Kozzy Is Breaking the Game — And I Hate to Admit It

I’m a Pies man through and through, always have been, always will be. But I’m also a footy man, and sometimes footy throws something at you so spectacular you just have to sit back, crack open a cold one, and say — yeah, okay, that’s something special.

Kysaiah Pickett is that something special right now.

The Dees Lost Their Engine. Pickett Became It.

Let’s set the scene. Melbourne entered this season as a club in genuine transition — and not the comfortable kind. Clayton Oliver, one of the premier inside midfielders of the modern era, is gone. Christian Petracca, the silky bull who was just as damaging on the outside, followed him out the door. Jack Viney, the heart-on-sleeve captain who gave the midfield its bite and its ticker, is sidelined indefinitely with an achilles that’s given up the ghost.

That’s three of your four best on-ballers. Gone. In one off-season.

New Demons coach Stephen King walked into a situation that would’ve made lesser men reach for a stiff drink and a transfer request. The engine room of a 2021 premiership side — a drought-breaking, city-defining, generational flag — had been effectively gutted. You’d be forgiven for writing Melbourne off before a ball was bounced.

Instead, they turned to the pocket rocket who’d been terrorising backlines for the better part of four years and said: mate, we need you in the middle.

From Pocket Dynamo to Genuine Midfielder

This is where it gets interesting, because the transformation of Kozzy Pickett from forward-pocket weapon to genuine midfield force isn’t just a positional shift — it’s a fundamental reimagining of how he plays the game.

As a forward, Pickett was a problem because of his speed and his goalkicking brilliance. He’d ghost onto the lead, take a screamer, snap one from the boundary — you knew the threat was coming, you just couldn’t stop it. Brilliant, yes. Predictable in its unpredictability, maybe.

In the midfield? He’s something else entirely. The burst is still there — the man moves like he’s been fired from a cannon — but now he’s adding contested ball work, clearance capacity, and a genuine ability to win the tap-on and get the Dees going forward. His disposal by hand remains elite. His vision in traffic has improved markedly. And the goals? Yeah, they’re still coming, because defenders who are set up for a midfielder are absolutely not set up for someone with Kozzy’s finishing instincts.

He is, in a very real sense, a cheat code that King has unlocked.

What Makes This So Hard to Defend Against?

Here’s the thing that keeps opposition coaches up at night, and definately keeps Pies fans like me nervous when we look down the fixture: how do you set up defensively against a midfielder who can snap a goal from forty metres on his non-preferred side?

Traditional midfield taggers — and every club has one — are built to neutralise ball-winners through physical pressure and positional discipline. They know what they’re chasing. They know the patterns. Tag someone like a Patrick Cripps or a Lachie Neale and yeah, you might annoy them, slow them down a bit.

Tag Kozzy? You’re essentially conceding that your tagger — who is now probably a bigger, slower body — is going to be dragged wide, run through the corridor at pace, or simply left embarrassed when Pickett changes direction and goals from an angle nobody expected. The tagger is slowing your own defence down more than it’s slowing him down.

And if you don’t tag him, he’s collecting possessions, creating clearances, and quite possibly kicking four goals by halftime. Good luck with that.

King’s Tactical Gamble Is Paying Off

Credit where it’s due — Stephen King has come in and made a bold call. The easy move would have been to go shopping in the trade and free agency markets for ready-made midfielders to plug the holes. Safe. Conservative. Predictable.

Instead, he’s built a system around leveraging what he has — and what he has is an extraordinary footballer in Pickett who was perhaps being under-utilised as a pure forward. By shifting Kozzy into the midfield brigade, King hasn’t just addressed the loss of Oliver and Petracca — he’s created something different, something that doesn’t have an obvious template in the modern game.

The supporting cast matters too. Melbourne’s youth — and there’s genuine talent coming through — is suddenly playing with permission. When your best player is running through the middle and backing himself, it gives licence to everyone around him. That’s how cultures rebuild after difficult periods. Teh whole group feeds off the energy of one player performing at an extraordinary level.

The Carn the Pies Caveat

Now look, I haven’t lost the plot entirely. I’m still a Magpie, I still think we’ve got the best list in the competition, and when Melbourne and Collingwood meet this season I’ll be backing the black and white all the way.

But I’d be doing you, the reader, a disservice if I let tribalism blind me to genuine quality. And Pickett right now is genuine quality of the highest order.

The comparison that keeps coming to mind — and this might start an argument at the pub — is a young Dusty Martin when he started operating more through the midfield rather than purely as a forward. That transformation took Dusty from brilliant to genuinely unstoppable. There are moments watching Pickett in the guts where I get flashes of that same feeling. The burst, the vision, teh absolute confidence to back himself in tight situations.

Is Kozzy at Dusty’s level yet? We’re not there. But the ceiling is visible, and that’s exciting — even for a bloke who’d rather he wasn’t exciting against the Pies.

What the Rest of the Competition Needs to Figure Out

The challenge for every other club is that Pickett’s evolution is ongoing. He’s not a finished product — he’s a work in progress that’s already causing serious damage. As his contested ball work continues to develop, as his endurance around the ground grows, and as his reading of the midfield contest becomes more instinctive, he’s only going to get better.

Coaches around the competition are going to be sitting around whiteboards for a long time this year trying to crack this particular code. Some will throw a tag at him. Some will try to flood the corridor and take away his space. Some will try to match him with pace. None of those solutions are clean, none of them are perfect.

That’s the mark of a truly dangerous player — when the opposition has no good answer, only a collection of bad ones.

The Verdict From a Pies Man

Kysaiah Pickett is, right now, the AFL’s most dangerous player. I can’t believe I just typed that about a Dee, but here we are.

Stephen King has taken a crisis and turned it into an opportunity. Melbourne lost their midfield. They replaced it with something unpredictable, electric, and genuinely difficult to plan for. That’s clever coaching and a brave footballer seizing his moment.

Come finals time — if the Dees get there, and they might — Pickett through the middle is going to be the story of the season. Mark these words.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lie down and remind myself that Carn the Pies, and everything is going to be fine.