Before we kick things off, I just want to say how relieved I was to have Adelaide playing Geelong in these types of conditions. Over the past few weeks, I have watched games where clubs participating in dry weather footy have somehow managed to make it appear as though they were playing with a wet bar of soap, and that should have been the case in this game, as well.
However, the wet weather has a habit of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and it is abundantly clear to me that both of these teams are operating at a level above many other teams in the league right now.
And so it was, a dreary night in South Australia following on from a pretty dreary few days. The ground was wet, the skies dark, and in the first quarter, it pissed down.
Amazingly, it only added to the spectacle, as over 42,000 fans (and great credit to these supporters for getting out there in the elements) were treated to a ripping game of football.
Sure, it had its controversies, and we’ll get to them… it’s the AFL – what would it be without a couple of moments where nobody had any idea what was going on, including the umpires? However, in a game that should have been a slog, we got some genuine highlights, some good, tough footy, and a grandstand finish, made more exciting/frustrating by a belated score review that once again set the game on a knife’s edge.
So, what did we learn? What did we miss? What were the best and worst things of this epic contest at the Adelaide Oval between the Crows and Cats? That’s what I am here to work through – let’s jump into Eight Things I Learnt from the Crows’ win over the Cats.
Note – Usually, I have these reviews behind a paywall, but because I am running late, I am leaving it open. if you like this type of review, I do 4-5 every week. Please consider supporting the work – links at the bottom of the page.
A POINT TO PROVE
Before each game I watch, I pencil in two players to watch a little more intensively as the contest progresses. There is no uniformity in choosing them – I just kind of look at the individual games and which players need to make a statement.
GRYAN MIERS
I’ve selected two small forwards who work up the ground to focus on in this game, as both have the potential to blow the game open if given any space, and yet, both operate in very different capacities.
Miers is a ball winner and whilst he is handy around goals, he is primarily a distributor, as highlighted by his massive season a couple of years ago that saw him rack up over 40 goal assists to lead the league. More often than not, when he finds a heap of the footy, the Cats feast, and he found plenty of it in this contest, picking up 25 touches as a high half-forward.
However, it is always the impact of those touches that hurts the opposition, and the wet weather didn’t aid him in slicing through the Crows as he would have liked, finishing with seven turnovers.
That’s not to say he was ineffective – he was always looking inboard, and always providing an option to change angles, but from that point, things did not play out the way he would have liked them to.
JOSH RACHELE
Rachele’s numbers are dwarfed by those of Miers, yet he was still quite effective when he did find the footy. He was one of the players who displayed clean hands, and had a few of those intelligent little knock ons to the advantage of teammates – the type of stats you only get to know about when you fork over thousands of dollars to Champion Data so they can tell you the same thing you saw with your own eyes.
He would have loved to hit the scoreboard in this one, but I liked his pressure inside fifty (three tackles) and the way he attacked the footy, even going back with the flight on one occasion, which in my experience is very Un-Rachele-Like.
Overall, despite finishing with 0.2 for the game, I found his contributions to be very valuable.
MATCHUP SPOTLIGHT
TAYLOR WALKER V CONNOR O’SULLIVAN
I loved this – the up-and-coming key defender against the wily old veteran.
Walker’s ability to guard space and protect the footy was first class in this one. His quick hands early… which were borderline close to a throw, set up a goal, and when he tried it again in the second quarter, he got pinged for it.
You take the good with the bad, I guess?
On the flip side, we had O’Sullivan, who is rounding into a wonderful key position player the Cats will lean on for the next ten years. His ability to read the footy in the air, and outpace Walker once the ball hit the deck, saw him rack up 13 intercepts and eight one-percenters.
He is an old school defender in a young man’s body, and as he adds strength and size, he will be a dominant force in the game.
That said, Walker kicked a couple of goals in a low-scoring game, and it is one of those matchups where the defender can have some big wins, but the forward only needs a couple of things to fall his way to make a huge impression. With two goals and a direct goal assist, Tex did exactly that, and played a very savvy game in the wet.
NEW FACES IN FOCUS
In this section, I want to give a specific focus on players new, or at least relatively new, to the teams. Some have played elsewhere, and others are fronting up in their first season, so it is always worth keeping an eye on how they’re travelling. In addition, players returning from injury/suspension may also be included, as well as those being trialled in different roles.
HUGO HALL-KAHAN
I got all excited about this bloke debuting, as I had not seen his name on paper, and I thought the bloke on the radio called him Hugo Hawker-Hahn… so I started preparing all my Triple H references. Of course, when I decided to look his name up, I got all disappointed. You let me down, Hugo! HHK doesn’t have the same ring to it, damn it.
Anyway, a very solid debut punctuated by a very solid teenage boy-ish type of pash with teammate Toby Murray, which left Hugo with blood streaming out of his nose.
