Jack Gunston is set to become the tenth player in Hawthorn history to record 400 goals for the club.

Gunston is currently poised on 399 Hawthorn goals, after kicking one against St Kilda last Saturday. He also kicked 20 goals for Adelaide in 2010-11 to make his overall AFL career tally 419.

The first player to kick 400 goals for Hawthorn was John Peck, who reached the milestone in Round 5 1965 against Richmond.

Ben McEvoy will this week become the seventh player to reach the VFL-AFL 250-game milestone at Hawthorn after starting a career at another club. The previous six were Russell Greene, Paul Salmon, Peter Everitt, Brent Guerra, Shaun Burgoyne and Brian Lake.

There is a longer list of players who reached 250 VFL-AFL games after leaving Hawthorn which includes Alan Martello, Rodney Eade, Terry Wallace, Daniel Chick, Luke McPharlin, Lance Franklin, Grant Birchall, Josh Kennedy and Isaac Smith.

53 points anyone? Not only has Hawthorn won all five previous games against Gold Coast at University of Tasmania Stadium, but it has won three of them by the same margin of 53 points (in 2014, 2015 and 2018). The other victories were by 71 points in the first match between the clubs in 2011 and by 26 points in 2016.

This Saturday’s encounter between the Hawks and Suns will be the fourth consecutive meeting between the teams played outside the home state of either club, following matches in Adelaide (2020), Sydney (2021) and Darwin earlier this season.

In fact, after Saturday, the two clubs will have met 16 times, but will each only have hosted three times at their main home grounds of the MCG and Metricon Stadium, and without a game between the clubs at either venue since 2017.

Hawthorn won its first eight games against Gold Coast, which was a better starting record than against any other club. The run ended in 2017, when the Hawks lost to the Suns by 86 points at Carrara in Round 3 and then suffered another defeat by 16 points at the MCG in Round 12 of the same season.

Hawthorn bounced back to win the next three against the Suns, before losses in Round 11 last season and earlier this year. The overall record between the clubs is currently 11-4 in Hawthorn’s favour.

The two clubs have met once previously in Round 21. This was 10 years ago, in Round 21 2012, when Hawthorn thrashed Gold Coast at the MCG by 64 points – 19.15.129 to 10.5.65. There were 11 individual goalkickers, headed by Jack Gunston with four, while Brad Sewell and Luke Hodge both had 35 disposals and received three and two Brownlow votes respectively.

Luke Breust continues to move up the career games charts and this week will join John Platten on 258 games, in equal 14th on the Hawthorn list.

Breust’s last quarter goal against St Kilda took him to 37 goals for the season and a share of the lead in the club goal-kicking with Mitch Lewis. Breust has already been the leading goal-kicker at the club on three previous occasions, with 54 in 2018, 34 in 2019 and 33 in 2021.

This Friday marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most significant days in Hawthorn’s history prior to joining the League in 1925.

On 5 August 1922, Hawthorn played a VFA game at Glenferrie and kicked a record score of 30.31.211 to defeat Prahran 6.9.45. The score was the highest recorded in either the VFA or VFL to that time. The winning margin of 166 points is one point higher than the largest Hawthorn has recorded in the VFL-AFL. Several members of the Hawthorn team that day were also part of the club’s inaugural VFL team in 1925.

Since it was first contested in 1970, Round 21 has been one of the best rounds for Hawthorn, with 37 wins and only 14 defeats, including victories in 13 consecutive Round 21 matches between 1982 and 1994 and eight consecutive wins between 2006 and 2013. Hawthorn has now had five more Round 21 wins, beating North Melbourne (2016 and 2017), Geelong (2018), GWS in the Canberra snow in 2019 and Collingwood last season. There was no Round 21 in 2020.

A feature of Hawthorn’s Round 21 wins has been massive winning margins. In fact, five of the 27 one hundred-point victories in Hawthorn history have occurred in Round 21, more than in any other round. These were in 1983 (versus Melbourne), 1986 (Geelong), 1991 (Fitzroy), 2010 (Fremantle) and 2011 (Port Adelaide).

30 years ago, in Round 21 1992, the Hawks backed up their massive win against Essendon the previous week with a solid 19-point win against Collingwood. A Waverley Park crowd of 53,369 saw seventh-placed Hawthorn 11.16.82 defeat third-placed Collingwood 8.15.63. Paul Hudson kicked six goals and Anthony Condon had 28 disposals.

40 years ago, in Round 21 1982, Hawthorn survived a late scare to beat Melbourne by 11 points – 14.19.103 to 14.8.92. The Hawks led by 43 points at the final change, but then conceded seven unanswered goals to fall behind by a point. Late goals to Michael Tuck and Michael Moncrieff saved the day. Moncrieff kicked four goals for the game and Rodney Eade, with 30 disposals, was best-on-ground. Several incidents during the game attracted media attention in the following days.  

Jason Dunstall and Peter Hudson share Hawthorn’s Round 21 individual goal-kicking record. Hudson kicked nine goals in Round 21 in both 1970 and 1971, while Dunstall recorded the same tally in 1986 and 1989.

Jarryd Roughead’s six goals against Gold Coast in his final game in 2019 is the record for Hawthorn against the Suns, surpassing the bags of five kicked by Luke Breust (2011), Lance Franklin (2013) and Jack Gunston (2014 and 2017).