North Melbourne is perfectly capable of beating Hawthorn but probably won’t
Not long ago you would have been laughed out of your tipping competition for suggesting that North Melbourne would account for Geelong at Kardinia Park, but these are the shifting sands of football. Hoodoos aside, what was most impressive about North’s 16-point victory against the Cats last week was that they fought their way back from an atrocious start - one that featured more turnovers than a Parisian bakery - and then crushed their opponent in a final-quarter surge.
The Roos did that pleasing but also infuriating thing where their subtler virtues come to the fore; Robbie Nahas raining in late goals as though he wasn’t someone that a club as middling as Richmond had told to push on; the defensive rebound of Sam Wright and Ben Jacobs and I suppose slightly less subtly, reborn Jarrad Waite’s belligerent efforts up forward. We probably shouldn’t mention Robbie Tarrant’s second successive excellent showing, lest he trip over a water feature or contract a rare tropical disease from an insect in the nursery section of Bunnings Warehouse.
So North hit their straps last week, they play well at Etihad and they also generally match up well against this week’s opponents Hawthorn. Can they beat them though? Personally, I wouldn’t bet the change from my car console on it.
Malthouse Theatre
In case you’ve been living under a rock, this weekend Blues coach Mick Malthouse will break Jock McHale’s long-standing coaching record, moving to the monumental figure of 715 games coached. That’s testament not only to sustained excellence but also an incredible adaptability, stamina, competitiveness and perseverance, qualities to which we tend to grow complacent or undersell.
Malthouse has been around long enough now to have been beaten out of coaching jobs by Mike Patterson. He’s old enough to have coached Bruce Duperouzel, a player whose career started during the Whitlam years. No-one else in league coaching ranks has been at it so long that they can count Brad Hardie amongst the players they’ve fallen out with. Now 43 years on, after 174 games as a player, 714 as a coach, 4 Premierships and numerous burst blood vessels, he’s also outlasted every AFL coach that ever picked up a clipboard.
If the numbers tell a compelling story about Malthouse’s monumental significance to the game, Malthouse’s career record also gives some perspective when it comes to Carlton’s current struggles and the likelihood that he probably won’t be there once the ship is righted fully; at Footscray he succeeded with scant resources as the club lurched from crisis to crisis; at West Coast he transformed a manufactured (and not always lavishly-funded) collective that barely won in Melbourne into a marauding powerhouse with a support base of often-unhinged intensity; at Collingwood, he took charge of an institution in noticeable decline and helped restore its status as an Australian sporting icon. Every one of those tasks took time. Years. Decades.
Malthouse might not be loved by many or even liked by some (football, remember, remains a sport for which there’s no statistical column for either) but he’s most certainly respected. That he passes McHale against Collingwood at the MCG? It just feels right.
The Showdown promises to be another belter
If you’d said a month back that the Showdown would pit 5th against 13th you probably wouldn’t have budgeted on the Crows being the better-placed of the two sides, but ladder positioning rarely matters in these encounters anyway. The Power and Crows split them one apiece last season. Ascendant up until copping a fearful pasting against the Bulldogs, Adelaide must recuperate fully to withstand Port’s assault on the contest. That’s a slight worry because they were smashed in a physical sense last week, out-tackled 71-52 and simply blown away by half-time.
Conversely, Port veered between lung-busting magnificence and head-scratching fecklessness against the Hawks, leading by as much as 58 point at one point and only just staggering over the line following a sustained final-term Hawthorn counter-attack. Still, some kind of fade-out should have been expected because the Power battered themselves into submission a week earlier against North Melbourne. “We’d love to be able to do it for four quarters but it’s nearly impossible,” said pragmatist coach Ken Hinkley of the near-disaster against the Hawks. The question here is how much of Port’s high-intensity best will get them past the Crows this week. A half? Three quarters? Whatever transpires is sure to be gripping.
Bonus: this game will be brought to you live via the Guardian goal-by-goal live blog.
Sydney might halt the Bulldogs’ momentum
The Western Bulldogs could have gone either way when they gave coach Brendan McCartney the flick in the wake of another disappointing season in 2014. The general consensus was that treading water was the best hope. Now they’re like that friend who documented his disastrous break-up via painstaking Facebook updates; you’re silently amazed but also happy for him when he reemerges at the pub six months later, gym-fit and tanned with a circle of attractive strangers gathered around him.
Last week the Dogs really hammered Adelaide, no mean feat even at home and an indication that they genuinely can match it with the better sides. The only complaint you’d make out of last week’s performance was that at 75 points up at three-quarter time and having copped their own fair share of beltings over the last few years, they put the cue in the rack rather than snapping if over their knee and dishing out some real pain.
While the 57-point win was headlined by 6 goals to Jake Stringer, there were so many other positives; super-impressive Lin Jong gathering 21 possessions and kicking 2 goals; veteran Bob Murphy slipping loose – seemingly every couple of minutes - to pilot play from half back; Liam Picken, resolutely unfashionable but unfailingly effective in driving the Dogs forward from the centre; key defender Michael Talia – a missing person in the McCartney era – smothering Taylor Walker out of the game.
What awaits them this week is a far tougher assignment; Sydney at the SCG. Last time (Round 10, 2012) they lost by 92 points and also mixed in their last five meetings are 82, 63, 35 and 39-point losses against a side that doesn’t often win by margins of cricket proportions. A dose of reality might await the Beveridge renaissance but it’s not a game in which Sydney can afford to relax for a minute.
The good, the bad and the ugly
It’s best that we get the bad news out of the way first: Gold Coast, St Kilda and West Coast will all play games of football this weekend. At the moment, new Suns coach Rodney Eade seems about as impressed with life as my dad when I told him that the multi-million dollar lottery win notification he’d received via his Hotmail account may not in fact be genuine. Unfortunately there’s no spam filter for coaching job offers, but at least this week Eade’s side faces a club of currently-equal statistical ineptitude in the ‘Q-Clash’, a derby with an appropriately uninspiring moniker. It’s 17th vs 18th, neither side having won a game this year. What more can you say?
The Eagles, thumping winners over Brisbane last week, are at home to buoyant GWS. The Giants must genuinely fancy themselves in this one but need no reminder that their last three games against the Eagles have resulted in a combined deficit of 290 points. Ouch. Elsewhere St Kilda will just try to avoid looking like witches hats against Essendon on Sunday and Fremantle’s blistering start to the season should continue against slowly-building Melbourne.
The most engaging of all the off-Broadway games this week might be Geelong and Richmond at the MCG on Saturday. The Tigers suffered one of the most infuriating losses of the Hardwick era (and hasn’t there been a few?) last Friday night against Melbourne and their coach is probably fortunate that Mick Malthouse has taken most of the spotlight off him this week. At present, Richmond has a better starting 21 than Geelong. They need to win this one and really ought to.
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