Tagging is one of those elements of the game that really seems to elicit passionate responses from fans and come finals time, the role of these ‘run-with’ players is often amplified because it’s their job to curb the influence of some of the best and most destructive midfielders in the game.

Even for the best exponents, tagging is usually not a skill that comes entirely naturally at first. The first time I was asked to tag a player I really didn’t know much about it and it probably took me the entire first half of that game to figure out what was going on. One of the hardest adjustments at first is that you need to overcome your natural instincts to go and get the ball.

Eventually it grew on me and I came enjoy that role and knowing the specific job I was going to do. Football is an increasingly technical game but the role of the tagger is theoretically simple; stop your man from getting the ball and limit the damage done when he does. When playing on someone like Chris Judd, this is easier said than done.

There are basically two types of midfielders; ones who get the ball on the outside and ones who get it on the inside in contested situations. It’s far easier to stop players who get the ball on the outside than it is ones who get it on the inside because you can keep them in front of you. They’re not going to go into a pack, pick the ball up and leave you in their wake like Judd or Travis Boak will do to you.

Midfielders who have a high percentage of uncontested possessions, if they even really exist anymore, are generally easier to tag. Those guys are generally really fast and really fit but you basically know what they’re going to do. It becomes a matter of taking their space and not allowing them an easy run. Naturally, players that can go both inside and outside are by far the hardest players to play on. For me they were guys like Judd, Nathan Buckley or James Hird. Those guys could do it all and you just didn’t know where to stand or what they were going to do next.

What the best current taggers like Ryan Crowley do now is, in some ways, actually a little harder than how myself and Brett Kirk had it back in the mid-2000s. We were luckier in that we could get away with blocking space and watching our opponents a little more. We used to tease Kirky about bringing his saddle to the game because he’d just run around for the whole day holding on to someone. That’s not the case now.

As for preparation for each specific role, you definitely want to know everything about the person you’re playing on and the video edits provided by the coaches and Champion Data are probably the best tool in discovering this. From them a game is cut from two hours to maybe 30 minutes of footage of plays involving your opponent; stoppages, possessions, every centre bounce involvement, that kind of thing. From that you establish running patterns and highlight the most dangerous kind of possession that opponent can get.

For a good player you might not mind them winning the ball from a throw-in getting a long kick in as long as it’s down the boundary line and it’s punched out of bounds. You can accept that. What you don’t want is someone cutting through the stoppage, getting it off hands and coming back through the middle with a 60-70 metre kick and hitting a forward.

Stopping those dangerous possessions can be tough but the methods are fairly basic. You’ll make sure you stand corridor-side and work off those running patterns that you’ve identified in your preparations. A most underrated element of tagging is teamwork and trust. Sometimes your man will run off you but if you’re working in tandem with a team-mate, you can cover each other’s men. Brett Kirk and I would often both be tagging and I always knew I could trust him to cover my opponent and vice versa. Tagging can be a very difficult job without that teamwork. My man might go to Kirky and his to me but we’d avoid getting in a foot race by just picking them up on the way through instead of following them everywhere.

This weekend Ryan Crowley will probably be assigned with the job on Robbie Gray or Travis Boak, but if you look closely he’ll also get some help from team-mates. At Sydney we’d sometimes assign a second player to watch the best midfielder. That guy nominally ‘plays on’ the opposition’s least dangerous player, perhaps a half-forward that’s come up to the stoppage, but his other role is to watch the main man in the midfield and give relief to the primary tagger when required.

In saying all this there are also battles you just can’t win. When we played Brisbane we knew that no matter how close we were to Simon Black or how well we tackled him, he’d often still get his handball away. Therefore you focus on the outside player who receive that handball and concede that Black will get it away regardless. Come finals time, every side requires a different set of tactics.

After the game is done and as I alluded to last week, the review process of your job as a tagger each week can either be pleasant or painful, depending on how you went. You might do a good job on your man and he still has 22 touches and even then you’ve either tackled him every time or you were within 30 centimetres of him and he still gets a possession. Coaches will stand by with the red pen but sometimes you know deep down that there’s not much more that you could have done. If a player pushes you out of the contest or you’re caught daydreaming during a hand-over of opponents, that’s another story. It’s all about effort.

They mightn’t be the most loved players among opposition fans, but taggers often perform a crucial role for their team and especially so in finals. If you’re heading off to one of the games this weekend, take a minute and have a closer look at their battles.