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It has taken much longer than anticipated, but Brisbane’s Charlie Cameron has made it into the AFL’s Top 100 goalkickers with his three goals against the Gold Coast Suns in the final game of Round 8 at the Gabba.
After four games this season that had reaped only five majors, Cameron sat on 408 goals, three short of matching the total achieved by Melbourne legend Fred Fanning in 1947, and earning Cameron the distinction of being the only player to score 400+ goals and not make the list.
Fanning did it all: played in a premiership in his first year, won the (then) VFL goalkicking on four occasions, won the Best & Fairest at Melbourne and retired from league football at age 25 to captain-coach at Victorian country town Hamilton, where he set numerous records over the remainder of his football career.
His salary at Hamilton was more than three times what he was making playing for Melbourne.
In his last game for Melbourne, Fanning kicked 18 goals one point, a record that still stands today, 78 years after his retirement and 22 years after his death in 1993, aged 71.
So far, Cameron has only equalled Fanning so they currently share the “hot seat” in 100th position of the Top 100 goal kickers of all time. No doubt, it won’t take many games for Charlie Cameron to excise Fred Fanning from the record books and continue his climb up the goal kicking ladder.
Three goals was pretty much “par” for Round 8 with 11 players scoring that total across the nine games of the round.
Only two players did better: St Kilda’s Cooper Sharman in the Saint’s flogging of Fremantle at Docklands on Friday night and Brody Mihocek in the Magpies’ nail-biting loss to Geelong on Saturday night. Both kicked four goals.
Geelong’s Jeremy Cameron – who bookends the six current top goalscorers in the AFL, with Charlie – scored only one goal in the Cats-Magpies game which was only bettered by one of the current Top 6: Jack Gunston with three goals.
“Jezza”, “Tex” and Luke Breust all scored one goal only and the two players who would have climbed up the “ladder” with a single goal, Jack Darling (North Melbourne) and Tom Lynch (Richmond) both scored doughnuts!
Gunston’s three goals, however, were significant. It meant that he passed the 500-goal barrier, becoming the 65th player to do (out of more than 13,000 players – 0.5% of the AFL/VFL-playing population).
A number of other lesser goal kicking milestones (1, 50, 100, etc.) have already been achieved this season, and – although it is difficult to predict – there may be many more in season 2025: Toby Greene, Jake Stringer and Jesse Hogan who all form part of a potent Greater Western Sydney forward line are all within reach of 400 goals with Greene requiring 9 goals, Stringer 27 and Hogan 31.
To reach 300 goals, Charlie Curnow (Carlton) requires four goals, the injured Tom Papley (Sydney) five and Brisbane’s Eric Hipwood 22.
Other players withing reach of more modest goal tallies are: Steele Sidebottom (Collingwood – 200), Michael Frederick (Fremantle – 100), while Jesse Hogan requires one more goal to bring up 200 goals for Greater Western Sydney.
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