Keep an eye on Brown
In many ways North Melbourne’s narrow loss to Port Adelaide last weekend was the quintessential Roos performance of recent years; Jack Ziebell ferociously hurtling into a 20-80 contest (20 being both his percentage likelihood of winning the ball and also escaping grievous bodily harm) and coming off second best, the entire side looking like a million dollars at various points but ultimately falling short against a real contender and perhaps most jarringly of all, a glorious, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it episode from the sixth season of the frustrating cable drama series, Robbie Tarrant.
That gallant loss also came despite the best efforts of a truly bone-jarring forward, Ben Brown, playing the role of Drew Petrie marginally better than Drew Petrie did. Brown’s actually the most exciting thing about North right now. That’s not necessarily a claim you can make based on numbers because he’s still never taken more than six marks in a game and has only reached the double-figure mark for possessions five times in thirteen outings. Or maybe that does tell us something; that with so few opportunities to insert himself into our collective consciousness he’s made such a dramatic, pulse-raising impression.
Cynics who’ve tired of the defensive labyrinths of modern football would do well to watch Brown bounding up the ground and crashing through packs. That Sideshow Bob hair sits atop a frame so mature and imposing that when he gallops towards the play like some rogue cavalryman you could just as easily picture him diverting to the car park and flipping a four-wheeled drive onto its roof with his bare hands. There’s no stat column for that feeling.
North didn’t get the win this time and will be one of the best 1-3 sides in recent history if they lose to Geelong on Sunday but as the season wears on, what price the intimidation factor of Brown, Petrie and Jarrad Waite barreling towards opposition defenders, all jagged knee-bones and (in Waite’s case) forward-facing studs? Dropping back into the hole against that lot should earn them penalty rates.
Have Port got much left in the tank this week?
If Hawthorn’s Round 3 victory over the Bulldogs was a leisurely Sunday drive, Port Adelaide’s ice-breaking win over the Roos was a 36-car high-speed pile-up. This week against the Hawks and though they’ve had seven days of rest, Port’s physical fatigue from that effort might hinder their ability to maintain, well, power. Coach Ken Hinkley remains optimistic all the same, and can you really put a price on the sight of battered and bruised Ollie Wines beaming away from the back of an ambulance van as his teammates saluted? I suppose you can; the nuggety midfielder will now miss 4-5 weeks with a dislocated wrist.
Port might be 1-3 after this game, but you still feel as though they’re still going places. The last time these two sides met at Adelaide Oval – in Round 10 last year – the home side got home by 14 points, but this game can’t hope to live up to the 3-point Preliminary Final nail-biter they produced in September. Again we’re likely to see an intense physical contest but Hawthorn’s array of scoring options should see them home. On paper at least, it’s the match-up of the round.
The Anzac Overload
Though every minute of Anzac Day has now been colonized by the McLachlan Imperial Forces, it’s worth remembering that every Australian observes it in their own different ways. I have it on good authority that even given the opportunity of savoring an entire day of bombastically-voiceovered montages full of tortuous battle metaphors and invocations of the spirit of departed diggers, a certain amount of sick freaks don’t even bother with the five games of football now sprawling the rest of us across the sofa like sloths.
Personally and probably in an indication of deep personal flaws, I can no longer separate one from the other. Anzac Day, Footy. Footy, Anzac Day. Anzac Day Footy. I think it’s a marker of the passage of time; the third one now since the passing of my own grandfather, an Anzac given to light-heartedly dismissing his war experience as “a holiday” but for whom Collingwood losses hit so hard it took him three days to get home after Collingwood’s one-point defeat to St Kilda in the 1965 semi-final.
Now that he’s gone – and a few of you might feel this way about Anzac Day and football too - the day serves as an annual and increasingly melancholy memorial of him and two major forces in his life, only one of which the family could truly comprehend and share in. Instead of a parade or a phone call we watch a game of football; nothing cynical, nothing contrived and nothing that can be bought or sold. It’s not often sport can make you feel like that.
Taking the Mick
Australian Rules football history is a lot kinder on its iconic figures than those men themselves would perhaps care to admit. Mostly remembering him as a sage, a trailblazer and the league’s best marketing man, we gradually forgot or learned to ignore Kevin Sheedy’s fondness for completely hare-brained football theories - statements that these days would sustain entire weeks of social media activity. Rightly, Sheedy is revered for his overwhelmingly positive contribution to the game, not the minor moments of madness or the darts that missed the target.
Likewise and irrespective of how his tenure at Carlton pans out, the prickly and increasingly-exasperated Mick Malthouse can rest assured of his place in the coaching pantheon. Not that you’d know it from his comments this week. Like Rodney Dangerfield and Aretha Franklin before him, Malthouse thinks there’s a respect problem. You’d think involvement in four premierships and a coaching career spanning four decades would put paid to that, but it says something very uncomfortable about the narrative around AFL coaching jobs that Malthouse’s wife Nanette – who has ridden all of the bumps with him over those years – should apparently be so regularly moved to tears by the speculation over her husband’s job. How do the less-equipped families of newbie coaches fare?
The mood should be a little rosier at Chez Malthouse by the end of the weekend after 0-3 Carlton meet St Kilda, a side whose sole victory over Gold Coast now feels like a fever dream. The Saints were impotent in attack against Collingwood last week, their only eye-catching move towards goal coming when Tim Membrey found himself locked on the boundary and sent a perfectly-weighted pass to a better-positioned forward in the corridor. The only problem was that it was Collingwood’s Travis Cloke.
The good, the bad and the ugly
For all the mouthwatering fixtures on the Anzac Day weekend, there will also be some genuinely terrible football this week. Real slop. St Kilda and Carlton’s aforementioned voyage New Zealand should be relocated to North Korea and take place in a locked, empty stadium free of all onlookers bar statisticians. Brisbane and West Coast too should do the honorable thing, pushing their Sunday starting time back to play in the dark, under the covers with the light off and no talking allowed, let alone cameras.
Still, there’ll be a couple of off-Broadway good ‘uns thrown in there as well. Richmond are always a riot when they beat up on inferior sides and also champagne comedy when they lose to them, so their Friday-night clash with Melbourne is a win-win proposition for neutrals. I feel cautious optimism about Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney’s clash in the marquee time slot of 5:40pm on Saturday, but the Suns have looked very shaky in 2015. After last week’s perspective-laden loss to Hawthorn, the pressure won’t let up for the Bulldogs when Adelaide hit town.
