AFL Round 20 2026 rising Team of the Week: Talor Byrne, Murphy Reid and Edward Allan posted senior-scale numbers

The read

The easy story to tell about a round like this is the greenest kid and the famous junior name — the promise, the wait-and-see, the pat on the head. Here's the harder and truer one: these numbers weren't marked on a gentler scale for young blokes. They were set against every senior in the same position, no discount for inexperience. And three of these players didn't just have a nice day for their age. They had a day near the top of the senior sheet.

Start with the headline: Talor Byrne rated 183 in the forward pocket on 14 career games. The number that matters isn't the age — it's what it was measured against. Byrne was judged against all forward pockets, seniors included, and he still came out on top of the room. So the honest reading isn't "good for a kid." It's that on the day, in his spot, he was one of the best forward-pocket players in the competition, full stop. The small games count doesn't make that easier to explain. It makes it harder.

The buried find is at Fremantle, and it's a whole forward line, not one player. They didn't get one young forward — they got three high forwards in the same forward line on the same day: Murphy Reid at 164 on 43 games, Josh Voss at 152 on 45, Neil Dudley at 114 on 35. When a forward half puts three players this high on the same scale in the same round, the space is being run as a unit, not by three coincidences. That's the part that should worry a planner. You can build a week around removing one dangerous forward. Remove three, all firing on senior scale, and there's no single lever left to pull — you're stopping a group, which is the much harder thing to stop.

But the number I'd steer a knowledgeable fan toward isn't in the forward line at all. It's Edward Allan's 135 on 29 games — in the centre. The eye skips it because forwards are visible and mids do their work in the crush. Yet the middle of the ground is exactly where seniors dominate longest, and it's the last place a player under 50 games is supposed to hold up. A forward number can be a day where a couple of chances land and the total balloons. A centre-of-the-ground number is far harder to fake for a day: you either hold that space against senior midfielders or you don't. Of all eighteen, this is the one most likely to be a level actually reached rather than a day caught.

Two things keep this honest. First, forward numbers are the most flattering numbers in the game — a 183 in the pocket on a tiny games count is precisely the shape a day-where-everything-lands takes, so the forwards deserve full credit for the day and no promises about the month. Second, the genuinely early stuff: Noah Mraz held down centre-half-back at 125 on four career games, and Jay Polkinghorne played centre-half-forward on two. Four games and two games is almost nothing — the ceiling flashed, which is worth noticing, but nobody, no number, can tell you yet whether it's durable. That's not a hedge. It's the truth about samples that small.

One more thing worth saying plainly: where the side carried lower numbers at rover and half-forward, that's a fact about the round, not about the players. The young talent this round showed up most in the forward pockets and the centre, and the numbers were leaner in the engine-room support roles — so the best available in those thin spots earned their jumpers doing exactly what was asked. That's the system working as designed. So here's what the evidence carries and what it can't: it carries that three or four of these players produced senior-scale football on a senior scale this round — that much is settled. What it can't carry is which of those days becomes a career, and which was a brilliant afternoon. The forwards dazzled. The centre is the one most likely to still be true in a month. The four-game defender is the one you simply can't call. Which of those you find most interesting is yours to weigh.

Who ran out of jumpers

The measure of how big the round was isn't the eighteen who made it — it's the players who produced genuine Team-of-the-Week football and still missed.

• 
  Sam Davidson Western Bulldogs
  137
• 
  James Tunstill Brisbane Lions
  111
• 
  Oliver Wiltshire Geelong Cats
  105
• 
  Hugh Boxshall St Kilda
  103
• 
  Bailey Macdonald Hawthorn
  102
• 
  Jedd Busslinger Western Bulldogs
  100