Neuroscientists have discovered that memory relies on just a handful of chemicals, and that an equally small number of compounds could be an eraser of memories. These same compounds could potentially be the source of a pill you could take whenever you wanted to forget something. Researchers have already found one of these compounds, as it would appear has the Richmond Football Club. The difference is that neuroscientists are on the verge of creating a pill to erase painful memories, whereas the Tigers are already capable of producing games like Saturday night’s that make their fans forget the pleasant ones. Eternal Trauma of the Tiger Mind.
Richmond played the first-half as though anesthetised, leaving their supporters numb – although their mostly lacklustre and occasionally embarrassing football is perhaps flattered by the metaphor, and undersells an outstanding St Kilda. It was a night where one side did everything right and the other everything wrong, and only a host of junk time goals reduced the result to a humdrum 67-point hammering.
“It was incredibly disappointing. We set ourselves up for a big game, but they outplayed us in all areas tonight,” said Richmond coach, Damian Hardwick. “Outplayed” doesn’t quite do the second-quarter statistical jeremiad justice. St Kilda had the ball 82 more times and nearly five times as many inside 50s as they restricted the Tigers to a miserable 15 possessions in their forward half. It goes some way toward telling the story of a term that saw the Saints kick 9.5 to Richmond’s friendless point.
While St Kilda has made smart decisions at the draft table and recruited astutely, their resurgence is filthy with Nick Riewoldt’s fingerprints. The 331-game player has been called a champion often enough that it amounts to a cliché. On Saturday night, in a game honouring his sister, he schooled the league’s best defender on his way to three goals and took his total mark tally past every other player in the history of the league.
It is a very different set of statistics that fortify the champion status of Geelong’s Tom Lonergan who played his 200th game Saturday night against Brisbane at the Gabba. As a result of running back with the flight of the ball and into Brad Miller’s knee in just his seventh game, Lonergan spent five days in an induced coma, had his blood replaced three times and lost a kidney. In Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong, Lonergan told author James Button that he never seriously considered retirement, and little more than a year later he kicked six goals in the second-half in a best on ground performance in the Cats 2007 VFL Grand Final win. “The photo of Lonergan coming off the ground into the arms of his parents, his mother Trish’s eyes brimming with tears, is one of the most moving I have seen in football,” writes Button.
Lonergan’s role in Geelong’s 85-point win in Brisbane was a lot more understated, but in its own way talks to a man who has always been about team. In 2014, the Western Bulldogs came to Lonergan with a three-year, $1.6 million deal. Geelong’s football manager told him he’d be mad not to take the money. But Lonergan stayed. “Without trying to get too spiritual, I just felt that my teammates were the biggest thing. How did I want to be spoken about at my funeral? I wanted to be known as a Geelong player,” he told Button. Little surprise that the Cats produced one of its most complete performances of the season for his milestone game.
A complete performance has been foreign to Collingwood for some time, and they came no closer to finding it against Essendon at the MCG on Saturday. One of the few constants in Collingwood’s season is that week after week their game has the stop-start, staticky irregularity of an AM radio found in the dash of a thirty-year-old Corolla. “They went back and sideways, and then came back and ended up in almost in the same spot. We weren’t concerned about that,” said Essendon coach John Worsfold with a thin-lipped smile. While the Bombers have also lacked for consistency, on Saturday their attack was as relentless as it was direct. It was also an effort that may have reflected the varying mindsets of the two teams. The Bombers played like a side who despite consecutive losses, were determined to keep their fading finals hopes alive, whereas Collingwood’s performance was closer in proximity to a team whose season is dying in a hundred different places.
For 15-weeks, Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley has maintained a positive focus so intense it’s helped him stay in shape by frying away unnecessary calories. But in the space of two-and-a-half-hours on a Saturday afternoon he’d rather forget, he dropped the mask. At the post-match media conference Buckley confessed that his players looked like they had lost a bit of hope and conceded the loss as a “tipping point” for his team, and likely his coaching future, despite it being tethered to President Eddie McGuire and football’s worst buddy-movie. No longer can they hit pause on the issue and let it run its course toward another stalemate.
While Luke Beveridge could possibly sign at the Western Bulldogs for life, his team increasingly looks like it might now follow the example of the 2009 Hawks and miss the finals the year after winning the flag. Coming into Friday night’s game against the Crows, the Bulldogs were 0-4 on the road for the year and had won just twice in the past seven weeks. After a ten-goal loss in the wet at the Adelaide Oval, they are now 0-5 on the road and 7-8 for the year. While sitting only a game and percentage outside the eight, the Dogs are the owners of the league’s second-worst rate for scoring efficiency. With two tall forwards battling depression, making the finals is perhaps a more difficult task than winning the whole thing from seventh.
Melbourne’s odds of breaking their premiership drought are a little better after they jumped from sixth to fourth after flirting with ninth during a tense final quarter against a Carlton that just wouldn’t quit. While Clayton Oliver, Jordan Lewis and Tom McDonald were major contributors for the Demons, it is the late efforts of Neville Jetta, who won or nullified four crucial contests in the last quarter, which should be the game’s talking point. However, that title may belong to Oliver. In an act likely to spawn a cottage industry of think pieces, Oliver got into what seemed a fiery back-and-forth with an angry Carlton supporter who leaned over the fence to proffer some advice to the young Melbourne midfielder. After already having to weather a debate on staging, Oliver is likely to be at the centre of another distraction he’d rather do without on the eve of what is a critical four weeks, where the Demons face three teams in the top four - Adelaide, Greater Western Sydney and Port Adelaide.
It was the Power who by the end of the round would replace the Demons in fourth spot after upsetting the Eagles in Perth – in a manner that suggests they’d completely erased the memory of last week’s shock loss to, yes… Richmond. With just seven weeks of football remaining, and two games separating fourth and twelfth, by the time we reach the season’s end, so much of what happens in the remaining rounds will likely be haunted by the might-have-been. And those moments for the teams that miss out will be near impossible to forget. For now.
