Ryan Buckland: Winning is losing for West Coast Eagles and North Melbourne in race to the bottom

Music festivals are making a comeback around the world.

They were one of the first major events to be hit by COVID and they’re the last to return.

And if you haven’t heard, the AFL is getting in on the act.

It’s called Tankapalooza 2022, and there are two performers: North Melbourne and the West Coast Eagles.

Before we go any further it is important to point out that players and coaches never set out to lose on purpose.

Eagles coach Adam Simpson said as much when the question was put to him point blank during the bye.

His response was reflexive and also correct.

“It’s something that I’ve never thought about and I don’t think I ever will,” Simpson said.

“If you’re ever going to think about it now — the competitive instinct is too strong to worry about … tanking?”

“We can’t wait for another year to try and do that (get out of the rut), so we won’t be doing that — and that’s not what the club stands for.”

West Coast’s current circumstance is a bit of its own making, a bit of the natural cycle of the AFL, but a lot of bad timing.

Would the fall have happened this quickly if the curse that began with Brad Sheppard’s retirement had not been cast by whatever football shaman spoke the poisonous words? No, but a fall of some magnitude was coming.

As they say, you should never waste a crisis, and that’s the mindset the Eagles should take to the final 10 games of the 2022 season.

West Coast has tried to blend some more explicit forward half play into its game at times in 2022, alongside a greater focus on winning the ball on the inside in the midfield.

The trends don’t really show up in the numbers because the Eagles have been so comprehensively obliterated most weeks.

One which does is kick-to-handball ratio, which has dropped from the high 1.9s to 1.65 in 2022.

No matter what happens in the wins and losses column, Simpson and his crew should continue to play around with the game plan and player roles to find some things out that may otherwise stay hidden.

North Melbourne is in a more precarious spot heading into Tankapalooza 2022. It has been bottoming out for a number of years having last made the final eight in 2016.

It will surely become the team with the longest active streak of missing the finals series (ex-Gold Coast) after this season given Carlton (2013) and Fremantle (2015) will make it.

Their list is still full of holes, with a lot of mid-career role players and some veterans who are getting close to the end.

The Roos are in need of a transfusion of young, highly-touted talent, and the only path they have to realise it is in the draft.

It’s no Big Day Out 2010, but it promises to be as messy and thrilling.

The prize? Pick one in the draft, and all of the trappings that come with it.

These trappings could be extraordinarily useful for West Coast.

Last place gives you pick one in the national draft, but also means the club’s name is first on the pre-season draft list as well.

This is relevant to the Eagles and their desire to land one of Tim English (who still hasn’t been announced as a re-signing by the Western Bulldogs, by the way) or Luke Jackson this off-season.

Out of contract players who do not come to terms with their current team can be delisted, but must pass through at least the pre-season draft in order to make it back onto a list for the next year.

By holding pick one in the pre-season draft the club can use the threat of a player effectively walking to them for nothing as leverage during negotiations.

Carlton did this to get Jack Martin out of the Gold Coast in 2019, albeit from pick three but using some jiggery-pokery around salary structure to allow him to slip. When another club pulls this trigger, it’s outrageous. But when it’s your club, it’s a master-stroke.

How does this all play out? As it stands, West Coast has around a two goal lead on North Melbourne from a percentage stand point. This means the net margin of the Eagles’ remaining games can be 13 points higher than North’s for their percentage to remain the worse of the two. Percentage may not come into play anyway: it’s all about the wins.

I have re-run the Pythagorean fixture projection with another couple of weeks worth of games to work out who has the better (or worse, depending on your point of view) time of it coming up. North has one of the easier runs home with an average opponent win total of 5.5. The Eagles have an average opponent win total of 6.28.

Also working against West Coast is North has only nine games remaining this season, where the Eagles have ten. That’s one extra opportunity for a win, which is a good thing in every context except Tankapalooza.

Unfortunately the two teams don’t face off again this season. In their Round 2 match up I don’t think we would have anticipated it could ultimately be the game that decides the number one pick for 2022.

It almost certainly would have been if the Eagles hadn’t somehow beaten Collingwood in Round 4.

For its part, betting markets have West Coast and North dead even at a bit shy of 2-to-1 odds.

In third place is Essendon, with the remarkable odds of $26 despite them only sitting one win above the two stragglers.

That would be in part due to the percentage gap which exists between the Bombers on 73 per cent and the Eagles and North in the 50s. It’s as good as another win, or loss.

Let Tankapalooza 2022 begin.