well as Rayner for making the most of the contact from first O’Connor, and then Zach Guthrie.

Rayner was booed for the rest of the evening – something he, to his credit, revelled in – and has copped a swathe of criticism for his conduct from all corners of the footy world.

The problem, though, is this: what he did was enormously beneficial to his team, dragging them into a match that was threatening to get away from them late in the second quarter. And given the AFL declined to fine him for staging, he faces no averse consequences for it to make it not worth his while apart from in the court of public opinion.

As it stands, the league only issues fines for staging based on the strictest sense of the term: so far, the five players who have received sanctions for it in 2025 have been penalised for faking contact, as in Ollie Dempsey’s case from earlier this year.

Currently, that doesn’t extend to the far broader blight on the game – exacerbating off-the-ball contact by going to ground off the lightest shove, as Rayner and James Worpel did on the weekend, the latter after copping a knock to the midriff from Callum Brown that he speedily recovered from to rub the free kick in the Giant’s face. Probably because it’s all but impossible to determine whether a player did milk it for all it was worth, or was legitimately felled.

That shouldn’t stop the AFL from trying, though. Start being harsher with staging fines, and put the onus on the players to decide, as Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir argued on Sunday, whether a $10,000 whack is worth it for the cause.

The Giants blew it. Again

For the third year in a row, GWS will watch the remainder of the finals series from the outside with a deep-seated feeling of an opportunity wasted.

Their elimination final loss to Hawthorn wasn’t the incredible choke that was last year’s defeat to Brisbane, or as heartbreaking as a one-point loss to Collingwood in the 2023 preliminary final. But it’s surely every bit as frustrating for Adam Kingsley and his team.

A 15-minute burst on either side of three quarter time that yielded seven goals was some of the most scintillating, unstoppable football any team has played all season. Not even Geelong on Friday night had such a devastating burst, which in the blink of an eye turned a 42-point deficit and September humiliation into a slender lead for the Giants.

But like Fremantle on Saturday night, the Giants shouldn’t let the closeness of the result disguise the cracks that the Hawks exposed at ENGIE Stadium, cracks which Kingsley must fix before Opening Round next season.

He’ll need to work out how a defence that held up tremendously for most of the home-and-away season was picked apart by the Hawks in the first half from minimal entries. Is it just the absence of Jack Buckley, or are there deeper problems?

More pressing is an urgent fix for their delivery inside 50 – the amount of times a Giant, especially Lachie Ash, blazed away the most important kick of all to spurn a scoring chance and give a Hawks defence loaded with interceptors exactly what they want, should give everyone in orange and charcoal sleepless nights for the next few weeks.

GWS have done an extraordinary job to remain perpetually relevant for the last decade. This was their eighth finals series from the last ten seasons, and their first having not at least made it to the second week.

But they’ve now lost four consecutive finals, three of them in Sydney, all of them having held final-quarter leads. With a bevy of inaugural stars at the end of their careers, you have to wonder just how many more chances at a maiden premiership, or at least another deep finals run, this Giants team has left in them to squander.

I was wrong about Damien Hardwick

A little over two years ago, when Damien Hardwick was appointed Gold Coast coach less than three months after abruptly ending his triple-premiership stint at Richmond, I was sceptical to say the least.

Could a man who cited burnout as the reason for his mid-year resignation from the Tigers really be ready so quickly to step into the hot seat once again? Would his heart be in the fresh challenge, or was this a cash grab from a man with nothing to prove?

And most importantly of all, had Gold Coast fallen victim to the messiah complex that has led many teams before them down a path to destruction?

My fear was that the Suns under Hardwick would resemble Alastair Clarkson at North Melbourne, or even Mick Malthouse at Carlton.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In terms of coaching appointments, this is another Ross Lyon to Fremantle – a bold decision by the Suns to fight their way out of mediocrity and be, off-field at least, ruthless in their hiring practices. No one serious doesn’t think the club sounded out Hardwick for a move north even before he ended things at Richmond, no matter how long everyone involved keeps mum.

That ruthlessness has extended to on-field as well: a Gold Coast team high on talent has a steely edge it has never had before, one that stood up spectacularly to the September heat and handled a withering Fremantle final-quarter comeback that would have broken a less resilient outfit.

Matt Rowell and Noah Anderson seem tailor made for the big occasion, their stars shining brightest on the biggest stage of all. Credit to Ben King as well, whose goalless outing was still the best game I’ve seen from him all year as he threw himself into marking contests all over the ground and showed he’s more than just a finisher. As for Mac Andrew, that multi-million dollar contract began to pay for itself when he went forward in the dying minutes and kicked the game-tying goal just when all hope seemed lost.

