Football is finally back
Lacking for wheels and mostly floating around the surface of the MCG with a costumed superhero along for the ride, Carlton’s pre-game hovercraft gimmick proved an unfortunate metaphor for their performance in the season-opener on Thursday night. As far as ‘fan engagement’ exercises go, it’s hard to see such activities ever eclipsing tried and true ones like winning.
There were other more tangible pointers to Carlton’s imminent demise. Dale Thomas never quite caught on in his first season at the Blues and this one started disastrously too as the luckless on-baller ran off the ground in the opening minutes with a season-denting shoulder dislocation. Thus Carlton was always due to tire and struggle late, their spirit-lifting four-goal buffer at the start of the second term notwithstanding. What followed was more a drip-feed of inadequacy than a deluge of incompetence.
Richmond also settled. Ben Griffiths and an emotional Jack Riewoldt shone. The Tigers were also buoyed by a sparkling debut from mystery midfielder Kamdyn McIntosh, whose failure to front for a senior game in his first couple of years might have had Tigers fans wondering the kind of dark thoughts that Richmond fans tend to wonder. They’re strange and often misleading things, debuts. Peter Daicos booted his first kick in league footy out on the full. Dean Polo and Jordan Gysberts looked like Brownlow medalists. We might never get another Kamdyn but this one looks a beauty.
At the end of the year, this game will probably have highlighted nothing much other than the spirit-lifting feeling of the season’s opening bounce. In all likelihood Carlton could end up football road-kill and the good sides will simply put the foot down and reverse over them. An optimist would say Richmond were rusty, others that they still don’t look entirely up to it. There’s plenty of time.
Sydney is never out of the game, no matter what the conditions
It seemed fitting that after his brave-faced honesty fronting the media this week, Bombers captain Jobe Watson should be confronted in his first game of the season by a Sydney downpour. No-one looks more comfortable when it’s wet. The loping Watson even makes dry days look wet, leaping away from packs like a gammy-legged plumber escaping a rising pool of sewerage.
Of course his colleagues are now out of the poo as well and for a lot of the time on Saturday they played like it, slashing their way through the puddles to establish what looked a match-winning 41-point lead in the dying stages of the third quarter. Yet somehow they lost it, fading to a defeat as irritating as Michael Hurley’s hairstyle.
Luke Parker had been supreme for the Swans with 35 possessions up until the opening minutes of the final term, at which point the nearest-best on ground was 13 touches less. The only way Essendon could stop him, it turned out, was to wait for one of his own teammates to knock him out. Ironically it was during the break in play while Parker was taken from the ground that Sydney regrouped and launched an intense, desperate counter-attack against the tiring Bombers, kicking seven goals to none in the final term to pinch it.
Lance Franklin and Kurt Tippett were colossal in that final burst, kicking two goals apiece and lifting their side in all other senses possible. Franklin even managed a goal-saving tackle at the other end. Much-hyped debutant Isaac Heeney was a sight, adding the match-sealing goal to 17 assured possessions.
The positives for Essendon? Tom Bellchambers held his own in the absence of the departed Paddy Ryder and like Paul Chapman, twilight-period Adam Cooney will really add to this side. It was an admirable effort given the Bombers’ unconventional pre-season but they were beaten by a side that only turned up for a quarter of the game. Not ideal, really.
Phil Walsh is taking it one week at a time
Here’s a very selective precedent to improve the mood of North Melbourne supporters: in the first round of their Premiership-winning 1991 season, Hawthorn was ingloriously thumped on a trip to Adelaide, blitzed by 86 points and left wondering whether they’d reached the end of the road as a flag contender. Could the Kangaroos eventually view Sunday’s 77-point Adelaide Oval thumping as a turning point? Having been whipped in every statistical category (including, against all odds, clangers) at least the only way is up.
