Brendan Bolton has the chance this week to equal the best ever start to a Hawthorn coaching career.

The club record of 3 consecutive wins has been held by Graham Arthur for 50 years. Arthur took over as coach from John Kennedy at the start of the 1964 season and coached the Hawks to victory in the opening three rounds against South Melbourne, Carlton and St Kilda.

Remarkably, Bolton already has the second best start in Hawthorn coaching history by winning his first 2 games. None of the club’s coaching greats – Hale, Kennedy, Parkin, Jeans, Joyce or Clarkson - achieved that at the start of their illustrious careers.

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Hawthorn has the opportunity to bring up 11 consecutive wins against Carlton on Friday night. Prior to the current sequence of 10 wins, the previous record winning sequence against the Blues was 7, established from 1984 to 1986. The current sequence started in Round 17 2005.

Overall, Hawthorn has won 58 and lost 102 of its 160 games against Carlton.

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Luke Lowden has become the first Hawthorn player to kick 3 goals on his AFL debut since Billy Nicholls in 2001 (Peter Everitt kicked 3 goals in his first Hawthorn game in 2003). The club record for goals on League debut is 5, shared by Johnny Hall (1938), Terry Ingersoll (1957), Dermott Brereton (1982) and Stephen Lawrence (1988), while the record for most on Hawthorn debut is 8 by Michael Byrne (1982) after he transferred from Melbourne.

As has been well-documented, Lowden made his debut in his sixth season on the Hawthorn list, easily the longest wait in club history under the drafting system. Until now, there have been several Hawthorn players who made their debuts in their fourth seasons on the list including Matthew Young (1994), David Loats (2002), Beau Muston (2009), Taylor Duryea (2013), and Derrick Wanganeen, Angus Litherland and Mitch Hallahan (all this season).

Wearing number 30, Lowden can perhaps look forward to a lengthy career as several reasons wearers of the number have gone on to play 100 games – Col Youren, Des Meagher, Peter Schwab, Tony Woods and Campbell Brown. All of those men, except Woods, also played in Premiership teams.

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Jarryd Roughead is getting close to become just the 8^th Hawthorn player to reach 400 career goals. His bag of 8 against West Coast took him to 396. The previous names who have reached 400 illustrate the quality of the achievement – Dunstall, Matthews, Hudson, Moncrieff, Franklin, Peck and Brereton. It was the second time in his career that Roughead had kicked 8, the other being against Carlton in 2009.

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That game when Roughead kicked 8 against Carlton was the last time Hawthorn had a home game against Carlton. Therefore 2014 is the 5^th consecutive season when Carlton has hosted the only meeting of the two teams in the season, doing so at Docklands 3 times (2010, 2011 and 2013) and at the MCG twice (2012 and 2014).

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25 years ago, in Round 13 1989, Hawthorn thrashed the Brisbane Bears by 71 points – 15.16.106 to 4.11.35. In their one previous game against Hawthorn in Melbourne (at Princes Park the previous season) Brisbane had scored 2.5.17, so in two completed games the Bears had managed a grand total of 6.16.52.  

The game had originally been scheduled for the MCG, but its condition had deteriorated so much in a wet winter that the decision was taken at the start of the week to play the game at Waverley. It thus became an extremely rare Friday night game at Waverley. The attendance was just 6,292, the lowest crowd to watch a Hawthorn game since 1966. Jason Dunstall kicked 5 goals, Chris Wittman 4 and Dermott Brereton 3, while the Brownlow votes went to Peter Curran, John Platten and Peter Schwab.

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50 years ago, in Round 13 1964, Hawthorn set up a 16 point win against Carlton at Princes Park by keeping the Blues scoreless in the opening term. In that first quarter the Hawks kicked 3.3 and the lead remained around the 21 point margin for most of the rest of the game. The final quarter was notable for neither team kicking a goal, the Blues adding 5 behinds and the Hawks just one. Hawthorn won 8.10.58 to 5.12.42, with John Peck and Ian Law both kicking 2 goals. The win lifted Hawthorn to 2^nd on the ladder, the highest position since Round 5.

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Hawthorn has played 88 matches in Round 13 for 39 wins, 48 defeats and one draw (in 1926). The Hawks have won their past three Round 13 games, beating Essendon by 16 points at the MCG in 2010 and then recording a 71 point win at Aurora Stadium in the club’s first ever game against Gold Coast in 2011. After a bye in 2012, Hawthorn beat West Coast by 20 points at Docklands in Round 13 last season.

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Hawthorn’s great goal-kickers never managed big bags against Carlton. Peter Hudson, Leigh Matthews and Jason Dunstall all had a top score of 7 goals against the Blues – in 1968, 1978 and 1989 respectively. The best individual tallies for Hawthorn against the Blues are 9 by Peter Knights in 1985 and 8 by Garry Young (in a losing side) in 1959 and by Jarryd Roughead in 2009.

The Round 13 individual goal-kicking record for Hawthorn is 9, held jointly by Peter Hudson (v Fitzroy in 1971) and Jason Dunstall (v Geelong in 1988), and followed by bags of 8 from Peter Knights (1972), Mike Moncrieff (1980) and Simon Minton-Connell (1995).