Richmond and Carlton go back to the future
What a strange time September 2013 was. Vaulted from ninth position at season’s end to a finals slot after Essendon was dumped from the finals in the wake of the Asada supplements scandal, Carlton absorbed the pressure of a packed MCG and beat a Richmond side that for all its bold, youthful talent, couldn’t quite come to terms with such rabid finals excitement.
Close to two years on and after a few rough patches here and there, the middle-tier Tigers still retain a great deal of that joyful spirit but the Blues have completely nose-dived and require perhaps half a decade of painful overhaul, which shows how easily things can slip. You can’t imagine that this week’s meeting between the two sides will be a throwback to that upset, but the Blues do seem to have at least renewed their focus and resolve under John Barker, putting together back-to-back wins before last week’s creditable loss to the Bulldogs.
In another retro touch, Tigers ruckman Shaun Hampson comes in for his first game of the season to replace Ivan Maric and finds himself in the unenviable position of turning out in front of two sets of fans who’ve remorselessly taunted him over the years. At least he’ll probably end up on the winning side.
The outlook remains bleak for the Bombers
Say what you like about James Hird’s merits as a coach, but last week’s insipid performance from the Bombers said far more damning things about the efforts of his players, who were ill-disciplined, lazy and inept for a great majority of their 110-point loss to St Kilda. With their captain Jobe Watson now gone for the season we’re actually going to discover a few things about this playing list in the next few months – potentially uncomfortable things – because Watson has carried many of them for far too long. The Bombers are already the worst clearance team in the league so the risk of being bullied is clear. Where are the other leaders?
The positive spin is that Watson’s absence can also be viewed as an opportunity for those youngsters who want to become genuine midfield contributors, but the patchwork oldies were the more depressing sight last week. James Gwilt played like a wounded double agent. Brent Stanton, David Zaharakis Courtenay Dempsey and the usually-reliable Brendon Goddard mostly looked like driftwood. Take away Dyson Heppell, Cale Hooker and Shaun McKernan’s annual day out and it didn’t look a lot like professional sport.
This week the Dons face Melbourne, whose euphoric and cathartic win against Geelong in round 12 has obscured a lacklustre six weeks of football. If they can’t beat a side as lacking in mojo as this Essendon outfit you’d be asking some hard questions. The Dees nearly always match up well in this fixture and you’d think the likes of Nathan Jones, Jack Viney and Angus Brayshaw will murder the Dons in the middle. No excuses for Melbourne.
Throw your arms around Adelaide
It was an eerie, upsetting, but ultimately uplifting experience to attend a game of AFL football last weekend. In the moments before play started between Essendon and St Kilda on Sunday afternoon – immediately following a respectfully-observed minute of silence in honour of Adelaide coach Phil Walsh – I had one of those moments that removes you from the absurd cocoon that is footy, with its unseemly squabbles and bawdy scandals and its relentless, winter-long grip on our attention. One of my nephews, only nine years old, turned and earnestly noted how sad it all was the way that Walsh had died two mornings prior.
I’d made a note of not mentioning it beforehand but of course he’d seen it on TV, heard it on the radio and even talked about it with his brothers. I stood and wondered how even in their innocence, each of them had absorbed that kind of information and taken it in their stride without asking difficult, unanswerable questions but then a few seconds later the ball was bounced and a melancholy, difficult moment became a happy and enjoyable one.
It was enjoyable because football just goes on. It never leaves you sad for long. Its relentlessness is also its strength, providing a counterpoint to everything in life that really is sad and difficult. To these boys and many other kids around the ground every goal was worthy of a high five, every pack a gasp of appreciation. Phil Walsh had spoken earlier in the season of the responsibility he and other coaches held to make the game attractive and here it was at its most appealing; goals raining in from impossible angles, men roaming through the centre unimpeded, team-mates bounding into open space to mark inch-perfect passes.
At the Adelaide Oval that afternoon Crows fans didn’t have the simple reassurances and the catharsis that a game of football can but they still got together and showed how much they cared for Walsh and what he was doing at the club. 15,000 of them marched from Parliament House to Adelaide Oval to pay their respects and share in their grief, like one giant group hug where nobody held back or pulled away early.
This Saturday a little more normality returns when the Crows travel west to face the Eagles. The challenge is a stern one, psychologically and in a pure football sense. Nobody could envy the Adelaide players their task but in some ways you sense it’s better they get this game out of the way interstate, where the Eagles are making every attempt to make them as comfortable as they can. Second-placed West Coast are clear favourites on paper but if any coach knew that games are decided on a far more human level – by channeling both the physical and emotional – it was Phil Walsh.
The Hawks and Dockers give us a taste of things to come
To Aurora Stadium in Launceston, whose patrons will on Sunday witness a clash between ‘home’ side Hawthorn and ladder-leaders Fremantle but also, one suspects, a constant internal duel between the ugliness and beauty within both sides. Nat Fyfe is playing, so Fremantle would still remain watchable if he was joined by 17 Nick Subans playing on a field of wet cement. Hawthorn has perhaps the greatest density of match-winning players of any side in the league and how they fare here will give a few ideas of what’s to come at the pointy end of the year.
There hangs over each Hawks-Dockers game now the ghostly spectre of all Hawthorn’s premiership-winning success of the last decade, meaning that no matter the 3 three-game gap between these sides as we enter round 15, the Dockers would remain wary of drawing too many conclusions so far out from when it counts. This game then presents us with an amuse bouche to a likely preliminary or grand final match-up, depending on how things shake out.
One final acknowledgment to Dockers defender Luke McPharlin, who rightly apologised to teammates after last weekend becoming the first player in AFL history to actually say something interesting during a half-time interview. Let’s hope there’s no repeat this week in his 250th league game.
The best and worst of the rest
New South Wales State of Origin representative Ryan Hoffman said it best in the wake of his side’s brutal loss to Queensland on Wednesday; sometimes you’ve just got to cop your medicine on the chin. If any side was likely to miss its own mouth right now it’s Brisbane, who’ll probably get a tranquilizing dose of the Swans on Sunday. Sydney has beaten the Lions up for fun in recent years and you can almost put your house on that happening again here.
Far more absorbing will be the earlier game on Sunday, which pits ninth-placed (and sliding) GWS against St Kilda’s exciting batch of youngsters and age-defying superstars. There’s more questions than answers in predicting this result. What sort of water do Leigh Montagna and Nick Riewoldt bathe in and can the rest of us get access to some? How did this week’s Rising Star Jack Lonie slip to Pick 41 in the national draft? More pertinently to this game, how can a side as short-staffed for key defenders as the Giants are right now hope to handle Riewoldt and Josh Bruce’s double act on current form?
On Saturday at Etihad we get to see if Brad Scott’s North Melbourne can follow through with a performance as spiky and confrontational as their coach’s media appearances but the sinking feeling is that major changes are required in their list. Any side is a chance against North and Geelong is no exception. At home to the Bulldogs on Saturday afternoon, Gold Coast seem almost twice the side with Gary Ablett Junior back but if the Dogs are playing finals this year they’ve got to win games against inferior sides and that is most certainly what the Suns are.
