“Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the western sea.” – Deuteronomy 34: 1-2
“I’m high on the hill
Looking over the bridge
To the MCG.” – Paul Kelly, Leaps and Bounds
#bemorebulldog is a cultural force as much as it is a hashtag. On an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, thousands of nomadic Bulldogs supporters, usually parched this time of year, reach Spotless Stadium awaiting deliverance. Hope and hunger hangs heavy in the air.
You need more than a map to make it from Barkly Street and up the Hume Highway to Sydney’s Olympic Park. You need the optimism that comes from supporting a club that was supposed to be dormant and miserable after their captain walked out at the end of 2014 and whose coach cleaned out his locker not long after.
You need the optimism that sportswriter Charles P Pierce describes as neither weak nor naive, but “tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair”.
With less than 10 minutes to go in the penultimate game of the season, brooding existential despair is in play. Time seems fungible. Is it 2016 or 1997? Two weeks ago, before boarding a plane for Perth to play in an elimination final, Matthew Boyd said: Clearly, people don’t give us much of a chance, but we certainly don’t subscribe to that train of thought.”
Beginning his life as a Bulldog in 2001 via the second round of the rookie draft, the 34-year-old former captain is a three-time Charles Sutton Medallist and has been named All-Australian as many times again. But as he swings his boot at a harried handball, he is staring into the darkness of a leftover dream.
There are only five-points in it, but you sense that Jonathon Patton, Rory Lobb or Toby Greene have a dagger poised near the Bulldogs’ heart. Boyd’s mid-air kick goes sideways off his boot. And lands in the arms of Jason Johannisen.
Johannisen is another Bulldogs’ rookie selection, taken 16 picks lower and 10 years after Boyd. The last time Johannisen was in Sydney he was playing his first game in 10 weeks after suffering a severe hamstring injury. His goal in the dying seconds to win that game not only breathed life into the Western Bulldogs’ season, but put the fairytale in play.
Johannisen is thrilling when he has the ball, and that is how it must be for these Bulldogs. Where there was no space at Spotless Stadium, with the ball in Johannisen’s hands it is suddenly everywhere. He glides between two Giants like the wind blew him there, shifts his weight and bounces towards the wing and Marcus Bontempelli. The football rises against the sky. Its flight transcends the flaws of the kick and falls perfectly for Bontempelli, whose left boot puts the Bulldogs in front by a point.
The Bulldogs have won the contested ball, won the clearances and have been inside their forward 50 more often. But it is the qualities so elusive they’re called, in the argot of sport, intangibles – the heart and soul of this club – that has them moments away from their first grand final since 1961.
It is Tom Boyd, who in his two years at the club has been more million-dollar manqué than marquee. His game is enormous, taking on and nullifying Shane Mumford after Jordan Roughead left the game with a bloody eye in the second quarter.
It is Clay Smith, who at 23 has fought back from three (three!) knee reconstructions and the intense pain of mourning a mate who died earlier in the week. His four first-half goals have made him arguably the game’s most influential player.
It is Joel Hamling, the delisted free agent who couldn’t swing a game in three years at Geelong, but has somehow taken out three of the game’s most dangerous forwards this September. He has held Jeremy Cameron to two kicks.
It is Tom Liberatore, who has football instincts as old as his blood and that of his father Tony, who watches his son and his Bulldogs with teeth clenched like he is biting a rope.
And it is Jack Macrae, who the Bulldogs selected with the draft pick they were awarded when Callan Ward left the club to become a foundation player at the Giants. Ward ended the game on the bench with concussion courtesy of an errant Zaine Cordy knee, while Macrae effectively ended it with a mark and goal that let go a roar from the travelling Bulldogs’ faithful so loud that it presumably registered on New South Wales’ air-defence radar.
“We have written our own history here tonight,” says Bontempelli. That it will be harder to write again on Saturday is a truth that’s self-evidence is as brutal as the Swans’ midfield.
On Friday night, the midfield murderers’ row of Isaac Heeney, Tom Mitchell, Luke Parker, Dan Hannebery and Josh Kennedy made Geelong look ragged along the seams, bursting them open in 26 minutes of brilliant football.
The only thing likely to distract Luke Beveridge more than a thousand media requests and the Swans’ midfield is Sydney’s $10m dollar man, Lance Franklin. While Buddy plays as though he has a childlike faith in his own ability, his game is cerebral. He stimulated the Swans’ surge on Friday night, kicking two first-half goals and setting up three more.
What Johannisen is to the Western Bulldogs, Gary Rohan is to the Swans. Rohan’s run was all the more incredible when you consider he was recovering from an injury that six days ago appeared season ending. Ironically, it was the steel in his leg as a result of previous injuries that may have prevented further damage.
The scars at the front of Rohan’s mind, however, will be the ones from the 2014 grand final when Sydney ran smack bang into the middle of Hawthorn exceptionalism. The Swans were not only defeated, they were disgraced. Despite being one of Sydney’s best, Rohan admits his nerves were shot. “I thought I had an idea of what to expect back then, but Hawthorn knew what was going on,” he said. “My nerves will be a lot better this time.”
This year Rohan and his Sydney teammates run into a side whose momentum is 120 minutes away from being biblical.
On Saturday at the MCG, the Bulldogs will emerge from a wilderness that has Moses and the Israelites covered by 15 years. Not even football’s most vociferous critics can dismiss the cultural (and for many religious) significance of this year’s grand final. The question is: does the shining promise of the Bulldogs have one more miracle in it?
