Join now and get your first month for just $1.<\/a><\/p>\nSteven King\u2019s side will go into the clash undermanned however, with all of Bayley Fritsch, Changkuoth Jiath and Paddy Cross departing the 23 due to injury.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the undefeated Suns (3-0, 191%) are sitting pretty in first place after three straight wins by more than nine goals to start their season.<\/p>\n
Brownlow Medallist Matt Rowell returns to the fray after a serious finger break during February\u2019s State of Origin sidelined him, while young key forward Jed Walter will also play his first game of 2026. 19-year-old Lachie Gulbin is the third of Damien Hardwick\u2019s inclusions, named for his second AFL game.<\/p>\n
In an unfortunate manner, Christian Petracca (hamstring) will miss his maiden clash against his old side Melbourne, with Bailey Humphrey (suspension) and Alex Davies (omitted) also making way.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the Dees have won 12 of their last 14 games against the Suns, though have lost their two most recent outings.<\/p>\n
The Round 4 match begins at 3:15pm local time. Watch it live on Fox Footy (Channel 504), and streaming on Kayo, from 2:30pm AEST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melbourne is set to embrace its biggest challenge yet in 2026, hosting a top-of-the-table Gold Coast clash on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-586559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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