MORE, please.
More Tom Papley-style back-stories. More Jake Stringer. More of the high scoring. More of not just Paddy Dangerfield accumulating 43 disposals, but the smooth manner in which he carries himself off and on the ground.
More Marc Murphy courage, more Jesse Hogan moment-seizing. More heroics from a player now just a month and a bit short of a 38th birthday.
More of the genuine stars "resting" in the forward line, creating havoc in defences and opposition coaching boxes.
More Nic Naitanui full stop. More of Mark Blicavs continuing to challenge preconceived notions of how football should be played. Of course, more Sam Mitchell being in full control, as well as entertaining, in both football contests and hard-edged, live TV conversations with journalists.
More Gary Ablett, but that’s a given. More impactful debuts to follow those of Jacob Weitering, Clayton Oliver, Darcy Parish, Papley, Callum Mills, Josh Schache.
'See ball, get ball' lifts Oliver to Rising Star nomination
More Robbie Gray, Jack Viney, Patrick Cripps.
Papley kicked three goals in his debut and boasts two grandfathers who played for the same club, the Swans. And yet that facet is not the main part of his back-story to which we are referring.
Overlooked in the previous year’s player drafts, Papley kept working on his football and his life. He would set the alarm for 5am to pursue a plumbing apprenticeship and then soak up the football wisdom of Gippsland Power coach Leigh Brown on weekends. Out of nowhere, he was rookie-listed by the Swans in 2015. He then lined up alongside Buddy Franklin in the season-opening mauling of Collingwood.
More, please, of the hard-policing of deliberate out-of-bounds acts, along with the stricter rulings around the exclusion zones of a player who has just marked the ball.
WATCH: Kreuzer call was correct
More lesser light recruits reaching immediate new highs at new clubs, like Zac Smith, Ben Kennedy, Matthew Wright, Matt Rosa.
Of course we want more of the heavy scoring of round one, the highest season-opening round since 2012, second highest since 2005. The North-Adelaide game had 30 goals, as did Geelong-Hawthorn. The Port-St Kilda match saw 35 goals kicked, West Coast-Brisbane 41.
Less of the stoppages which just suffocated the game itself and the general enthusiasm around it in recent seasons. Round one 2016 produced the least amount of stoppages in a round for two and half seasons.
Less injuries to guns like Dane Swan and Luke Hodge. And now we can only hope we will see Dane Swan again on an AFL venue.
Less Stevie J criticism, too. He’s not going to kick every goal he attempts, never has. But when you’ve got 450 of them to your name, you’re entitled to keep trying the impossible.
Also, less of the personal grandstanding of a certain journalist who wrote a story about Collingwood which he could not actually verify, and who then pathetically tried to moralise and say the story wasn’t about Collingwood despite him fully making it about Collingwood.
You can’t have it both ways, and that ham-fisted crack at a serious football issue was a real downer of the past week.
Let’s see what round two brings.
