Gather Round’s first ever Sicko Saturday treats Adelaide Oval to a day of gloriously bad football

If you didn’t know better you would have sworn it was a typo on your fixture card.

A scroll down the list of games and venues took you to Saturday at Adelaide Oval, and the curious pairing of Carlton-West Coast into Melbourne-Essendon.

There’s no rule that says the games at the 53,000-seat Adelaide Oval have to be the marquee ones of the day, but it does make logical sense. And yet, here we were.

The reigning premier Brisbane had been sent to Norwood along with the Bulldogs, and to nobody’s surprise played out one of the games of the year.

Granted it made a bit more sense to send the Kangaroos and Suns to the Barossa, but both sides were projecting up this year and played like it out Tanunda way.

Back then they couldn’t have predicted it, but by the time we all gathered for this round the four teams playing on centre stage on Saturday came in with a combined season record of 1-15.

Either by bad luck or bad design, the AFL had created its first ever Gather Round Sicko Saturday — a double-header to be savoured only by the truest and most depraved footy nuts.

Part of the gift of Gather Round is the opportunity, if you have the means and will, to take in a wide spectrum of games and teams. In doing so you can really start to get a sense of what good football looks like when compared to the rest.

On Saturday, Adelaide Oval got nothing but the rest. And in a gross way, it was pretty captivating.

It may have been foolish to expect anything else, but the early one between winless Carlton and winless West Coast was a disaster. If there’s a worse game this year, just hope you don’t accidentally watch it.

So many poor decisions, and then so many errors when the right decision happened to be made. The Blues were clearly the superior team but needed time to convince themselves of that fact.

Losing, it seems, is an awfully hard habit to break.

Once they figured it out it turned into an unglorified training drill for Michael Voss’s side as they racked up stats that even the coach himself described as “extraordinary”. But the numbers couldn’t do this game justice.

Identifying a low ebb from the afternoon is tough. Was it Charlie Curnow missing a five-metre handball to a teammate in an open goal and accidentally rushing a behind?

It could have been Jake Waterman trying to sidestep Mitch McGovern on centre wing, only to forget to actually change directions before running straight into the Carlton defenders’ arms.

Maybe it was Jack Williams’s brain overheating and shutting down when all alone 20 metres from goal, neither passing or shooting and instead chipping it to nothing and through for a point.

It was a punishing watch at times, and the only subsection of the population to have taken any joy from it at all would be Carlton supporters. But even their solace was tainted by a concussion to the returning Harry McKay and a serious late injury to Brodie Kemp.

Positives for West Coast? Tom Gross looks promising. Liam Ryan played well. The draft is in about seven months.

Without wanting to sink the boot any further than necessary, the Eagles are some way off the standard of even the next worst teams. They know this as well as anyone but finding some relief, let alone a cure, is proving impossible.

What the Demons and Bombers produced may have been less farcical than the afternoon’s efforts, but it was only just barely better.

Melbourne in particular is a team totally lost in the wilderness, a shadow of the outfit that won a premiership in 2021 and dominated the first half of 2022.

Chief among the Demons’ issues is their total lack of a forward line, though with the way they use the ball going in there it wouldn’t matter if David Neitz was still running around.

For a team fighting for its season, maybe even for the long-term future of its coach, Melbourne was a complete damp squib in the first half. It was painful to watch.

To their credit there was a response after half-time but it was for little. The quality didn’t match the endeavour, and eventually a couple of turnovers and dropped marks rendered it all null and void.

Essendon was unconvincing but a clear step above the opposition. There were periods when the Bombers would turn the ball over two or three or four times inside their own defensive 50, but each time be saved by Melbourne’s own ineptitude.

The Bombers, wouldn’t you know it, get to play West Coast next week on the same day Carlton faces North Melbourne. Just in case you couldn’t get enough of today.

All of it will give the AFL cause for consideration when concocting next year’s Gather Round fixtures. There must be a way to avoid treating the regional games like second-class matches while still keeping the cream of the crop in the prime-time slots.

Or maybe they can just lean into the Sicko Saturday concept and reserve one Gather Round day a year for some proper slop. It might just make us savour the good games that bit more.