Over the past few seasons Luke’s been an incredibly relevant Fantasy football forward option. From 2014-2017 his average didn’t drop below 87 in AFLFantasy with a personal best year in 2015 where he averaged 97.3 from 22 games. For SuperCoach, during the same time period his average didn’t dip beneath 90 and with a career high 103.9 average also in 2015. During this time period, Dalh was consistently apart of the top averaging forwards across all competitions and was hugely relevant.  However, in 2018 things a little.

We started to see Luke used more in a half forward and pressuring forward role and less time in the midfield with players like Toby McLean being chosen to fill the rotations that Luke had previously held. As such, his fantasy scores drop to an average of 78 in AFLFantasy and just 77 in SuperCoach. The big question is this, does a move to Geelong help his fantasy output?

No, Geelong are flush for midfielders, even with the potential (at time of writing anyway) of Tim Kelly departing I can see for-see only a limited midfield time for Dahlhaus. With a midfield rotation already consisting of Ablett, J. Selwood, Dangerfield, Duncan, Menegola, S.Selwood and the supporting cast of Guthrie, Parfitt and even Fogarty I can’t see the need to base Luke predominantly as a midfielder which is where he’d need to be to get back into the high 80’s and early 90’s of average scores to make him relevant in the salary cap formats of the game. 

In my opinion, the reason for his recruitment is to bring some much needed defensive pressure inside Geelong’s forward 50, something that in his early days as a Bulldog he was well known for. In 2018 the cats were ranked first for efficiency inside forward 50, but they were ranked 8th for tackles inside forward 50. With a combination of strong goal sense craft, defensive pressure and the ability to crumb at the feet of Tom Hawkins I can see Dalh being a handy inclusion for the Cats, but maybe not so much for his Fantasy output. For the record, I do think he retains forward status though. 

Do you think Luke Dahlhaus is fantasy relevant? Comment below and let us know.