On the flipside, Adelaide’s new leadership team of coach Phil Walsh and skipper Taylor Walker couldn’t have started any better, the latter contributing 22 possessions, 15 marks and 6 goals to set an authoritative tone for his side. So maligned by Taylor’s dominance, his opponent Joel Tippett was subbed out of the game at half-time and could have been forgiven for heading straight to the airport. Walsh is probably wary of the fate that has befallen many of his better-credentialed predecessors, so immediately turned his attentions to next week’s clash with Collingwood. Wiping his own sides’ insipid effort from the memory will be the only thing to stop Brad Scott combusting.
A new season brings new hopes
The opening round was a happy one for a host of fans not likely to need tickets in September with Melbourne, the Bulldogs, GWS and Collingwood all notching spirited wins. Paul Roos’ Demons made a mockery of Gold Coast’s finals aspirations, looking a transformed side in their 26-point MCG win. Their seven club debutants – Jeff Garlett, Jesse Hogan, Aaron Vandenberg, Ben Newton and Angus Brayshaw and Heitier Lumumba - were suitably magnificent, adding the hard-nosed aggression and goal-kicking potency the Dees have lacked in seasons past.
Brayshaw unleashed 9 bone-jarring tackles, as ample an indication as any of the disparity in hunger between the two sides. Just as pleasingly, Garlett laid 6 –as many as Nathan Jones - in a 20-possession, 2-goal effort. Rodney Eade might be quietly fuming that a side who’d failed to pass the 100-point mark at all last season rained down 17.13 on his overstretched defence. The stats made for ugly reading.
The Bulldogs’ 10-point win flattered West Coast a little. Adding injury to insult, luckless Eagle Mitch Brown suffered a season-ending knee injury. Only wayward kicking in the final term prevented the Dogs from extending the winning margin any further. They won the contested possession count by 19, a yawning gap that you’d think points to future struggles for Adam Simpson’s side.
It was a nightmare round for tipsters, but the honour for the most lackluster game of the round – the Giants’ win over St Kilda – was at least easy to predict. Only Nick Riewoldt’s final-quarter departure with a neck injury following his clash with Thomas Bugg raised pulses inside Etihad stadium. The Saints had been on a 3-goal charge when the momentum-sapping incident occurred, but a 9-point GWS victory was a fair result in a game that never reached any heights as a spectacle.
Another game that is unlikely to be released as a commemorative DVD was Collingwood’s two-goal stumble across the line against Brisbane. Unfancied as finals contenders by most wise judges, the Pies should have won it in a canter after leading by as much as 53 points during the third term but like Sydney against the Dons, the home side piled on seven goals to nothing in the final term to provide a scare.
Brisbane lost skipper Tom Rockliff with broken ribs and coach Justin Leppitsch admitted his men had been “obliterated” in both contested possession and pressure acts in the first three quarters. There’ll be no let up next week as his travels to play a chastened North Melbourne. Coaching: not all it’s cracked up to be.
Saving the best until last
Hovercrafts and three-dollar meat pies are one thing, but the best way to get ‘The Year of the Fan’ under way was for the AFL to schedule some engaging fixtures to start the season. Fremantle’s narrow home win against Port Adelaide was, if anything, slightly better than we’d hoped and Monday’s Hawthorn-Geelong blockbuster started as expected - a claustrophobic, high-intensity shoot-out - before the Hawks unlocked their turbo-mode capabilities and killed it off as a contest.
There’s something reassuring about watching Hawthorn. Its players boast a nimble, sure-footed confidence too consistently applied across every section of the ground as to be coincidental. You have to win the contested possession, of course, but there also seems to exist in Hawthorn’s players an innate awareness and anticipation of each other’s’ attacking movements, like a footballing version of predictive text.
In the second term Jordan Lewis – appearing to everyone else like a man shaping to take a 55-metre set shot – looked to Sam Mitchell just as likely to change course at the last minute and spear a pass into the corridor. Mitchell marked that and goaled. If the Hawks keep finishing each other’s’ sentences this year, not even sides as well-drilled as Geelong have a hope.