Great to see him return late in the game. Across the entire contest, he was pretty damn good, with his ability to assess and pick a good option becoming something that was evident under pressure, and something that’ll also get better as he gets more games under his belt.
Welcome to the AFL, Hugo – you earned your stripes in this one.
TEN THINGS I LEARNT
1 – ADELAIDE FINALLY HAVE THE RIGHT GUY TO PLAY ON TOM STEWART
Well, Callum Ah Chee was the right man… for three quarters, before yet another hamstring sent him to the sidelines, but he did give the Crows the blueprint for how to curb Stewart’s influence on the contest.
I have vivid memories of Matthew Nicks attempting the same thing with Luke Pedlar at one point, and things did not quite work out the same way, with Stewart feasting on his inexperience. Ah Chee, however, is a different kettle of fish, and given his roles in finals the last couple of years, playing as a defensive forward, he was well-prepared for this, and positioned himself perfectly to both make Stewart accountable, and to punish him if he wasn’t.
Stewart is having another excellent season – let’s face it, he has had more very good years than average ones – and his intercept work is one of the strengths of the Geelong defence.
Ah Chee not only took that away, but he found the footy and stayed dangerous, finishing with a goal and a direct goal assist in his three quarters.
Of course, the Ah Chee injury meant that Stewart should have been able to resume his intercepting role in the last quarter, right?
Not quite. The pressure of the contest and the manic nature of the Crows forward structure meant that he was constantly under the pump, with the team collectively compensating for the loss of Ah Chee.
It is a damn shame that Ah Chee’s body is letting him down so heavily this season. He was meant to be a cherry on top of a premiership run, bringing copious amounts of big game experience to the Crows, but with four hamstring injuries this season, that interrupted preseason is coming back to haunt him.
I reckon he now recovers, goes through a mini pre-season, and the Crows endeavour to get him right for September. The role he played in this one might mean the difference between another early exit, or a deep run.
2 – DANIEL CURTIN HAS ALLAYED MY FEARS
It always takes a little while to get back in the swing of things after a while out of the game, and after Dan Curtin was injured in a preseason wrestling drill (ugh!), his reintroduction to the side returned only meagre results over the last month of footy.
Averaging under ten touches per game, he needed a big game, and it is no coincidence that in a contest that rewarded the players most inclined to run straight at the footy and put their head in the hole, that Dan had his best game of the year by a long way.
He started brilliantly, dominating his wing and picking up nine touches in the first quarter, alone. Against any player, that is a great result on a wing, but against a player like Mark Blicavs… that is truly impressive.
Blicavs is an incredibly tough matchup, but he does like to play a bit of a hybrid role, being drawn to the contest when he starts on the wing. This gives his opponent the opportunity to capitalise if they’re smart enough to hold their width and provide an outlet option.
Curtin was wise enough to do just that, finishing the game with 26 touches and seven intercepts, as he patrolled his wing with the experience and poise of a player far beyond his years.
Blicavs was found in no man’s land on several occasions, stuck between the contest and the open Curtin, and with his size, Curtin was actually able to stand in tackles and dish the footy off.
I may have been a little worried about what role Curtin was going to play prior to this game – I saw what he was capable of last year, but knee injuries have a habit of sapping the confidence from a player – lots of second-guessing our body and its capabilities. Curtin put any concerns to rest in this one, and this game should provide the launching pad for a big second half of 2026.
3 – WHEN OISIN MULLIN IS NOT APPLYING A HARD TAG, I’M NOT SURE HOW HE SHOULD BE USED.
I like Mullin, and have been gushing about the way he has played his role in 2026 thus far. He has added elements to his game to make him a more well-rounded player, but I am a strong believer that he needs a designated starting point in order to get the best out of himself, and for whatever reason, Chris Scott started to move away from that starting point being Jordan Dawson in this game.
I’ll explain a little further.
To some, footy is in the blood. You grow up with it, and simply know the game. You know how a play is going to unfold and you can see what your teammates are going to do with the footy. You can read it. It’s something you CAN learn, but it takes time. Mullin has had to learn this stuff the hard way, whilst for many others, it is second nature.
He needs to be with someone, doing a defensive job, and then get separation to run and spread. Without it, he is stuck guessing at how things are going to play out, and it leaves him in positions that render him ineffective.
That’s not his fault – this is the player he is, and Geelong have been excellent at playing to his strengths – running with a star mid, and then bolting off to punish them when the ball turns over.
That did not occur in this game, as after the first quarter, Jordan Dawson was seemingly left to his own devices, and Mullin spent time across the flanks.
Of course, the flip side to this is that if he plays on Dawson full-time, the Adelaide captain just takes him forward and uses that marking prowess to punish him.
Pick your poison, I guess?
Chris Scott chose not to have Mullin follow Dawson everywhere, and the Adelaide captain ended up with a game-high three goals.
