Sanne Visser

Australian rules is a strange sport to fall for from Amsterdam, which is exactly why it grabbed me. I stumbled onto a match during a sleepless night of streaming and was hooked by the chaos and the skill, then spent the next few years learning it from scratch with fresh eyes. With no inherited team loyalties, I could study it purely as a system, and the more I watched the more layered it became. My work centres on the things that hold up week to week: clearance and contested-possession differentials, how a side scores from turnover, and how ground dimensions suit or strangle a team's style. I spend a lot of time on lines and totals, because a windy afternoon at the wrong venue can flatten a scoreline a model loved on paper. Travel and short turnarounds quietly do more damage than most people credit. Five years in, I've learned to stay patient through the noise of a long season — one upset doesn't break a read, and one big margin doesn't prove one. I set my reasoning out plainly so readers can follow the logic and disagree where they like. — Sanne Visser