IF A CHANGE is as good as a holiday, then the AFL landscape of 2011 and 2012 is currently experiencing the all-time bender of vacations.

New clubs from the northern states, new time slots for games played in new stadia and, from next year, weekends filled with enough football to drive the divorce rate in Australia well north of 70 per cent.

So many of the jumpers, viewing mechanisms and venues of our great game are unfamiliar from just a few years ago.

And if our favourite players aren't jumping ship to warmer climates, then awards like the All Australian team and AFL Coaches Association player of the year are always populated with new faces as injuries cruel quality players and old age catches up with others.

Brian Lake, Barry Hall and a plethora of Saints have been often cited this year as stars on the wane but it's really just part of the natural cycle of AFL football that rarely can a player consistently deliver 20 or more fine games in consecutive seasons.

One of the most exciting aspects of every AFL season is getting a handle on the second and third-year players who are breaking into League's best 22. 

Rising stars are usually a bit raw to fall into this bracket (although Dyson Heppell is giving Greatest Team of All's selectors some serious headaches) but it's those formerly inconsistent excitement machines who are now morphing into regular game-breakers who provide the best marker of generational change across the League.

Looking across our squad, you'll see it's predominantly made up of 25-29 year-old hardened bodies entering the prime years of AFL superstardom.

We touched last week on Ben Reid's remarkable rise in the Magpie ranks to elite defender but this week a  20-year-old Fremantle Docker, being talked up in some quarters as the next James Hird, joins Greatest Team of All.
 
Nathan Fyfe enters our team on the back of a best-on-ground performance against the Swans in Sydney. John Longmire declared himself a fan after the game, admitting that even his team of premier stoppers had found Fyfe impossible to curtail as he racked up 31 touches to lead Freo to a crucial win.

Joining Fyfe in the Greatest Team this week is a 10-year veteran who has always been a quality player but had suffered from being shifted forward when the marking power dried up, along with a litany of soft tissue injuries.

This season has seen Luke McPharlin settled and accountable in the Fremantle backline, using his considerable marking ability to dominate tall forwards across the League.

He sits sixth in the League in marks and has played every game this season for the first time since 2006.

Making way are Carlton's young goal-sneak Jeff Garlett, whose recent output has suffered along with the Blues form, and Heath Shaw, who was almost certainly on track for All Australian selection before his suspension last week for gambling on his own team.

With just seven weeks of the season to go, the Greatest Team looks fairly settled but with form spurts from the Bombers, Saints and, to a lesser extent, the Bulldogs, there may still be a few stars of 2010 who again shine brightly enough in the run to the finals to break into the team.