Balance showing in GDFL results
Early round results have vindicated coaches’ claim of more competition balance in the Geelong and District league.
Many around the traps were predicting a tougher competition in 2024, as most clubs looked to top up or lost little in the off-season.
Bannockburn coach Ron Pilgrim was one to predict this change, when speaking ahead of his team’s Round 2 fixture against Winchelsea.
“I just think the competition is really starting to even out and that’s exciting for the competition,” Pilgrim said.
“We’re getting better players, standards are improving out of sight.
“I think if you’re not on your game moving forward, you’ll lose more than you win if you’re not prepared to make sure you’re ready to go.”
And going by the first two rounds, the stats appear to back this up, showing a vastly different list of results compared to those in the past two completed seasons.
In 2023, the average winning margin was 39 points in round 1, in large part due to an 157point Bell Post Hill victory.
By the next week, that margin jumped to 52 points with two blowouts.
A year earlier, the statistics proved worse, round 1 of the 2022 season sporting a 49point average before fluctuating to a whopping 92-point win average margin by round 2.
But all that seems to have changed in 2024, the seasonopening round on April 2 drawing an average margin of 21.6 points.
It even decreased a week later, sitting at 21.1 — a stark different to that 92 point difference from two years ago.
Meanwhile, four of the six games in round 2 were decided by two goals or less, while in round 1 it was four games with 16 points or less.
Forty-nine points is the largest winning margin of the season so far, a result seen in both round 1 and 2 by Bannockburn and East Geelong.
Belmont Lions’ upset win over the reigning premier Inverleigh was a talking point of round 1, as was Bell Post Hill, written off by some after several off-season departures, after they took the highly valuable scalp of East Geelong on the Eagles’ home deck.
Lions co-coach Andy Walsgott felt the early competitiveness was “a real strength of the league”.
“We were talking, it will probably be round seven or eight to figure out who is going to be the better sides, and even then, we were talking about wins and where we might get them and it’s just hard to tell,” he said. “Every one’s picked up and everyone’s got better.”
Even for a club like Anakie, who went 1-47 in the past three seasons, there was serious cause for optimism in the preseason after a big recruiting haul. And their 2024 results, while not yet in the wins column, shows vast improvement. After average losing margins of 135.5 (2023) and 75 (2022) in the first two rounds of past seasons, the Roos have reeled that back to 30.5 this year, which included a five-point loss to North Geelong on Saturday.
While hard to predict if these trends continue past round 2, it’s promising signs for clubs and supporters of the GDFL this year.