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You know when your team is getting torn apart by the opposition’s star midfielder, and you’re left wondering why on earth the coach doesn’t send someone over to tag him out of the game?
Sydney practically granted that wish on Friday night against Collingwood – and it showed exactly why it’s a tactic more fraught with danger than perhaps we give it credit for.
If there’s one thing about Dean Cox’s coaching that differs starkly from John Longmire’s, it’s in his use of midfield taggers, and specifically, James Jordon.
As predicted by everyone, Jordon went straight to Nick Daicos from the opening bounce, and scarcely left his side from there.
34 disposals and nine clearances later, it had backfired almost completely – and in more ways than just Daicos’ outstanding individual display.
Longmire, in 2024, had settled on a midfield trio the envy of every other side in the competition – at centre bounces and at virtually every stoppage for which they were on the ground, it was Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner and James Rowbottom, with a pinch of Errol Gulden if and when required.
Jordon, for the most part, clamped down on the opposition’s best half-back distributor, and only moved to tagging on-ballers in moments of utter desperation – the ultimate ‘break glass in case of emergency’ option. And when he did, he’d mostly push up from half-forward to follow his man wherever the ball went, as a centre bounce attendance rate of seven per cent for the year is testament to.
Whether caused by the absence of Gulden or just a difference of opinion on how to structure the midfield, Cox has used Jordon vastly differently, having clamped first Lachie Neale, then Caleb Serong, then Luke Davies-Uniacke, and against the Pies, Daicos.
In five rounds, he has already attended nearly double the centre bounces he did in 2024, and even been at more than Rowbottom and Warner.
Nick Daicos is corralled by James Jordon. (Photo by Sarah Reed/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
It’s been an effective ploy, no doubt – Neale and Serong were both held well below their usual numbers by Jordon, and with it, the Swans have ranked sixth-best at conceding scores from stoppages across the first five rounds.
Daicos, though, is a very different footballer than the above two – and in failing to limit the Magpies champion’s influence, Jordon and Sydney found out how significantly teams who tag can find themselves exposed.
Six of the Pies’ ten first-half goals came from stoppages, a glut of scoring for a team that, over their first four matches, had ranked third-worst in the league at scoring from them.
It’s the first of those goals, via a centre break from Daicos, that outlines the issue that plagued Sydney all night perfectly.
Minding Daicos at the bounce, Jordon decides, with his man sucked up to the footy and the Pies in possession, to play the role of sweeper and try and deny a clean getaway.
It’s a sound move – the problem arises when James Rowbottom, the normal defensive mid at the Swans, rushes to make that same position, leaving Daicos free – exactly the scenario the Swans would have wanted to avoid.
Rowbottom has done lock-down roles on opposition mids before; this isn’t him not knowing how to do it, it’s an expectation that, come what may, Jordon will be guarding Daicos at stoppages, and so it’s up to the rest of the unit to compensate for that.
Footy is messy – a player can’t just ride another player’s coat-tails all game long, and if Jordon had in this play, Steele Sidebottom could have fed a handball to Pendlebury running into space and not Daicos.
Not much has gone wrong, but there’s a clear crack in the Swans’ stoppage armour – and given them something they’d think about for the rest of the match.
Because from here on out, the Swans do guard Daicos much closer than they did in that centre bounce – and quite often, to their detriment.
It’s only natural for a team to be Daicos-conscious, such is the danger the Pies’ No.35 poses with ball in hand; but it’s vital to guard against the Magpies working that out.
Craig McRae knew full well a Jordon tag was coming, and even encouraged it during the week; and when something is predictable, it can be turned to one’s advantage.
Knowing the tag will come, Daicos drags himself as far from the drop zone as it’s possible to go while still being around the ball – he’s top left, Jordon dogging his every step. And notably, the Swans’ spare ahead of the ball, Braeden Campbell, uses Daicos as his reference point.
It effectively drags two Swans out of the contest to the Pies’ one – when the ball spills clear, Sidebottom reaches it a split second ahead of Campbell, who had more ground to cover, with the result a long kick forward and more pressure for the Swans’ backline to deal with.
Jordon, meanwhile, was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t when trying to curb Daicos – he’s a fascinatingly tough player to tag, mostly because he’s just about the quickest clearance machine you’ll find in the AFL.
Jordon can back himself to handle Neale or Serong, and even Davies-Uniacke, for speed, but Daicos is in a different league.
So at the start of the third quarter, when he’s dragged back slightly more than usual from the centre bounce, his first instinct when Daicos sprints to the foot of the ruck contest is to try and retard him.
Instant free kick, and another Daicos clearance.
He’d get five frees for the night, with Jordon conceding three – and I’d argue he should have had a few more.
Tagging him isn’t as simple as it can be for those outside half-backs, where sometimes you just need to stand next to them to stop a handball receive or easy uncontested mark; or even for a Neale or Serong, ostensibly impossible to deny the ball but who Jordon has done the job on this season already.
GWS’ Toby Bedford has done the best job at it this year in Opening Round – the quickest tagger in the game, he had the dual advantage of being able to go stride to stride with Daicos, and having him struggle with his fitness in sweltering conditions towards the end of the game.
Bedford, too, was intent on making Daicos accountable: while he’d have just 14 disposals, six were inside 50s, an excellent return for a primary stopper and five more than Daicos himself managed. There’s a clear contrast there to Jordon, who, for all his moxie, did little with his 16 disposals other than shoot out handballs to nearby teammates or blast the ball forward indiscriminately.
In a way, the battle epitomised the match as a whole: it was the Pies’ speed, for so long a staple of the Swans, that won them the day.
The notable part of the Swans’ tag that did work was Daicos’ direct contribution to the Magpies’ scoring – he had just four score involvements for the night, two of them behinds off his own boot. If the Swans had been offered that heading in, they would have shaken your hand off to take it.
But the Pies have more weapons than just one: Steele Sidebottom, reborn in 2025 as an inside midfielder after years as a wingman, thrived with the extra time and space, his 28 disposals bringing 10 score involvements and the sort of elite decision making we’ve come to expect from the veteran. Noah Long, too, had seven score involvements, to go with eight clearances, the least known of the Pies’ on-ball brigade taking Daicos’ role at the foot of many a ruck contest and doing his job superbly.
Daicos, to be sure, had a grand impact: with 34 disposals, he was frequently too quick and too smart for Jordon to quell, timing his runs perfectly for handball receives or to shark spilled balls well enough for a game-high nine clearances.
Uncontested marks and handball receives, the cheap stats his detractors like to count against him, were few and far between, but there’s no doubt his Magpie teammates benefitted enormously from the amount of focus the Swans put into stopping him and him alone.
The Swans did their best to quell Nick Daicos. Had they gone at it without a tag and backed Warner, Heeney and co. to get the job done, who knows how they would have fared – but it could scarcely have done worse.
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