Let’s put this on the table right away – Leicester, Cleveland, Reykjavík… Footscray. Footscray is the fairytale. And a Jason Johanissen goal in the dying seconds at the SCG on Saturday has the fairytale in play.
After playing like dervishes in the third quarter and wresting back momentum just as Sydney seemed poised to take back top spot, the Bulldogs sit within shouting distance of the minor premiership and a home final that their coach says he’d like played at the MCG – a rebuke at those who question his team’s worth outside of Etihad.
But unlike fairytales, the collective memory of McClelland Trophy winners does not last forever. The fairytale is a premiership, and Footscray (the Western Bulldogs doesn’t quite have that Brothers Grimm ring) hasn’t won one since 1954, an eon predating rock ‘n roll. They’ve been close, with consecutive preliminary finals in 1997 – a game that Bulldog supporters still mourn like orphans – and 1998, and 2008 through 2010. So close that some supporters feel ill equipped for much of anything beyond further finals heartache. As Dominic Kelly said a month ago: “We’ve known too much disappointment to believe in fairytale endings.”
The Bulldogs are more aware than most that the ‘premiership window’ can close quickly – and maybe even quicker once the rock dropped in the Western Sydney pond ripples into a tsunami. The GWS Giants are like a young, unseeded ’85 Boris Becker, often playing on outside courts and touted as “the next big thing”. Should they win this year, it is not hard to see them winning a few more in quick succession. But you can’t help but sense this Bontempelli-led Bulldog renaissance is a bulwark more than capable of holding back the tide, and one that is well placed to make a more sustained tilt at a flag.
This Bulldogs’ window has opened every bit as quickly as its previous ones have closed. In 2014, their captain Ryan Griffen legged it for Blacktown and their coach Brendan McCartney appeared to spend a brief moment in football’s witness protection program before re-emerging as a development coach at Melbourne.
Through the door came a coach who had already achieved a footballing miracle, albeit an amateur one, by taking St Bede’s Mentone from C-Grade in 2006 to A-Grade premiers in 2008. Luke Beveridge today oversees a list that has benefitted from shrewd recruiting (Marcus Bontempelli and Jake Stringer, a living persona of the adage that the beautiful cannot exist without the crude), underrated veterans (Dale Morris and Matthew Boyd), father-sons (Mitch Wallis and Tom Liberatore), free-agents (Matthew Suckling and Stuart Crameri, who would have these Bulldogs even closer to the fairytale), and a million-dollar forward playing VFL.
While they’re yet to make a documentary about Beveridge’s St Bede’s miracle, you sense a Bulldog one would be on screens within days after tasting a premiership. A Footscray flag would be undeniably the best possible result for anyone involved in AFL media. It would take little creative license to turn it into a religious experience, which for many long-suffering Bulldogs fans, it would be.
Rob Clancy is a man who straddles both divides. Clancy, who used to work the sports desk at the ABC and the Olympics, has been witness to the odd sporting miracle. But as a Bulldog supporter he now finds himself seriously considering the possibility that his club is a serious contender for a premiership that would require no priest or proof to be regarded as a miracle all its own.
“This takes a mind shift, from hope to expectation,” says Clancy. “It’s a very difficult and unfamiliar process, but seeing them win at the SCG this weekend, for the second year running, makes it seem nearly close enough to touch.”
And what if the Bulldogs actually won the premiership? “I have no idea, but I know nothing I could do would go anywhere near expressing what it would mean to reach that seemingly unattainable goal.”
Sweet Jesus, don’t ponder the thing – let it in. “OK, I’ll be hugging lots of strangers, shedding a few tears because my dad didn’t live to see it, and plenty more because I’ll be sharing it with my kids.”
There are times in a man’s life when it’s OK to cry – and even neutral supporters have a right to get a little misty-eyed if Footscray wins the flag. Seeing Bob Murphy on the bench in a club-issue polo shirt as the final siren sounds would be the biggest sporting tearjerker since Kevin Costner asked his dad to play catch.
The Whitten Oval is Murphy’s Field of Dreams, and it takes little imagination to see him having a kick-to-kick with Charlie Sutton as the light dies in Melbourne’s west. Murphy loves Footscray the way some people love God. He sees the Bulldogs everywhere he looks – a cosy corner pub, a park where he walks his dog, or when he hears an album by The Cure. When Murphy did his knee in the closing minutes of an already heartbreaking loss in round three, he became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser. But such is his spiritual hold over this club that a premiership would frame him as a Kerouac saint or one of Springsteen’s heroes.
When Murphy’s fellow poet-philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote, “fairytales do not tell children that dragons exist, fairytales tell us dragons can be killed”, I don’t think he had the Hawthorn Football Club in mind. But here we are with the Hawthorn dragon atop the ladder, and for the seven other premiership contenders it is not a happy place. Hawthorn is not merely dynastic in their ability to win, they are almost dynastic in the European sense. If Footscray were to be the club to slay the dragon, the fairytale would be undeniable.
