Pavlich, Tredrea, Cooney

HOW WOULD AFL teams look if the old suburban and regional zoning rules still applied?

In the days before the draft – and before the introduction of non-Victorian teams to the competition – clubs recruited players according to their home addresses.

So in this ultimate fantasy football league, afl.com.au takes a look at who might be playing for whom if the old policy remained in place. Today, we consider Melbourne, North Melbourne, Port Adelaide and Richmond.

It is often said that one of the Melbourne Football Club’s greatest identity problems lies in the fact it doesn’t have a set area of the city it can call its own. While every other club comes from a suburb, the Demons are from a stadium and therefore don’t really have a development area. They have patches around suburban Melbourne and did have a large chunk of the inner-city zone but few children grow up right in the middle of the city these days.

Melbourne’s saving grace comes from its country zoning area that covers part of the Murray region. Kyabram, the team that gave the Dees Garry Lyon, has also produced Brett Deledio and Kayne Pettifer.

Tasmanians Brad Green and Russell Robertson as well as Northern Territorian Aaron Davey remain Demons in a side that does not have a lot of depth and struggles to find key position players.

NORTH MELBOURNE
B: Jesse Smith, Alipate Carlile, Andrew Welsh
HB: Jack Ziebell, Matthew Egan, Richard Douglas
C: Brady Rawlings, Brett Kirk, David Rodan
HF: Steve Johnson, Barry Hall, Paul Chapman
F: Josh Fraser, Daniel Bradshaw, Matt Campbell
Ruck: Hamish McIntosh, Dane Swan, Daniel Cross
Inter: Robert Campbell, Justin Koschitzke, Ryan Houlihan, Tom Lonergan

North Melbourne’s side would be one of the more impressive units. Drawing extensively from part of the Murray region and also Melbourne’s northern suburbs, the Kangaroos line-up is blessed with plenty of tall options in the ruck and up forward as well as some quality midfielders. The half-forward line would rarely get beaten.

The side could possibly use some more running defenders as we’ve had to slot in the untried Jack Ziebell at half-back. But otherwise this is a strong outfit that would be a premiership contender.

The Port Adelaide side, like the Crows, have access under the father-son rule to players whose fathers played for half the SANFL clubs. So in this case we have assigned them players from Port Adelaide, West Adelaide, Woodville-West Torrens and Central Districts.

The Power side would be stronger than their South Australian rivals. Some of the best tall defenders in the game would be wearing the teal and black, as would some of the most exciting forwards and on-ballers in the game.

The side also has youngsters such as Brad Ebert, Justin Westoff and Hamish Hartlett coming through the ranks.

Apart from a bit of a deficiency in the ruck, this is a well-balanced unit packed with stars.

It’s fair to say that the Richmond side was the toughest team to work out with this project. Even with extensive research and maybe some blurring of the zone boundaries, we could not even scrape a full team together and only have one player on the interchange.

Again this is because Richmond’s zone was largely based in the inner-city which wouldn’t give them any players in the modern era. Instead, the whole team has come from Richmond’s other metropolitan area in the south-east suburbs (Waverley area) and its country zone which is in the Sunraysia area in north-west Victoria.

The Tigers were helped by father-son selections Joel Bowden and Matthew Richardson as well as Richard Tambling and Jack Riewoldt who both came from states and territories that weren’t zoned.