Welcome To Balls of Steel’s AFL Beat!

Indeed this was/is/will be a good day as Geelong won again!

It really wasn’t easy as, just as in the only other win this season against Gold Coast, Geelong were barely able to survive a mad comeback in the fourth by Richmond to hang on to the 9 point victory.  The same problems from before were evident, but the encouraging sign is that the young guys are learning and the hurt guys are healing while the team is winning.  We’ll see what happens next week against Collingwood who,

absolutely embarrassed the Carlton Blues in the Thursday late night Round 5 opener 120-45.  I was working out very early on Friday morning, so I had this game in the background as I was exercising and WOW does Carlton look bad!  It was specially awkward because the team had put on a big pre-game ceremony to honor Mick Malthouse,the former Collingwood and now Carlton coach, who broke the record for most games coached in the AFL.  The first few seconds of the highlight package below shows part of the ceremony.

If you fast forward to about the six-minute mark, you can see that the teams lined up at the end of the game to honor Mick.  I love the expression on his face.  He looks like he would rather have his testicles torn from his scrotum by a bald eagle.  Or to encounter this in his bedroom:

I apologize for that Nightmare Fuel.  Here is something to make you feel better about possibly visiting Australia.

Carlton is lucky, however, that the Brisbane Lions are in the league. At least Carlton led the game at one point very early in the first quarter.  Brisbane never led and got soundly beaten by Gold Coast.  Here is some really nice team work from Gold Coast to produce a goal:

I’m actually consulting a thesaurus right now to find new ways to describe blowout losses since all the late Friday night games were one-sided. The West Coast Eagles (/looks up words) routed drubbed the GWS Giants by 87 points while North Melbourne had non-success against the Hawthorn Hawks by 60.

At least the Giants didn’t completely re-live last year’s destruction at the hands of Josh Kennedy.  On the bright side, GWS went from a 111 point loss to a 87 point loss.  They might beat them in five years!  MAYBE.

The Hawks-Kangaroos game was pretty rough.  The two teams had a nice rivalry going in the 70’s and it just might be re-ignited after these actions:

My takeaway from this?  Holy shit, there is a guy in the league named Andrew Swallow!  He’s apparently married to this lovely lady, Mrs. Swallow:

The only competitive game besides the Geelong-Richmond clash on Friday night was the Sydney Swans-Western Bulldogs match.  Unfortunately, it was on at the same time as the Geelong game, so I didn’t really watch it.  It turned out to be a great game, which the Bulldogs managed to squeeze out at the end. You can see Western’s version of an AFL fast break here:

It’s worth seeing the video below of the last two minutes of the game as Sydney is desperately trying to win the game with one goal and Western is just as desperately trying to lock the game away.  If you are not interested in watching this league after watching this video, there is nothing I can do.

Saturday night brought one more blowout as Fremantle showed exactly why it is the best team in the league by completely dominating Melbourne and cruising to a 68 point win. The lone highlight for Melbourne came here

That game was the lead-in to what ended up being two very good games. In the Adelaide Derby, Port Adelaide triumphed over the Adelaide Crows 115-91.  This was a huge clash as Adelaide had been one of the early front-runners in the league but have now dropped two in a row.  Eddie Betts did his best for the Crows by pulling out his pocket rocket

but, as Deanna Favre has many times said, “It wasn’t enough.”

The other game provided the closest finish to any AFL game this season as Essendon narrowly edged St. Kilda by 2.  You can see the last two minutes in the video below, but, more importantly, feel the frustration as St. Kilda missed a golden opportunity to score a goal, settled for a behind, allowed one behind, and could get no closer.  I’ve been told this before, but now it’s confirmed:  St. Kilda are the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the AFL.

Let’s take a look at the ladder, shall we?

It is getting clearer now which teams are good, which are bad, and which are still question marks.  Fremantle stands alone at the top and Brisbane stands alone at the bottom.  We can be fairly certain that St. Kilda, Carlton, and Gold Coast are also bad and they should feel bad.  In the next tier are the teams that can look good one week and bad the next, which is pretty much the bulk of the league.

Finally, there are the teams that are good but have lost to other good teams. I include in this group the Western Bulldogs, Sydney Swans, Hawthorn Hawks, and the Port Adelaide Power.  Despite their standing in the ladder, I don’t think Collingwood or the West Coast Eagles are that good as they have beat up on the bad teams.  As the schedule gets tougher, we’ll see how good they really are.

I will leave you with Chekhov’s testicle.  I’m glad to read he is OK.  His twitter timeline must be hilarious!

Keep your pills safe.  See you next week!