If I am in charge, Mullin has a job in every single game, and you back him in to do it. That’s his role. That’s where he has success. You don’t mess with what’s working.
4 – GEELONG PLAY MAX HOLMES AS MANY TEAMS SHOULD PLAY THEIR BEST RUNNER/KICK.
I might be on a tangent here… bear with me.
Earlier in the season, we saw Errol Gulden dragged down and injured. Last year, same thing.
Dean Cox wants Gulden to be a midfielder, and he can be, but he is not built to be crashed and bashed. Max Holmes is similar – can play the role and does attend centre contests here and there, but the Cats know where his best work is done, and they play to those strengths.
When Holmes runs through the middle or along the wings off half-back, he is a potent weapon, often hitting the middle of the ground at top pace. This allows him to give his forwards options as his penetrating kick often finds players running back to goal out the back.
The Cats have given him licence to take the game on, and I like that about their structure – it made a heap of difference having him back there in this game, particularly with Lawson Humphries out of the side, but I do wonder whether the Cats might have been better served by having someone like Lennox Hoffman coming into the team to replace Humphries. A like-for-like player could have given the club a little more flexibility with Holmes, and also eased the burden on others with Ah Chee’s role on Tom Stewart being such a successful one.
The benefit of hindsight, I guess.
5 – THE WORK OF BRAYDEN COOK IS VASTLY UNDERRATED
When I have spoken to Crows fans about Cook’s work this season, it has largely revolved around his aerial ability, or his penchant for getting forward and hitting the scoreboard.
Whilst both those attributes are excellent, his defensive side of playing the wing has been largely flying under the radar. If you were paying attention in this one, you would have seen multiple occasions where his hard run and commitment to his role stopped Ollie Dempsey from becoming an option inside 50.
I don’t think we’re going to see Cook listed as one of the best for the Crows in this game – not externally, anyway. However, Matthew Nicks would be delighted with his role on Dempsey. Of course, you have to give credit where it’s due – Dempsey’s one-hand mark against Cook in the third quarter was a ripper – but it took flashes of brilliance to beat him. And against a player that can break a game open, I reckon the Crows would look at 14 touches from Ollie Dempsey and be pretty content with the way Brayden Cook played his role.
Great to see him lock down his position for Adelaide, after a few seasons of being a bit of a Nowhere Man in the team.
6 – WHEN YOU SEE LITTLE KNOCK ONS IN A GAME, TAKE NOTE
A bit of a shout-out to both Taylor Walker and Alex Neal-Bullen for doing team-first things in this game that simply don’t show up on the stats sheet.
In the wet weather, intelligent footballers know when to take possession and when to set up a teammate, and both Walker and Neal-Bullen executed the little things beautifully in this contest.
Neal-Bullen played a very understated role for the club, picking up 15 touches across half-forward, but his pressure and footy IQ made him far more valuable than can be explained with numbers. His tap in traffic to Ben Keays gave his teammate an easy goal in what could have been, or should have been an easy tie-up for the Cats had he taken possession.
Above, I wrote about Oisin Mullin and just knowing what to do with the footy having grown up with the game – that tap from ANB was that type of thing playing out in real time.
7 – JEREMY CAMERON’S ARM IS NOT 100% AND IT MIGHT NEVER BE.
Jezza is still wearing that arm guard, and after copping a knock, or kick, to it in the first quarter, he barely looked like he was going to have an influence in this game.
Looking back at a few actions, Cameron looked like he was intent on protecting that arm, and I cannot really blame him. Watching him in the 2025 Grand Final was painful (for me… I can only imagine it would have been agony for him) and whilst I am not in any way diluting the impact of Max Michalanney’s role on Jezza, I don’t think he was attacking the contest the way he normally would.
The sadist in me wonders whether key defenders were watching last night, because if the opportunity comes up to pin that arm and make him land on it in a tackle, or if he is going to mark the footy anyway, would you not just thump him in the arm?
I am a bit of an arsehole, so i would, but I get that others wouldn’t… being fair and all.
Cameron moved to the wing, as it seems as though both he and the Geelong coaching team realised something was up, before alternating between the roles, but he had four effective touches for the game, and just one touch inside 50.
They have to get him right. He can’t play defences like the Western Bulldogs every week.
8 – JORDAN DAWSON IS THE PERFECT WET WEATHER PLAYER
There were a few instances in this game where players made it look as though they were playing dry weather footy, but none more so than Jordan Dawson.
After what has been a bit of a horror stretch for him, personally, Dawson’s performance in this game was scintillating. His control of the footy, his marking skills, his poise with the footy, and those two massive goals from outside fifty with the wet footy… team-lifting moments from the captain.
Over the years, I have taken notice of some of the great wet weather performers. James Hird was always brilliant, as was Jason Akermanis. Jordan Dawson is now starting to insert himself into the conversation when it comes to players who excel in adverse conditions.