Down back and up forward respectively, Wil Powell and Ben Long, two lesser lights at the Suns, have that dog in them: both were tough, fierce and composed at the hottest of moments, and the former was arguably best afield amid a litany of bona fide A-graders.

None of this would have been possible without Hardwick, who has the Suns playing a different brand than his Tigers of old did, but one just as well suited to finals.

And for Dimma himself, there was an extra sweetness to victory – at the fifth attempt, it was his first elimination final win, exorcising any ghosts left from the Tigers’ famous 2013-2015 heartbreaks before their breakthrough as a powerhouse.

A premiership at the Suns would instantly take Hardwick into the realm of coaching immortality. After Saturday night, it’s hard not to feel that it’s a matter of if, not when.

What to do about Quaynor booing … and why it’s hard to do anything at all

Anyone who thought Isaac Quaynor wouldn’t get booed on Thursday night was being naive.

The idea that an Adelaide home crowd which is vocal at the best of times wouldn’t have a significant chunk of its populace take any opportunity to get stuck into a rival player for a slight perceived or otherwise – in Quaynor’s case, his role in Izak Rankine being suspended for his infamous homophobic slur – was fanciful.

Maybe that’s why I’m not as aghast by what happened as many in the footy world seem to be, though the numerous stories of LGBTQI+ Crows fans feeling understandably unwelcome at the footy in the wake of Thursday night’s booing has been deeply, deeply grim.

Before we begin to discuss what to do about it – if anything at all – it’s worth noting that this isn’t another Adam Goodes case. A decade ago, the Sydney champion was run out of the game by targeted booing at games around the country, the scale of which quickly escalated into a national talking point.

Quaynor is unlikely to be booed the next time he plays in Perth, or Brisbane, or Sydney. At the same time, he’s not the victim in this. The deepest sadness out of Thursday night’s booing was in its symbolism; in the suggestion that Quaynor dobbing in a rival player was a greater crime than Rankine’s homophobia.

The problem in doing anything at all about the booing is this: as we learned from the Goodes debacle, a targeted individual can quickly morph into a broader talking point beyond the bounds of the footy community, and our society is nowhere near mature enough to deal with nuance in cases like this.

Goodes being booed was manna from heaven for right-wing shock jocks to gain easy capital defending the paying public’s right to boo whoever they damn well pleased – I have always thought that a significant chunk of the booing back then was as a result of people rebelling against the idea that any player should be above reproach.

I find it hard to believe that Australia has that many people who were angry at Goodes for sticking up for Indigenous rights, or calling out being racially abused by a teenager at a game two years prior.

Booing is endemic in Australian sport – no one batted an eye at Dan Houston being jeered all night by Crows fans for last year’s Rankine knockout, or Brayden Maynard and Nick Daicos for merely existing, or on Friday night Cam Rayner’s twin free kicks earning him villain status for the rest of the night.

We’re not getting rid of that part of the game, and trying to tell people that there’s a line not to cross when it comes to certain players is a red rag to a bull.

That’s why maybe a public statement from the AFL calling out Crows fans might do more harm than good, put a long-term target on Quaynor’s back, and only make the problem worse.

Aussie Rules has a homophobia problem – you only need look at the six reported incidents of on-field slurs in the last two years, or the Adelaide SANFL fan copping a lengthy ban for abusing Glenelg’s Liam McBean last week, or indeed the reaction from many corners to the Rankine saga.

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But it’s also rare enough to stand out when it happens, and for perpetrators to quickly be identified.

If the sight of Rankine watching on as his side lost a qualifying final they might have won with him in the side isn’t the best possible deterrent to on-field abuse in the future, players are even dumber than we already thought. And if losing the moral high ground so comprehensively that the rest of Australia started actively rooting for COLLINGWOOD on Thursday night doesn’t suggest to Crows fans that all they achieved from booing Quaynor is to look like utter turnips, then they’re even dumber than that.

Blow it out of proportion too much, and this risks becoming another opportunity for footy’s vocal minority, and the vultures on its fringes, to show its ugliest side.

For both Quaynor and LGBTQI+ footy fans, the consequences would be worse than to simply treat Thursday night as a one-off disappointment, and continue to make slow steps forward.

Random Thoughts

– I might be a grinch, but for all the spectacle of his winning behind, if the Suns are serious that’s David Swallow’s last game. They’ve moved past him.

– I don’t care that he didn’t even make the All-Australian squad, Jarman Impey is the best half-back in the game.

– Max Holmes >>> Bailey Smith and it’s not even close. Every chance he’s a Norm Smith Medallist by the end of the month.

– Reckon Lachie Schultz’s Thursday night game finally put Collingwood into the green in the Schultz for Jack Ginnivan change they made two years ago.

– The Mark and Goal of the Year finalists are pretty rubbish, aren’t they? I reckon there were ten better goals this year than the ones they picked.

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