MELBOURNE – The game knew who the night belonged to before the speeches started. Gary Ablett Jr walked through the Crown Palladium on Tuesday in his first year of eligibility and left as an inductee, the formality of the vote confirming what Australian football has understood since roughly 2007: that no midfielder has dominated this competition quite the same way.
He was joined by West Coast Eagles icon John Worsfold, Essendon’s 400-game full-back Dustin Fletcher, South Australian goalkicking champion Tim Evans, Indigenous trailblazer David Kantilla, and umpiring great Hayden Kennedy at the 2026 Australian Football Hall of Fame ceremony. Bill Walker, the only four-time Sandover medallist in history, was elevated to Legend status – the 34th in the Hall’s 30-year history.
Ablett retired in 2020 through a guard of honour at the Gabba after Geelong’s Grand Final defeat, finishing a 357-game career that accumulated virtually every individual honour the game offers. Two Brownlow Medals. Eight All-Australian selections. Two premierships. Five players’ MVP awards. Three coaches’ best player citations. Six club best and fairests. He had 45 or more disposals on six separate occasions and reached 53 in round 10 of 2012 – a number that still functions as a benchmark for what a single-game midfield performance can look like.
The transformation happened at the end of 2006. Geelong’s playing group challenged Ablett to train with the intensity of Chris Judd, who had just won a Brownlow and taken Carlton to a preliminary final almost by himself. Ablett responded by spending the next decade proving the challenge undersold him. He left for Gold Coast at the peak of his powers in 2011, won a Brownlow there too, then returned to Geelong for a final act that ended with that farewell lap in Brisbane. The AFL confirmed he was voted in unanimously.
“Little Master” was the nickname that stuck, inherited from his father, whose own Hall of Fame induction stands alongside him in the record books. The son eclipsed the father statistically, which is a sentence with real weight given who the father was. The pattern is not unique to Australian football – American sport has wrestled with the same calculus, most recently when Sherman Lewis, a four-time Super Bowl champion and Michigan State legend, died in May at 83, leaving an NFL legacy shaped more by impact than statistics.
Worsfold’s case rested on something harder to quantify than career disposal averages. He is the only person in West Coast’s history to win premierships as both captain and coach – 1992 and 1994 as a half-back defender, 2006 as the man in the box. The club names its champion award after him. He captained more games at the Eagles (138) than anyone else and coached more (281) than anyone else. When he returned to the club in October 2024 as head of football, he was walking back into an institution he had shaped from its first decade as a competition newcomer.
“I backed that in and the Club delivered on that for me,” Worsfold said at the ceremony, recalling the gamble of joining an expansion side in 1987. “Delivered on my playing dream and gave me the opportunity to be a premiership senior coach.”
He played 209 games for the Eagles as a fierce, spoiling defender, forming one of the great half-back lines alongside Glen Jakovich and Guy McKenna. Both Jakovich and McKenna are themselves Hall of Fame members, which locates Worsfold within a specific era of West Coast dominance that reshaped what a non-Victorian club could achieve in a national competition.
Fletcher’s induction completed a set. He becomes the fourth member of the VFL/AFL 400-game club in the Hall, joining Michael Tuck, Brent Harvey, and Legend Kevin Bartlett. He played 400 games for Essendon across 23 seasons, won premierships in 1993 and 2000 under Kevin Sheedy, and spent the better part of two decades neutralising the competition’s best key forwards – Tony Lockett among them, then Lance Franklin. His longevity was the point as much as his skill. The groin injury that ended his career came in the 400th game itself, which had its own kind of symmetry.
Walker’s elevation to Legend status arrived with ceremony that matched its significance. Now 80 and a great-grandfather of two, he spent 305 games at Swan Districts between 1961 and 1976 as a rover of extraordinary range – 456 goals, five club champion awards, four Sandover Medals as the WAFL’s best and fairest. He was an inaugural Hall of Fame inductee in 1996. Three decades later, he is a Legend, joining Merv McIntosh, Graham Farmer and Haydn Bunton snr as Western Australians who reached the game’s highest individual honour.
He grew up the son of a Narembeen farmer in WA’s wheatbelt, light and quick, with polished skills on both sides. He revolutionised how forward pockets moved through the forward line, roaming rather than holding position – an approach that looks obvious now and was genuinely novel then.
Evans, the 1000-goal Port Adelaide SANFL full forward, and Kantilla, the Tiwi Islands ruckman who became a foundation figure at South Adelaide in the early 1960s, completed the playing inductees. Kantilla was named in the Australian Football Indigenous Team of the Century in 2006; his journey from the Top End to the SANFL opened a path that subsequent generations used. Kennedy, who umpired 495 games and five Grand Finals before a persistent hamstring injury ended his career five short of 500, represented the non-playing cohort. The full class of seven inductees was confirmed by the Australian Football League on Tuesday evening.
The Hall of Fame was established in 1996, the centenary year of the competition. The 2026 class brings the total membership to 345, with 34 Legends. What it cannot do is resolve the argument about where Ablett Jr actually ranks among them. That debate, the game has learned, tends to go longer than 357 games.
