Mark Duffield - The Editorial (23.06.2026)

**Mark Duffield** (0:00)
Hello, everybody, welcome to the SENWA Radio Studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium on this Tuesday morning in Perth. We are here thanks to Beaumont Homes' award-winning design built to be loved forever. It's gonna be partly sunny in our fair city today, atop of 20 degrees, made in WA for WA. This is Mornings with Mark Duffield on SENWA.
So, okay, folks, it's time to put your thinking caps on today, or more to the point, your fixture caps. I'd love your opinion on the fixture as it stands, and your opinion on how the AFL might want it to look after a Tasmanian team enters the competition in 2028
If you are one of those people who regards the fixture as a fix, then how do we fix it?
Do you like the wild card round? Does the wild card round survive the entry of the Tasmanian Devils? And does gather round survive the entry of the Tasmanian Devils? And even more radically, does gather round survive at all? Because in one of the options being canvas at the moment, the future of the highly successful round in Adelaide is up in the air. So the AFL-CEOs are meeting on the Gold Coast at the moment. And according to Code Sports, here are the four options being put to them on how the fixture might look. So option 1, 22-game home and away season. All teams play once, plus there are four double ups. Now either gather round gets scrapped, or the AFL buys home games off clubs and moves them to gather round.
Option 2, 24-game home and away season. All teams play once, plus six double ups. Gather round gets joined by one other neutral round. Does that prick West Australian ears up? Could we stage such a neutral round, i.e. have our own gather round? Option 3, group stage. All teams play once, plus two double ups. That's gather round and rivalry round. Top 16 teams split into four groups of four and play once. The bottom three teams are in the bottom group, presumably playing each other for draft picks. And option 4 is a tournament.
So all teams play once, plus two double ups, which is gather round and rivalry round. And then there's a three week tournament, stage mid-year, achieving what I'm not entirely sure. So I'd have to say that of those options, the group stage option holds a fair bit of appeal. If they have a good and fair formula for working out how to allocate the top 16 teams into groups, then it would address a lot of the imbalances that currently exist in the home and away fixture. And it would also provide a point of interest in the closing weeks of the season for the bottom teams, assuming they have to win to get draft picks. Now, those games would eliminate the incentive for bottom teams to tank, and that in turn would enable the AFL to get more proactive in its efforts to lift teams off the bottom and equalise the competition.
It just leaves the question, what becomes of the wild card round, and what does the wild card round look like in terms of whether it's going to be successful this year? So as it stands, the two teams sitting 9th and 10th on the ladder, the two who would most benefit from the wild card round are Gold Coast and North Melbourne, and they both boast 7-7 win-loss records. They are literally 50-50 teams. The 11th ranked Collingwood have a 6-7-1 record from their 14 games, the 12th ranked Saints have a 6-9 record and remain in contention for the play-off rounds. The 13th ranked Giants are 6-8, and so are the 14th ranked Blues, who were going so bad, their coach Michael Voss stepped away mid-season. It must be said the Blues have been great since, winning five in a row under interim coach Josh Fraser.
So there is a chance that the teams that claim spots 9 and 10 in a wild card berth will be teams that surge between now and the end of the season, so we will feel like they have earned it. If the Blues keep going under Josh Fraser, that combined with the fact they're often competitive even when beaten with Michael Voss in charge, maybe they would be worthy. Maybe North Melbourne would be too, but it is the North Melbourne that was beaten by 124 points by Fremantle just a few weeks ago. Give us your thoughts on the fixture options. Give us your thoughts on wild card round as it's shaping up. 04H7, 736, 736 is the text line. 1312, 55 is the Barra and Doday open line. Barra and Doday because the little things are everything.