He was brilliant in this one – a real captain’s knock, and when the votes are announced on Brownlow night, if he doesn’t get the three, there should be an investigation. A blind man could see he was a cut above.
9 – BAILEY SMITH IS A VILLAIN… AND LOVING IT
I like watching Bailey Smith… but then again, I do like most things BS.
His altercation with James Peatling is doing the rounds on social media because an umpire decided that enough was enough, and pinged him for throwing Peatling to the ground after they’d engaged in a wrestle for 30 seconds or so.
Look, I get that the Crows supporters will say it was a definite free kick, and in isolation, it was. However, in the contest of all that happened in the previous thirty seconds, I really don’t want to see teams being penalised for stuff 100 metres off the footy, particularly when the other party had been giving as good as he’d got, if not better.
Smith is a lightning rod for controversy, and just a week after people said how he’d been flying under the radar, his clash with Peatling (which really, was pretty bloody tame) had him on everyone’s lips again.
Peatling matched up against Smith for most of the first half at stoppages, but it was not a tagging job. The longer the game progressed, the better Smith got – his tank is enormous, but I genuinely hate umps picking and choosing where the line is that players cannot cross, because it means that everything beforehand was fine?
10 – THE RUCK BATTLE WAS ENTHRALLING
I haven’t seen a styles clash like this since AJ Styles had his farewell match.
You know I was going to squeeze one wrestling reference in after being denied by Hugo, right?
The tag team of Sam De Koning and Mark Blicavs attempted to double team Lachie McAndrew in this one, but unlike Joe Ganino in a men’s prison, McAndrew fought back and really held his own. He was strong in the air and gave the Crows a good outlet on several occasions as they exited their defensive fifty.
However, the game of Sam De Koning was one of his best, as he used his ability at ground level to become a secondary threat, picking up 11 clearances amongst his 23 contested possessions.
SDK attended 68 ruck contests for just 16 wins, but it was his follow up that was the most impressive. McAndrew, despite winning 51 of the 92 (!!!) ruck contests he attended, couldn’t give his mids first use in the centre, with the Cats gaining a 16-8 clearance advantage in the middle. He did make up for it around the ground, and is continuing to demonstrate just what a good decision it was to acquire him from the Swans.
QUICKIES
Far out, this is a long review.
Danger in the middle again? He started like a bullet, with 13 touches in the first quarter and it all pointed toward it being another “Danger game”. However, the Crows cracked in after quarter time, and with Danger having 17 over the next three quarters, they were able to curtail his influence.
I like James Borlase. You could show a movie on his back. Another ten one-percenters in this one as he had the job on Jack Henry. With Jordon Butts hurt (listed as a calf), Borlase gives the Crows plenty to work with in defence, and I hope he retains his place, even with Mark Keane and Nick Murray to come in for cover.
Also, Jordan Butts’ hair is a little weird. Like he has a possum stuck to his head.
The Cats just don’t go away, do they? There was a moment in the third where the Crows put a bit of distance on them, and suddenly, bang, bang, bang goals to Neale, Dempsey, and Bowes, and the game tightens right up again. You just rarely ever see them a mile behind. They hang around and give themselves every chance to pinch it.
That score review… wow. It looked like the lightest touch on the post on the Fogarty shot. It was obviously there, but the ball didn’t even deviate. Heart in mouth stuff, but far out things like that kill the atmosphere at a game.
Jack Martin started brilliantly and then… two touches in the second half.
He had Wayne Milera for company early, and Milera looked all out of sorts. Composed himself well, however, to finish strongly. Unlike many half-backs, I love that he wins his own footy.
Nice to see Jake Soligo moving through the middle more now. Will be important later in the year.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A massive win for the Crows, and just reward for those 40K fans braving the weather.
As a spectacle, let’s face it – this should have been shit, but it was bloody great! Good, hard footy between two excellent teams.
The Crows needed this. After a lean year, they are now just a game behind the Cats, and dreams of finishing top four are now in play again. Throw Rankine and Thilthorpe back into this team, and the upside is massive.
As for the Cats, two excruciatingly close losses on the trot could take the wind out of anyone’s sails, but there were a heap of positives from this game. Winning on the road is tough, and they were in this up to their eyeballs. I have no doubt they’ll be there at least in the second last week of September… again.
As always, massive thanks to those who support this work. You can see the amount of care that goes into it. I love footy, I love writing about it, and I hope you enjoy reading it. Without you, this whole thing falls over. Sincerely… thank you – HB
Like this content? You could buy me a coffee – I do like coffee, but there is no guarantee I won’t use it to buy a doughnut… I like them more. And I am not brought to you by Sportsbet or Ladbrokes… or Bet365, or any of them.
[/arm_restrict_content]
