Hawthorn Lose Their Clean Sheet and Geelong Get Theirs Back — the Register Reaches 80, the Bill 2,906

After Round 23 the board moved more in seven days than it had in the month before it. Port Adelaide added five for an estimated 275 player-games lost and stay top, but the margin is not what it was: Essendon's 23 takes them to 255 and cuts Port's lead from 38 games to twenty. Richmond and North Melbourne each added 45, the two steepest weeks in football — Richmond up two rungs to third on 239, North Melbourne up two to ninth on 167. West Coast slip a place to fourth on 232 despite adding 24 of their own. GWS, who have sixteen names on their list, more than any club, added only six and slid to fifth on 210. Fremantle finish the round where they have sat all year, healthiest in the league on 51, so the spread from hardest-hit to healthiest is 224 games. Across all 18 clubs the season's casualty bill now stands at an estimated 2,906, up 287 in a single week.

Port Adelaide's week was as close to a still one as they have had since Round 21 — five estimated games, no new name on the register — and the total still reached 275. Ten seasons are over at Alberton, more than anywhere else, and those ten are ten of the fourteen currently out. The four still on a timeline are Jack Watkins, Zak Butters, Jason Horne-Francis and Lachie Jones, two of them tests. That is a list with very little left to lose, which is why a quiet week barely moved the number.

The club closing on them is Essendon. Jordan Ridley's foot and Sullivan Robey's knee took the Bombers from five ended seasons to seven inside a week, and their 23 added games is what turned a 38-game gap at the top into a 20-game one. Nine names out at Essendon, seven of them gone for the year: the shape of Port's list, one rung down.

Eleven seasons ended this week, and they landed where the ladder said they would not. Hawthorn had gone twenty-two rounds without losing one; Conor Nash's neck ends that, in the second-lightest room in the league on 68 games. North Melbourne lost two — Robert Hansen jnr's wrist and Jacob Konstanty's illness — as did Essendon in Ridley and Robey. Richmond's Noah Balta (toe), West Coast's Tylah Williams (leg), Melbourne's Thomas Matthews (shoulder), Brisbane's Reece Torrent (ankle), Carlton's Campbell Chesser (knee) and St Kilda's James Barrat (foot) complete the eleven.

Five names went the other way, and they matter as much. Toby Conway's foot and knee are back on a timeline rather than a season, which puts Geelong's clean sheet back on the board — Adelaide, Fremantle and Geelong are now the three clubs yet to lose a season in 2026. And four of the seasons the ledger recorded as ended last week are ended no longer: Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera's hamstring reads four to six weeks, Mason Wood's calf one to three, Tim English's knee is back to TBC, and James Rowbottom's hand is three weeks rather than the year. A register that only ever grows is not a register — it is an assumption. This one moved both ways.

The Boot Room mapped 741 senior players to the exact model they play in after Round 21. Line that against the current casualty list and 104 of the 153 open episodes have a boot on file — two in three, not a census. One name is carried by two different players, so it was dropped from both sides rather than guessed at, and the players the boot survey never covered stay out of it entirely.

What comes back is a spread, not a smoking gun. Asics wearers are the least likely to be on the list: 11.1 injuries per 100 wearers against a league figure of 14.1, and 1.31 estimated games lost per wearer against 1.67. Adidas sits highest at 19.8 per 100, Puma 16.5, Nike 14.8. Narrow it to the two boots 57% of the competition plays in and the gap holds its shape — the Asics Lethal Testimonial 4 IT, on 210 pairs of feet, carries 8.6 injuries per 100 wearers; the Nike Tiempo Legend 10 Pro Elite, on 211, carries 12.8. Under fifty wearers a single episode moves a rate several points, so the small models are listed and not rated.

And then the part that matters. Boots do not choose themselves. The Boot Room already found two of every three ruckmen in Asics and Nike on 48% of midfielders, so a brand's rate is carrying its wearers' position and running load as much as anything about the boot itself. The categories doing the damage this season are the ones no boot is built to influence: knees account for 29 of the 80 ended seasons and hamstrings seven, while foot, ankle and Achilles — the only group footwear could plausibly touch — account for thirteen. This is a map of who wears what and who is hurt. It is not a cause, and nothing in it says a boot broke anybody.

So the count after Round 23, modelled rather than counted: Port Adelaide 275 at the top, Fremantle 51 at the bottom, 80 seasons ended league-wide out of 153 episodes still open. Knees own the year and are not close to being challenged for it — 40 episodes, 29 of the 80 ended seasons, and an estimated 662 games, more than foot, ankle and shoulder put together. Three clubs have not lost a season at all. How much slack any of it earns a side is yours to weigh.