We’re back for Round 12 of Zero Hanger’s weekly ‘five four useless stats’ series.
Every week Aaron Delaporte from Useless AFL Stats will take a look at the most useless statistics from the weekend just gone, the absurd, the ridiculous and the more useless the better.
As we head into the bye period with a few less games Round 12 still provided us with some more weird yet captivating and ultimately Useless Stats.
Melbourne's Christian Salem has the longest unbeaten streak of any current AFL player with 13 winning games, from 2020 Round 17 to Round 12 2021. He missed the Demons loss against Adelaide a few weeks ago with injury.
The last time a Melbourne player won 13 or more games in a row was Brian Roet, who completed 17 consecutive winning games from 1964 Round 2 to 1968 Round 1. Amazingly he missed playing in 36 Melbourne losses in that period which included the entire 1966 and 67 seasons.
The longest Melbourne player win streak is Ralph Lane; 22 games from 1955 Round 1 to 1956 Round 13, whilst the AFL record is shared between Geelong’s Max Rooke and Cameron Ling at 27 consecutive wins, this occurred in a similar period across 2007 and 2008.
Jack Higgins made headlines for all the wrong reasons as despite a great performance he was unable to convert in front of the big sticks on the weekend, however he wasn’t the only one to have to have a bad run.
Higgins kicked 1.6, whilst Aaron Naughton ended his evening with 1.5 and Taylor Walker with 2.6 could also do with some goal kicking practice this week.
The UAS team has been that miffed at the current state of AFL goal kicking that we put together an Inaccurate team of the week filling up all 22 positions on the field with players who kicked more behinds than goals from the Round 12 fixtures.
The combined tally was a staggering score of 11.51.117 - you can check out the full team on our Facebook page.
Due to a big run of injuries at West Coast, Luke Edwards made what was perhaps a surprising debut being pick 52 at last season's AFL draft. The son of AFL great Tyson Edwards, who played 321 games with Adelaide, combined with his dad to become the 9th father and son pairing to have the same amount of disposals in their debut matches, with both picking up 15 touches.
However, there is one big difference for the Edwards. Tyson debuted in Round 11 1995 for the Crows, who had a 44-point win over Footscray, and Luke of course was part of the Eagles' gritty 22-point win over Carlton. They are the only father/son duo to record equal possessions in winning debuts as all eight other combinations had at least one of the father/son pair involved in a loss.
After Round 12 of the 2021 season the teams currently 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th which are Melbourne, the Bulldogs, Geelong and Brisbane, have 1, 2, 3 and 4 losses - whilst the teams 4th last, 3rd last, 2nd last and 1st last teams in Adelaide, Collingwood, Hawthorn and North Melbourne, have 4, 3, 2 and 1 wins.
It has been over 100 years since the ladder was like this, the only other times being in Round 7, 1917 and Rd 9, 1900.