As you may remember from last week, the AFL Beat this week was going to be either delayed or abbreviated due to my week-long vacation (more on that in another post!) in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  Well, it turns out that it will end up being both.  Delayed because I barely got home at 12:30 AM last night and I woke up to go to work at 5:15 AM this morning. And abbreviated because this is the second round with byes, so there were less games.  Let’s power through, shall we?

Welcome to Balls of Steel’s AFL Beat!

The Round started off with a rare Thursday night (in Australia, late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning for us) match featuring the Hawthorn Hawks traveling to Adelaide to take on the Crows.  The Hawks controlled the game early but could not open up a large lead against the game Crows.  Adelaide was able to take a slight lead in the third, but the Hawks reacted the right way and pulled away for the 29 point win. For the second week in a row, I do not have an Eddie Betts highlight, but I do have this weird wobbly curvy goal from Daniel Talia

and a nice “stirring the pot” celebration from Charlie Cameron

To paraphrase PFTCommenter, someone needs to be looking at the score before doing a GLORYBOYMEFIRST celebration, imho. No offense.

The Friday night (late Thursday/early Friday morning for us) game featured Richmond hosting the West Coast Eagles at the MCG.  The Lions hung tough for a half, but the Eagles quickly took the lead for good and ended up winning by 20.  West Coast’s Mark LeCras somehow got the ball to squeeze in for a goal in the first.  It was a sign of how the night would go for the Lions:

In the Friday night early game, Carlton left WhyEaglesWhy looking like this

as they somehow some way beat Port Adelaide in what may be the upset of the year.  You can watch here the agonizing last two minutes as the Power is desperately trying to score a goal inside Carlton’s 50.  What seemed like a mark to set up the lead-taking goal was taken away after one of the referees correctly noticed that the Carlton defender had touched the ball after it left the kicker’s foot.  In that situation, the call should have been to play on, but the other referee had already called the mark.  Per the AFL rules, this resulted in a ball up (Phrasing!).  Port could not get any closer…

Later that night, however, Sunrisensunrise would look like this:

as North Melbourne ripped the GWS Giants a new one by 56.  The Roos, as we discussed last week, picked a great time to have a consistently good game and took advantage of many GWS injuries to nab a critical win.  They tried to even the injury count a bit by injuring their own player during pre-game warmups

I make this solemn pledge to you, my loyal AFL Beat readers:  If I cannot insert an Eddie Betts highlight, I will certainly put in an Andrew Swallow highlight!  (or lowlight in this case)

As a reminder, here is the lovely Mrs. Swallow:

In the Friday night/Saturday morning finale, the Western Bulldogs crushed the Brisbane Lions by 72.  Everything was going right for the dogs as they even had the luxury of fumbling the ball in front of the goal and still managed to get 6 points:

Here is a much better example of the effort that propelled Western to victory:

And then we get to Saturday night/Sunday morning.  I am really really happy that I was in Vancouver on vacation and not able to watch any games because I would have probably thrown my tablet out the window if I had seen the Geelong game.  It was truly like this:

Yeah, we lost. At home.  To Melbourne. A team we had not lost to at home in 10 years.  That’s like the Steelers losing to the Browns at Heinz field.

This was a nice play,

but unfortunately, we didn’t get too many of those and Melbourne did.

Let’s look at the ladder, shall we?

The middle group got bigger and tighter (Phrasing!) as the Giants and Crows both dropped games.   We still have to wait until the end of Round 13 for the byes to be finished and for a clearer picture to emerge of where everyone stands.  In the meantime, I’ll go join WhyEaglesWhy in the corner…

See you next week!