This Bomber has finally arrived and can supercharge club’s stuttering build

Source : ABC NEWS

Zach Reid continues to announce himself as one of the best young defenders in the AFL, a fascinating ruck battle leaves questions for St Kilda, and Collingwood proves why its system is the best in the competition. 

Here’s what we learned from round nine of the AFL season.

After years of false starts, Zach Reid has arrived

Any discussions around drafts are usually a touchy subject for Essendon fans due to the staggering number of misses over the past two decades. 

One class in particular, that of 2020, is a polarising topic. The Bombers had three top 10 picks in that draft and walked away with three players — Nik Cox, Archie Perkins and Zach Reid.

While other players from that class, namely Riley Thilthorpe (pick 2), Max Holmes (pick 20) and Errol Gulden (pick 32) have kicked on and become stars of the competition, the Bombers have been waiting for their trio to hit their straps.

Cox started the brightest and Perkins has played the most games of the trio, but many around the club have long believed Reid, who has played the least, will end up being the best player.

It has been a hard graft for Reid, whose career has been halted by multiple injuries, but he is finally putting together some football and quickly showing why Essendon has been willing to play the long game with him.

Reid has played eight straight games to start this season, incredibly the longest stretch of games in his four-year career to date. Saturday’s 27-disposal, 14-mark effort against the Swans was by far the best of the lot.

The Bombers stopped in their tracks for the second straight week after a bright first half, and as the Swans pushed in the final quarter, Reid stood up tall. 

Reid took five intercept marks throughout the contest, all with varying degrees of difficulty. There were the easy ones where he gobbled up haphazard kicks inside 50 from Sydney, tougher ones where he withstood heavy contact to take a big pack mark. 

But one stood out in which he ran back with the flight of the ball to take it over his shoulder. It was so special that the master of running back with the flight of the ball — Brisbane great Jonathan Brown — stopped commentating the live action as it happened on Fox Footy so he could talk about the mark itself.

Reid looked like someone who hadn’t played AFL football in a long time in his first two matches this season, but in the weeks that have followed, not only is he getting acclimatised to the pace of the game, but he is growing more confidence in his body with every crunching hit he withstands in a marking contest.

Reid isn’t just an intercept threat either. He racked up 451 metres against the Swans, mostly using incisive kicks out of Essendon’s back 50. In a side that is largely devoid of elite ball users by foot, he sticks out like a sore thumb.

There has been great debate over what exactly constitutes a pass mark for the Bombers this season, Brad Scott’s third in charge. Getting 20 or more games into Reid will go a long way to making it a positive season.

Essendon is still ages away, but players like Reid can shorten the timeline in a hurry, particularly when paired with an equally exciting tall at the other end of the ground in Nate Caddy.

All the great sides have strong spines, and the Bombers are building theirs with Caddy and Reid as the bookends. 

The Saints might not really need TDK

Friday night’s clash between St Kilda and Carlton was dubbed by some as the TDK Cup due to the two clubs’ bidding war over Blues ruckman Tom De Koning.

De Koning is out of contract with the Blues at the end of the year, and the Saints have reportedly handed him the football equivalent of a blank cheque to pledge his future to Moorabbin. Carlton wants him to stay, but is well aware he could walk, given the Blues have their own cap constraints.

There is only one problem, the Saints already have a really good ruckman in Rowan Marshall, who is signed through the end of the 2027 season.

De Koning is four years younger than Marshall and is an upgrade, he is arguably the best ruckman in the competition in the non-Max Gawn division, but the duel between the two men begged the question as to whether the Saints really needed an upgrade in the ruck stocks.  

The Saints are quite clearly big game hunting, and have been for the best part of 12 months. They attempted to turn Essendon skipper Zach Merrett’s head with an offer so big that Merrett, the most loyal of players, needed to sit down with his partner to talk about it. 

They chased Finn Callaghan, who said no and signed a monster deal to stay with the Giants himself. 

De Koning is seemingly the next cab off the rank.

If De Koning says yes to the Saints, he’ll walk in as the club’s highest-paid player. A look at the ruckmen in recent premiership sides, sans Gawn with Melbourne in 2021, suggests blowing large portions of your salary cap on rucks isn’t really all that wise.

Collingwood realised this barely 12 months after giving Brodie Grundy, an excellent two-time All-Australian big man, a monster seven-year, $7 million deal. They flipped Grundy to use the cap space elsewhere, filled the ruck spot with Darcy Cameron, a less sexy ruck option, and won a premiership 12 months later. 

It was interesting to watch Marshall play with an extra layer of meanness than usual against De Koning. Every contest between the two had an air of “good luck taking my job” about it from the Saints ruckman. De Koning had the better game, but Marshall wasn’t too far behind at all, and the game was a microcosm of where the two ruckmen’s careers currently stand.

The Saints have a big contract call pending with Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera as well, who is also out of contract and wants to be remunerated in a way that reflects his status as one of the best players on the team. 

Is it worth pricing yourself out of the Wanganeen-Milera business because you finally got a big fish to say yes? That’s the question Saints bosses must ask themselves.

Collingwood has the best system in the competition

A sensational first couple of months has Collingwood deservedly sitting among the league’s premiership favourites, but Thursday’s win over Fremantle in Perth might have been the biggest statement yet.

How many other clubs would boldly decide to go to Perth, still the most daunting road trip in the AFL, while choosing to rest four first-choice players? Yes, Craig McRae suggested Brayden Maynard and Brody Mihocek were dealing with a few ailments, but had this match been a final, they would have played. So too would Jordan De Goey and Scott Pendlebury.

Not only were the Pies undermanned, they came up against a Fremantle side in dire need of a response at home. What ensued was another reminder that Collingwood will be incredibly hard to beat at the pointy end of the year. 

Australian rules football isn’t like basketball or the world game, it is harder to plug and play due to the sheer number of players there are on the field. With a larger amount of players comes a larger chance for things to go wrong if guys aren’t on the same page.

What Collingwood did against Fremantle was the finest example of plug-and-play that you’re ever likely to see. 

Pendlebury and De Goey are two of the Magpies’ top six centre bounce players so far this season. With the pair out, Craig McRae put ironman Jack Crisp into the coalface and it yielded instant positive results. 

Crisp attended 61 per cent of the Pies’ centre bounces against Fremantle, by far his highest of the season (his previous high was 13 per cent against the Swans in round five), and responded with 29 disposals and seven clearances, the most by any Collingwood player. 

The Magpies are now in year four of the McRae era and clearly have supreme confidence in what he preaches. They are able to adjust on the fly, pardon the pun, better than any other team in the competition. 

Each player not only knows their own role, but their teammate’s role as well, allowing the Pies to shapeshift throughout a contest as much as the game deems necessary. It is why they regularly prevail in close games.