2001 AFL Season - Notable Events

Notable Events

• In their Round 16 match, Essendon trailed by 69 points 12 minutes into the second quarter against the Kangaroos, but recovered to record a high-scoring 12 point win. This presently stands as the largest ever comeback in a VFL/AFL game. Essendon would not beat the Kangaroos again until the first round of the 2008 season.
• Melbourne and Collingwood began its annual tradition of playing each other at the M.C.G. in a Melbourne home game on Queen's Birthday Holiday, as the only AFL match of the day. The teams had met on the King's or Queen's Birthday Holiday sporadically in the past (1950, 1958, 1961, 1964, 1975, 1977, 1983, 1993, 1996 and 1999) as one of several games played on the day, with the 1958 game's attendance of 99,346 still enduring as the highest crowd for a non-final, but this was the first season that the fixture became annual, and the second time (after 1996) that the game was the only one played on the day.
• The longest recorded quarter occurred during the Round 5 match between Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs. The second quarter went for 40 minutes and 39 seconds.
• Fremantle lost their first 17 matches of the season in succession, the worst start to a season by any team in the AFL era (post-1990). Including a loss in the final round of the 2000 season, the Dockers' long losing streak stood at 18, well short of Sydney's 26 consecutive losses endured in 1992 to 1993. As well as this, they only won one game at home, which happened to be their final home match of the season.