On the Thursday night before his first game at Geelong, Patrick Dangerfield was on The Footy Show, sitting on a throne, like some sort of surf-coast Caesar. It wasn’t exactly the Geelong way. Their champions of recent years had mostly been taciturn figures. Dangerfield had already given more interviews in the pre-season than most of his teammates had given in 10 years. No footballer was more available for comment. He was at Geelong to win premierships, he told us. They’d build a game around him.
In many ways, they built the club around him. That Monday, against a side that had won the last three flags, he played one of the great individual games of the decade. He ended up winning the Brownlow medal by nine votes, and collected pretty much every other award there was to win. He was the best player in Australia. Geelong had reset, put all their eggs in the Dangerfield basket, and were on the cusp of another golden era.
But it never happened. Every year since, they have contended, and never quite convinced. Every year, they have been the backdrop to someone else’s story. Every year, Dangerfield has been in the top echelon of players, and has entered the finals series in exceptional form. Every year, he has trudged off, a step behind his captain, statistically sound, but leaving only questions. Is he one of the great home-and-away players, not suited to the hyper-pressured nature of finals? Does he, as Leigh Matthews said a few weeks ago, try too hard, undone by “a desperation that borders on the frantic”. Do we expect too much of him? Does he demand too much of himself?
Dangerfield and his Cats were under the pump heading into last week’s semi-final. He had a bung hand. He was coming off a poor qualifying final. The team was on its final warning. They’d lost to the Giants three times in a row. Another season, which had looked so promising at times, which had seen them unleash some astonishing 20-minute bursts, seemed to have petered out.
But if there’s one thing they specialise in, it’s semi-finals. You can set your calendar to it. They’re like the world’s greatest Group 2 racehorse. They’re like Zipping, who won four Sandown Classics and an Australian Cup, but who always fell a couple of lengths short in the truly world class races. Geelong won. We stifled a yawn. Melbourne fans licked their lips.
As always, Dangerfield was marked harder than anyone else on the ground. Despite being tagged, he had the most clearances and contested possessions of any Geelong player, yet didn’t figure in their best players. Though his horsepower has diminished, he can still leave your jaw on the floor. He can still seize a dead ball, tuck it under his arm, drop his left shoulder, and cannon away.
Few footballers in the modern game, with the possible exception of Chris Judd, have been able to go from zero to a hundred quite like him. But unlike Judd, who would glide away like a speed skater, Dangerfield at full pelt resembles a downhill skier – crouched, tensed, always half a chance to go hurtling off the mountain. Those mad Dangerfield bursts so often end in anticlimax – in a stray, overcooked kick. To his critics – and there’s a particularly salty subset of fans who delight in panning him – that’s the problem. He butchers the ball, they say. He doesn’t kick enough goals. He’s a hypochondriac. He’s a flopper. He’s dirty.
It’s mostly rubbish. But there are flaws in his game, and holes in his CV. His finals record actually isn’t too bad. But when an entire season had boiled down to a few moments, and when the right run has presented itself – the second half of last year’s grand final, the third term of the 2019 preliminary final, the opening quarter of 2018 elimination final – he’s been an oddly passive, peripheral figure. Most of his truly great performances – the day we thought he’d wrecked his knee and he ended up kicking 5.6 in a half, the first half of the 2017 semi-final, the night he had 48 possessions against North Melbourne – have come in Group 2 games.
A few years ago, he sat down with the Herald Sun’s Mark Robinson and talked about how he was unfulfilled without a premiership and a dominant individual finals series. “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it,” he said. He wants this premiership so much. He seems to want it too much. He wants his teammates – an orderly assortment of the ageing and the adequate – to complement him the way Dustin Martin’s Tigers did. He desperately wants to secure his place in football history – to be in the same conversation as Martin, as Franklin, as Ablett, as Judd.
Dangerfield is one of the great footballers of this generation. But he’s also one of the hardest to place. On Friday night, in his sixth preliminary final, in one of the best stadiums in Australia, up against one of the most brutal midfields imaginable, he gets yet another chance to elevate himself. No one wants it more. As it stands, he remains a small-s superstar, a forever thwarted prince in waiting.
Follow Friday’s preliminary final between Melbourne and Geelong at Optus Stadium with Guardian Australia’s liveblog. Start time in Perth is 5:50pm, 7:50pm AEST
