IN A true epic top of the table battle yesterday, it was the Adelaide Crows who emerged victorious with a 10-point win over reigning premiers, Melbourne.

For much of the season and even in the preseason, much of the talk has been around Melbourne being the premiership favourites and how hard it has been and will be to stop the reigning premiers this season. However, Adelaide cracked the code and has shown the rest of the competition how to defeat the Dees.

Let’s take a look at the stats and see how they did it.

One area of Melbourne’s game that it has become renowned for is its handball game. Regularly getting well in excess of 100 handballs per game, the chains of handballs particularly the Melbourne midfielders have been able to link together is impressive to watch.

However yesterday Adelaide applied the pressure around the ground and was able to stop Melbourne’s handball game dead in its tracks, restricting the Dees to only 79 handballs for the game, while getting 115 of their own.

This inability of the Dees to play their natural game began to affect them in other ways.

Melbourne’s disposal efficiency was significantly lower than it has been in all season, dropping from an average in the mid 60s to only 53.9 per cent. This is while Adelaide’s remained around its season average in the mid 60s.

This can also be attributed to the number of tackles Adelaide laid, which at 86 was higher than any of the Dees’ first five opponents so far this season.

Ebony Marinoff, Teah Charlton and Rachelle Martin were pressure machines for the Crows, creating havoc across the ground and maintaining pressure all game. This caused the Dees to second guess themselves at times and make mistakes they do not often make.

This extra pressure also saw Melbourne’s inside 50 efficiency drop significantly. Normally up in the mid 50 percents, it was down to 39.3 per cent.

Adelaide coach Matthew Clarke noted post game that that was something his team had focused on pre-game, and it really showed.

Adelaide has been one of the most dominant sides of the competition for a long time, and yesterday was just another demonstration of why that has been the case. Perhaps because the Crows are not a Victorian side they have flown under the radar a little, but they are the last team standing in the undefeated stakes, and with a final month of the season consisting of games against the Bulldogs, Lions, North Melbourne and West Coast, perhaps their undefeated run still has a bit longer to live.