Micro Noises - Issue 5

Crows firm as flag favourites

Back in Issue 1 of Micro Noises, we revealed that Adelaide, Collingwood, Essendon, Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs were the only teams who could win the flag, by virtue of that fact that they'd all won in both rounds 7 and 8, as have the last seven premiership teams in the seasons they've taken home the flag. In round 16, Adelaide has provided themselves with a further premiership portent. The Crows racked up 27.16 against the Giants, only the second time in VFL/AFL history that combination has been thrown up. The last was in 1988, when Hawthorn trounced Fitzroy in round 19. The Hawks went on to take out the flag in that year, and the following one. Could this be the start of the Crows' second golden era?

The accurate ones

Meanwhile, North Melbourne went one better than the Crows by registering a goal/behind combination not seen in the 14,085 VFL/AFL games that had been played prior to Friday night. The 24.5 scored by the Roos was the most accurate 24-goal score in League history, the previous best being 24.7, registered by Geelong in 1971, West Coast in 1996 and Adelaide in 2005.

The even more accurate ones

As dead-eye as North Melbourne was, its score was not the most accurate of all time by a team that's kicked 20 or more goals in a game. That honour belongs to Fremantle who, in a 2000 match against Sydney, scored an amazing 20 goals 3 behinds, which represents a ratio of 6.7 goals for every behind scored. North's Friday night ratio of 4.8 goals per behind puts in fifth place overall. The 10 most accurate efforts from a side kicking 20 or more goals are:

The upside of the Hill

As disappointing as it would have been for Hawthorn's young Bradley Hill to have been dropped back to the Box Hill Hawks on Saturday, it did make us feel just a little bit happy. After all, we probably won't get too many more opportunities to see B. Hill playing for B. Hill.

The Marginal Medal - number 1 is 2!

Another 2-point game at the weekend, and North fans are breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't the Roos on the end of it again. (They've already lost three matches this year by that margin.) This time it was the Tigers who succumbed, after having led by 10 points with 46 seconds to go. But Karmichael Hunt's post-siren goal gave the Suns a 2-point win and there have now been six 2-point margins in 2012. 38 points is in second place, having come up five times so far this year.

Gig Dig #1 update

In last week's Micro Noises we noted that Hawthorn's 9.9 third-quarter blitz against the Giants represented the highest number of scoring shots by a team in a quarter so far this year. As promised, we've flicked through the records to find the most recent occurrence of a side having had more than 18 shots in a quarter, and it turns out that we didn't have to go back too far. On two occasions in 2011, a team had an incredible 19 scoring shots in a single quarter. In round 6, Essendon left Gold Coast shell-shocked at quarter-time by scoring 15.4 to the Suns measly one behind in the opening term. And four weeks earlier, Hawthorn kicked an amazing 8.11 in the third quarter, on their way to notching up a highly inaccurate score of 16.26 against Melbourne. Gig Dig #1 will continue this week as we search for examples of still more scoring shots in a single quarter.

Year of the week

Watching the highly unfancied North Melbourne upstage the Blues on Friday night, it was hard not to think of the Battle of Didgori, when the 55,000-strong Georgian army defeated the Seljuq troops, which by all accounts numbered at least 460,000. The undermanned Georgians achieved that stunning victory in the year 1121, which is rather fitting given that North's behind total in each quarter was 1,1,2,1.

Postcode of the week

By half-time in that Friday night game against North, it was pretty clear that Carlton were on a fast track to nowhere. And their quarter-time and half-time scores of 3.4 and 6.9 reflected that. 3469 is the postcode of Nowhere Creek.

Ridiculous footy anagram of the week

As big as the Chris Judd tribunal story was, the fact that Jack Ziebell was suspended for four weeks, the same penalty as Judd, has had many pundits shaking their heads. That the tribunal handed down such a penalty despite conceding that Ziebell's sole intent was the football, left some wondering whether the current tribunal members were fit to be making such deliberations. This is perhaps best summed up by the fact that THE AFL TRIBUNAL is an anagram UNFIT BALL-HATER.