Round 18 was promoted as potentially the most pivotal for the season – every game bar the late show on Sunday had ramifications for the top eight, the top four and, hell… even the top two, in a season regularly described as one of the game’s most intriguing.
Despite this, Melbourne’s Herald Sun dedicated Saturday’s front page (and pages four through six) to a low rating football program whose only notable achievement is to commercialise our culture’s stupidity. Again Eddie McGuire’s name popped up in the news churn, just days after he made a point to remind people that he doesn’t draw a salary for his work as Collingwood president – something that could be diagnosed as “egotism posing as altruism”.
If McGuire’s return to The Footy Show shared a dynamic with the round just gone it was that of inevitability, with most games largely going to script. That is until his Magpies came from two men and four goals down in the last quarter to overrun the West Coast Eagles by eight points.
It may be that grim times bring into view hopeful stories, and after a year that began with a story about a bulldog, a toy and a door handle to explain away an injury suffered in a St Kilda bar fight, the Jordan De Goey story maybe one of the few tales at Collingwood that has a happy ending. In the second-half, De Goey was a tightly wound spring of black-and-white energy and a footballing tour de force. His four goals and chase-down tackle on Liam Duggan that resulted in the goal that gave the Magpies the lead and ultimately the premiership points.
The novelist Don DeLillo wrote, “it is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”, and a month ago he could have quite easily have been referring to the Collingwood Football Club. But thanks to De Goey, Collingwood’s finals hopes have a (faint) pulse that was almost impossible to find until now. Still, it will require something more miraculous and more often than what transpired under the roof at Etihad Stadium late on Sunday afternoon. Still, if we’re happy to see anything connected with McGuire “off the leash”, we’ll take a resurgent Collingwood ahead of a man who thinks ex-footballers in drag is biting satire.
It was an opponent who simply stopped doing the hard things that let Collingwood back into the game. A contested ball statistic that fell 38-16 Collingwood’s way is only slightly less damning then conceding the final five goals in a game that while terrifically enjoyable for Essendon and Western Bulldogs fans, left Eagles supporters in a state of rage, nausea and despair.
All of these emotions are familiar to Richmond fans in any given fortnight, and earlier in the day, the Tigers again delivered after they overcame a slow start to roll over the top of what is now almost a predictably pedestrian Greater Western Sydney. Dustin Martin and Trent Cotchin were again instrumental in a Tigers win, but it is the form of Nick Vlastuin, Kane Lambert and an improving Dion Prestia which may be more important if the Tigers are to have a sustained run in September.
With just one win and two draws in the past six weeks, the Giants will be happy with some sustained form, full stop. With just five rounds remaining until the post-season, matching last year’s effort of a preliminary final is not the fait accompli it appeared at the start of the year. While the Giants may own the league’s most impressive injury list, they have failed to perform as advertised
On Saturday, the desire of GWS seemed to dampen when the rain began to fall in the second quarter, with Giants coach Leon Cameron ascribing the fadeout to reasons more mental than meteorological.
“You’ve got to adapt to all conditions. Our last quarter was probably the wettest for the game and we actually knuckled down in the last quarter, so it was a mindset thing in the second and the third,” he said.
Still, explaining the Giants collective mindset is easier than making sense of what goes on inside the head of Toby Greene. It’s not hard to picture Greene as that dog that’s let off the leash that comes barrelling towards you and you cant tell whether he wants to play with you or take a bite out of your arse. And although he’s hardly the evilest dark breeze that’s blown through the MCG, after punching Alex Rance on the chin, Greene is likely to go at a clip worse than a suspension every 10 games.
If you want a good story out of Sydney, take a look at what the Swans are up to right now. Another impressive win in a string of them – 10 out of their last 11, with the one loss by six points.
It was always going to be a tough ask for the Saints. The last time St Kilda won at the SCG, it was still fashionable for Sydney’s trust-fund kids to warm their necks with the headscarf traditionally worn by Palestinian peasants. The meaning behind the scarves embedded with a rainbow that were worn on Saturday night was a little easier to comprehend – it was the AFL’s Pride Game, and a further demonstration of how the league is engaging with the LGBTIQ community. It follows a 2016 study by La Trobe University’s Centre of Sport and Social Impact, which highlighted that nearly three in five of those surveyed who had attended an AFL game, witnessed verbal homophobia or transphobia. And it remains clear that change is a battle that still must be fought, particularly when the front page of the Herald Sun points to “an obsession with political correctness” behind the demise of The Footy Show, and is remedied by McGuire saying, “We’re gonna give it [The Footy Show] back to the people. We’re gonna bring fun back to football.”
It would appear that simply being decent and promoting a game for all is a bit dull.
Callum Sinclair seems like a decent young man, and his game on Saturday night was many things, dull not being one of them. Sinclair added to what has up until now been a meagre repertoire of football tricks with five goals and 10 marks, most of which were grabbed as if hoping to squeeze the air out of the ball. When he kicked his fifth in the shade of three-quarter time, you half expected him to beat his chest and let fly with a Tarzanic yodel.
The five goals from Geelong’s Harry Taylor, while a surprise, were a little less unexpected but also less influential in a game where Geelong had been comprehensively outplayed by Adelaide in the top-of-the-table clash.
For much of the season, it has been Adelaide’s forward line that has been atop of the poster in 48-point font, but as the season progresses it is clear their midfield is developing a formidable reputation. Along with the Couch brothers, Rory Atkins and Richard Douglas provided the Crows with their drive and helped them win the stoppage clearances 33 to 17. While Patrick Dangerfield suffering from a rare bout of restraint (albeit of the corporal kind) helped them, their form is silencing more than a few die-hard Crow cynics.
The form of a Melbourne outfit slowly returning to full-strength is also hushing a few of the doubters. Saturday’s game against Port Adelaide was crucial if the Demons were to remain in the frame for the top four, and an unrelenting first-half has them once again in contention for the double-chance after three weeks that only had a ho-hum win over Carlton to recommend it. Coincidently, it was three-weeks ago that Jack Viney required foot surgery, and only a week ago that he was still on crutches. On Saturday he’d had the ball 12 times in a first-quarter that set up Melbourne’s win.
But if there was a story from the game the kind you see in movies “inspired” by true events, it was that of Jack Trengove. The former captain’s foot issues have been a little more multifarious and certainly more ongoing than Viney’s, so much so, it was only his sixth game in three-and-a-half years, and his first in 399 days. But like Viney, Trengove had a solid first quarter and took an important step in extending a career that looked all but over after an attempted trade to Richmond in 2014 was aborted due to his suspect foot.
If Melbourne and Trengove can maintain their form through until the end of September, it will be a footballing story to rival the Bulldog tale of 2016 – and one that’ll make for a more interesting front page than the last swing at relevancy from a dinosaur let off its leash.
