The secret to following a football team is to never look on the dark side. You point out that Essendon won 10 of its last 14 games last year and has added Dylan Shiel to its midfield and should be looking to finish top four. You ignore the fact they finished 11th and haven’t won a final for 14 years.
So, to the first game of the season, a herald of sunny days ahead… until that is Greater Western Sydney thumps you by 12 goals.
Terry Wallace, a man not unaccustomed with underwhelming football teams said of the Bombers that “something’s not right…. It’s got to embarrassment levels.” This was particularly true of the Bombers’ midfield who had their doors blown off by Stephen Coniglio, Tim Taranto, Lachie Whitfield and Jacob Hopper.
A lifeless pre-season is now more difficult to dismiss, as something seems amiss at Tullamarine. John Worsfold has six days to force a solution up out of the soup. The only upside is that St Kilda, a team that held off the pundits’ consensus pick for the wooden spoon by just one point, are up next. Still, a win is better than the carnival of muck we saw from the away team at Sydney Showgrounds on Sunday.
Acknowledging that there is always a risk of reading too much into the first week of the season – both West Coast and Collingwood had miserable starts to their 2018 campaigns – it wasn’t a great few days for many of those teams expected to contend this year. While Richmond opened the year with their now traditional win over Carlton, they face a year without arguably the game’s best defender, five-time consecutive All-Australian, Alex Rance. It is largely uncharted waters for the Tigers, whose big four – Rance, Jack Riewoldt, Dustin Martin and Trent Cotchin – have missed just 14 games since the start of the 2014 season.
For a team that disappoints its fans for sport, Melbourne began its much-hyped year very much on brand, failing to score in the last quarter on the way to losing by four-goals-and-change to an unheralded Port Adelaide.
The Power’s Paddy Ryder and recruit Scott Lycett restricted Max Gawn to less than half his average hit-outs last year, Justin Westhoff kicked five goals, and Tom Rockliff got the ball 44 times, more than shading the Dees’ only shining light Christian Salem, who had career bests in both possessions (32) and metres gained (741). It was a win that Ken Hinkley rated as his best ever moment in coaching. “And that includes finals,” said Hinkley, should anyone dismiss his statement as an opening weekend embellishment.
Not that you couldn’t forgive Hinkley for lapsing into hyperbole following Jack Watts’ pre-season performance. Watts’ second act at the Power has so far been a three-ringed circus. After the game he told Fox Footy’s Cam Mooney that he’d had a hard time getting to grips with his horror off-season after he became embroiled in a texting scandal and then cleared his sinuses by inhaling Wiesn Pulver off a woman’s chest at Oktoberfest.
“It’s just pure relief,” said Watts. “I had weeks where I didn’t want to get out of bed and I’ve never experienced anything like that… I’ll cop more shit from people saying I’m no good at footy for a thousand years compared to what I’ve been through the last few months.”
The Crows too know a few things about a shitty few months, but they were supposed to put that behind them with an Adelaide Oval opener against a Hawthorn team most expected to slide in 2019. While writing off an Alastair Clarkson team is a fool’s errand, only those Hawks fans with the sunniest of outlooks would have expected the game we saw from James “the self-proclaimed Worpedo” Worpel, who had fans recalling Sam Mitchell and momentarily forgetting Tom Mitchell.
Last season was one West Coast fans will never forget, but they will need to wait until this weekend to see the club’s premiership flag unfurled after headquarters rewarded them with an opening round more than 3,500 kilometres away, as the Eagle flies, at the Gabba. That the Eagles were grounded without half-a-dozen premiership players, including Josh Kennedy, is to take nothing away from the excitable Lions, led by prize recruit Lachie Neale who picked up 29 possessions in a 44-point win. It was only a few years ago that the idea of a promising Lions team before the end of the decade might have been mocked into silence long before it got within a mile of attracting the services of an elite midfielder from the other side of the country.
In 2016, Brisbane seemed almost irrelevant and incapable of preventing their young talent heading south to sunnier football climes. But it was that year – a year where the Lions won only three times and played in front of an average home crowd of just a tick above 17,000 – that they re-signed 19 young players, providing the club with a foundation for new coach Chris “Pops” Fagan.
So, we return to one of football’s great truisms – that it doesn’t matter how dark things get, there’s always the promise of a sunnier days ahead, be it next week, next year or 2021… or 2022, definitely 2022.
