Impey Tops the Lot as One Game Swallows Round 19

Round 19's team was built in one game. Five of the round's eight biggest performances came out of Hawthorn and Richmond — and every one of them belonged to a Hawk. Three of them made this side, more than any other club, and a fourth was so good he leads the Rising team instead.

The rest of the sheet is history being made in real time. Two players produced the best game of their careers — Rowan Marshall in his ninth season, Nick Bryan in his 33rd game — and four more produced their best of this season. Ten clubs share the eighteen positions. Melbourne, who had two of the round's most selection-worthy games, are not one of them.

Jarman Impey was the best of anyone, anywhere, this round. Thirteen seasons and one rebuilt knee into his career, he produced the second-best game of his entire record — a half-back moving the ball with the appetite of a wingman, at an efficiency most wingmen never touch.

The detail that lifts it from a great game to a story: his club-mate James Sicily went with him. Across every defender in the competition this round — more than a hundred and seventy of them — the two Hawks finished first and second, out of the same back six, in the same game. Sicily's game was his best of the season and sits among the three biggest of his career. One defence owned the round's podium.

The forward line is where the era shifted. Rowan Marshall's game at centre half-forward was the best of his career — and he built it like a midfielder, winning his own ball at a rate no key forward in the competition matched this round, by a distance. Alongside him, Mitch Lewis doubled his own standard for the season and led the goalkicking on the sheet. And in the ruck, Nick Bryan's career best took the spot off Max Gawn — who produced a perfectly serviceable Gawn game and lost it anyway. The spot changed hands at the top, not by default.

Then there are the stiff ones, and this round produced a brutal set. Nick Watson had the fourth-biggest game of the entire round — bigger than all but three of the men who made the side — and was squeezed out of a forward line that simply had no room. Trent Rivers produced a season best and finished fifth for four half-back spots. Tom Sparrow's game was the fourth-best of a career now 130 games deep, and it earned him the interchange. That makes Melbourne the hard-luck club of the round: two top-shelf performances, zero on-field jumpers.

Jye Amiss doubled his own standard too, and ran into the only two key forwards in the league having career and season bests on the same afternoon. And Noah Mraz produced the best key-defender round of anyone in the competition — in his third game of AFL football. Three games is too short a record to displace two-hundred-gamers from the senior sheet. It is not too short to lead the Rising one.

That's the round's best on the engine's read — Impey out front, one game five deep in the top of the round, career bests at centre half-forward and in the ruck. The bolters and the unlucky ones are yours to argue.