A history of the double comeback

3 Apr

This article was originally published on This Week In Football.

A quick one from me this week while I’m on holiday (got to see my first game at Adelaide Oval, great stadium!).

This came to my attention from a comment on r/AFL – the idea of a double comeback. Team A gains a significant lead, Team B reverses that into a significant lead of their own, but Team A comes back again and wins the match.

Originally a thirty point margin was floated as the threshold. However, since 2001 (the start of score-by-score progression on AFLTables) there have been 29 games in which both teams have held a lead of 30+ points at some point.

But in none of those did the team who surrendered the initial lead secure the win (including the Essendon v Carlton draw in Round 23 2014.)

If we drop our threshold down to 24+ points we get 5 examples of the double comeback, any of which are well worth a revisit (unless you were on the wrong end and the wounds are still too deep) and some are genuinely classics:

Adelaide v Melbourne 2002 Semi-Final