In fact, five weeks before this game North Melbourne and Sydney scored 210 aggregate points in a half! Yet the following week the Swans amd Bulldogs scored 70 aggregate points in a full game, with Footscray kicking the lowest score against the Swans for 36 years! This contrast has always made the 1991 - and even more 1989 - seasons so interesting to me. 1991 though is particularly instructive because West Coast, whose sheer speed made them invincible on the dry grounds of autumn, proved beatable when wetter conditions reduced their speed advantage. Nowadays it would be much easier for a team to finish 25-0, as West Coast looked certain to do while the weather remained dry, because the variation in conditions has been so largely eliminated.

@@guodade2239 Interesting points.

I cannot see why one would say Rehn had “luck” if he missed virtually three seasons and prevented a potential Crow dynasty. The Crows’ performances during this era stand as proof - even before the fact was made emphatic by Docklands and the poleward expansion of the subtropical arid belt deep into formerly humid parts of southern Australia - that ground rationalisation was (and is) making the AFL more and more like basketball in that unusually skilled tall people (exceedingly rare in the population) as Rehn was are utterly irreplaceable.

It was actually almost a year after the Port Arthur massacre, which occurred around the fifth round of 1996.

@@guodade2239 Wow. My memory is extremely faulty.

Indeed it’s the second-last time a team kicked fewer than three goals in a match - the last score of two goals was Melbourne’s 2-8 (20) in the opening round of 1991 against a seemingly invincible West Coast defence. Before the weather broke up, it looked odds-on West Coast would go 25-0 (when that was more improbable than with Docklands minimising unpredictability from weather) as they were just too hard and fast for anyone to counter their defence and score enough points. However, when the weather broke up their speed advantage declined and Hawthorn’s attacking style was much more valuable.

After North’s performance it’s now the third last time

thank you

That’s something they need to do, as well as to stop using the whistle so much after a mark except when awarding a free for wasting time. It may be that over-dry grounds due to global warming and Docklands (à la covered pitches in cricket) make time wasting inevitable, too.