MAFL 2010 : Round 24 (Week 2 of the Finals)

Each season as we enter the Finals and games take on heightened historical relevance, a part of me wishes that the MAFL Funds would sense the occasion and respond accordingly by doing something dramatic and memorable.

They never do, of course, partly because they're not sentient and partly because the opportunity for winning large sums of money on huge home-team underdogs rarely arises during the Finals. As far as the Funds are concerned, the Finals are just another round offering a few more opportunities to spot and exploit mispricing in the head-to-head and line markets.

And this, cooler heads might say, is probably as it should be. After all, $100 lost or won on a Finals game buys no more or less than $100 lost or won in Round 22. It just feels different to say during the off-season that, say. you won a lot of money on the Grand Final. Irrational, undoubtedly, but true nonetheless.

Anyway, to this week's fare. New Heritage, Prudence and ELO-Line are all lining up behind the home team favourites in both contests this week, while Hope has found the sub-$2.00 prices on offer for the Cats and the Dogs far too tame for it to risk its newly acquired profitable status. It's made no bets at all.

Here's the detail.

This week the unanimity is positively deafening, as all five remaining tipsters are, as the wagering Funds, predicting victories for the favourites. The tipsters believe the Cats will win by anything between about 4 and 10 goals, and, excepting ELO, that the Dogs will win much more narrowly, by only 1 or 2 goals.

ELO thinks the Dogs will win far more comfortably than this. On a few occasions in recent weeks I've commented on the Dogs' still-high MARS Ratings and it's this that has prompted ELO to tip the Dogs to win by over 7 goals.

Here's the week's full Ready Reckoner:

The second week of the Finals has been the last week for most teams who've entered it having finished in the bottom half of that season's final eight. Of the twenty such teams that have fit this description during the past 10 seasons only two have progressed to week 3: Hawthorn, who finished 6th in 2001 and who were eventually knocked out by the Dons in the 1st Prelim, and Collingwood, who finished 6th in 2007 and who went out to the Cats in the 1st Prelim of that season.

The particular matchups that we have this week in terms of ladder positions are 2nd v 6th and 4th v 5th. This first configuration has occurred once before, in 2000 when the 2nd-placed Carlton beat the 6th-placed Lions. The second configuration's been slightly more common. We've seen it three times before and, on each occasion, the team that finished 4th has emerged victorious. Most recently, we saw 2nd play 6th last season when Collingwood beat Adelaide, and before that we saw it in 2007 when the Roos beat Hawthorn, and before that in 2001 when Richmond defeated Carlton.

The chart below summarises the fate of teams from each of the 8 ladder positions in the first two weeks of the Finals (the Week 1 figures having been updated to include last week's results).

Everything then seems to point to the Cats and the Dogs going through. Time to get nervous.