Essendon and Melbourne are set to take centre stage in the much-anticipated AFL 2019 home-and-away season fixture to be released on Wednesday.
The league is desperate to bring back the excitement of Friday night football after too many games in the blockbuster time slot proved fizzers last season.
Premiers West Coast and beaten grand finalist Collingwood will rightfully see plenty of prime time action in 2019, but fixturing chief Travis Auld is also a fan of the brand of football the Bombers and Demons played this year.
“We want to bolster Friday nights, we want to make sure that Thursday and Fridays are really strong that those feature events are there,” Auld said.
“We want to reward teams that have been playing really good football.
“West Coast and Collingwood are the two obvious ones but Melbourne and Essendon look quite exciting after trade period.
“So we want to feature them in the right spots as often as we can.”
The league has enjoyed some success with a limited move into the Thursday night time slot and will be able to schedule more next year after the players’ association agreed to allow more five-day breaks.
The AFL has already released the round one schedule, the season starting with the now-annual Thursday night Richmond-Carlton clash at the MCG.
The struggling Blues were a big factor in Friday night flops this season, but Auld argued the season-opening clash was a stand-alone fixture guaranteed to draw a big crowd and TV audience.
The Magpies will host Geelong in the first Friday night game of the year – a clash that, on paper at least, should get Friday nights off on the right foot.
Auld is charged with the nigh-impossible task of devising a way to have 18 teams play 22 games each per season and making it fair and equitable for all.
Regular blockbuster fixtures like Anzac Day, Dreamtime at the ‘G and Queen’s Birthday only add to his headache.
The AFL does this using a formula based on splitting the 18 teams as they finished on the ladder into three groups of six – the top, middle and bottom.
The ‘weighted rule’ method limits the amount of times a bottom-ranked team plays clubs from the top group and vice versa.
The league announced its pre-season series fixture on Monday, with clubs to play two warm-up games once again.
But next year’s pre-season series will take place over two weekends instead of three.
The league hasn’t settled on the format or dates for AFLX games but is adamant the experiment will continue in some shape or form.
