“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano once said. Or perhaps it was Tony Antrobus. Whatever the case, an exception can be made for the 1993 AFL season, now immortalised in a superb podcast, ‘The Greatest Season That Was’. The brainchild of Adam Collins, Daniel Brettig and Shannon Gill, its premise is self-explanatory. For 1993 really was a season like no other. It started with Footscray’s playing list parachuting into Port Phillip Bay. It ended with Michael Long on stage at Essendon’s premiership celebration. “Jeez, I played well,” he said.
In 1993, many of the stars of the 80s were suddenly yesterday’s news. Warwick Capper had retired, scoring a brief role in the film Fortress. Dermott Brereton’s body was shot. His club was broke. Many of the men who had owned the clubs were bankrupt, in prison or fleeing the law. A few years earlier, Reuben Pelerman had bought the Brisbane Bears as a Valentines gift for his wife. They were now cleaning up the mess. The Sydney Swans, meanwhile, were total no-hopers. Their admin department operated out of the Showgrounds. In the podcast, Ron Joseph recalls stepping outside his office and seeing two camels defecating on the footpath.
Other superstars played sadly minor cameos. Peter Daicos kicked eight in round two but was pensioned off soon thereafter. Tony Lockett barrelled into a goalpost and completely stuffed his back. But the goals didn’t dry up. There were 71 individual hauls of seven or more. Many came from cyclonic personalities who had burst onto the scene – Modra, Jakovich, McAdam and Wheildon.
Doc Wheildon, in particular, was a wild one. His haircut alone would be grounds for arrest in some jurisdictions. In Tasmania, he half-volleyed a drop kick from the boundary line, one of the most astonishing goals ever kicked. He kicked eight goals at the SCG but was in such a shambolic state the next day that Robert Shaw dropped him. Several years later, he tumbled out of a King St nightclub, was skittled by a taxi and never played again.
Some of the season’s most enduring memories are of North Melbourne. In many ways, they were like a suburban club. The players were drinking industrial quantities of alcohol. But Denis Pagan shipped the place into shape. When he was appointed, he was working as an insurance inspector. He quickly implemented a devilishly simple, eminently watchable game-plan he called “the three quarter ground concertina”. Much of it revolved around a swaggering, sculpted menace at centre half forward. Wayne Carey’s solar confidence made him just the man for footy’s new era.
North topped the ladder for 11 weeks. Pagan was the man of the hour. He was a fearsome individual. These days, if you said some of the things he said, you’d be led away in handcuffs. But he was a players man. He scheduled one-on-one lunches with every Kangaroos player. One can only imagine the sheer intensity of those conversations. But by the time he had lunched with all of them, North’s season had petered out. A pitifully small crowd saw them get walloped by West Coast in the elimination final.
1993 was also the year of Gary Ablett’s 124 goals from 17 games. With his lank hair, blank eyes and preposterous talent, Gary was totally without precedent. He certainly wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Halfway through the first quarter of the famous Essendon game, the Geelong forwards had barely got warm. “A bit quiet down here mate, isn’t it?” he said to his opponent. A few hours later, he had kicked 14.7 and his coach was in hysterics. “Shit, how well’s this bloke going,” he told the runner down the line.
The previous September, Geelong had frittered away a four-goal lead to lose the grand final. Malcolm Blight didn’t speak to his players for a month. In 1993, he determined to make them more defensively minded. But it was a disaster. The nadir came when they lost to a Lockett-less St Kilda by 71 points. Gordon Fode booted 5.9. Blight would stew over such losses with a bottle of port and a packet of smokes.
Finally, he gathered his players. “I’ve cost you the year,” he said. They proceeded to beat the top five ranked teams. For reasons that have never really been explained, he coached the last game from atop a table on the WACA boundary line. They needed Collingwood to win in Adelaide on the Sunday. Ablett listened to it “on the wireless”, a curious image in itself. Naturally, the Crows got up and Geelong pissed away another year.
In 1993, it seemed as though every Victorian kid barracked for Essendon. The Bombers were 50-1 outsiders. They had a bunch of L-platers from the north-western suburbs of Melbourne. But their skipper Mark Thompson, the most solid of citizens and cool-headed of footballers, kept them on the straight and narrow. They started the season slowly but cultivated a freewheeling style based around speed and quick hands. The turning point came against the Eagles, a game that featured eight future AFL coaches. Afterwards, Kevin Sheedy waved his jacket like a loon and Mick Malthouse slammed a reporter up against a wall, asking him whether he stupid as well as deaf.
In the preliminary final however, they seemed to have blown it. Matthew Liptak kicked a goal in the opening seconds and the Crows shot out to a seven-goal lead. But Graham Cornes’ half-time address was a fiasco. Someone farted, the group degenerated into a giggling shambles and Essendon stormed home in one of the greatest games ever played. Cornes still hasn’t let it go, so to speak.
Prior to the grand final, Sheedy referenced a blown-up picture of the Chinese student who stood in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square. “Don’t be too brave out there,” Tim Watson told Michael Long as they ran down the race.
Long owned the decider. He owned the entire finals series. Of course, his famous goal was touched. But that was immaterial. He played like a man in a slow motion hurry. He would hold up play, Martin Flanagan wrote, “waiting for the game to arrange itself to his satisfaction”.
A quarter of a century later, the world has moved on. Pagan is now a real estate agent. Liptak is an orthopaedic surgeon. Cornes, 70, plays lead guitar in a rock band. Ablett is about to become a granddad. Malthouse writes tart columns bagging his former players. Thompson is fighting charges of trafficking and possessing ecstasy and ice.
But thanks to this podcast, the memories come flooding back. Listen to it and you can visualise Darren Jarman, with his positively pornographic kicking action, massaging the ball onto Jason Dunstall’s chest. You remember two 6ft 11in beanpoles galumphing down the Waverley wing. And you ponder Fitzroy’s Mark Zanotti, whose contract had been crowd-funded by the infamous Painters and Dockets, driving down from Brisbane and being fixed up with $1, $2 and $5 bills.
As the competition continues to disappear up its own fundament, this podcast is the perfect antidote. 1993 was fun. It was ridiculous. It shaped modern football. For many of us, it’s the reason we fell in love with the game.
- What are your memories of the 1993 season? You can share your selections with us in this form by 10am AEST Monday 30 July.
