In a series of fortnightly columns 10 years ago for The Age, former Fitzroy and St Kilda footballer Tim Pekin had a poet’s eye and was a contrast to the ex-player patois heard everywhere else. Pekin once ascribed our love of the game to “the moment”. This was what brought us back to the game again and again, the promise of “the moment”.
In a season as absorbing and as close as this one, there has been no lacking for “the moment”. But for consequence and poignancy, only round 14’s one-handed mark and after-the-siren goal by Sydney’s Gary Rohan to win an extraordinary game against Essendon can match “the moment” from the dying seconds of Saturday’s twilight game between Port Adelaide and St Kilda.
In a game where the standard of play during the preceding two hours didn’t rise perceptibly above the mean, Port Adelaide found themselves four points down, 70m from goal and the game all but beyond their grasp with just 19 seconds to go. St Kilda was about to win for the first time in eight trips to the Adelaide Oval, while the Power’s hopes of a top-four finish was going the same way as those fans heading for the exits.
But as the poet Jim Carroll wrote of basketball, this was “a game where you can correct all your mistakes instantly, and in mid-air”.
Paddy Ryder, Port Adelaide’s ruckman, is averaging more hit-outs (36) than at any time in his career, but none as important as the tap that initiated the final piece on Saturday night. As season-saving plays go, the Ryder-Robbie Gray one-two looks even more impressive in retrospect.
For those that missed it: Ryder works his way to the front for the throw-in, Gray’s balance as Ryder establishes position is on the back of his feet. But in an instant, Gray takes three or four devastating steps that help put a couple of lengths on St Kilda’s Seb Ross, who has not done much wrong all night, and just out of the reach of a lunging Jack Billings. Ryder controls the tap in mid-air and places it on the chest of Gray at the top of his momentum. Football poetry.
Gray finds the space that has come from the Saints being drawn to the contest instead of holding their position, runs to the 50m arc and kicks the goal that likely secures Port Adelaide’s role in September.
It was a play that Power coach Ken Hinkley described as the sort of stuff they practise on the training field, but no training drill can entirely capture the alchemy of consequence and pressure that generates a sum significantly greater than one that can be clinically rehearsed during the week or dissected on video. Be that as it may, you suspect Gray’s goal to be on high rotation in the office of St Kilda coach Alan Richardson this week, where he will pore over film of that stoppage as though it was shot by Abraham Zapruder.
This isn’t to sell Port Adelaide’s effort short, and it wasn’t as though St Kilda’s players just pulled up lawn chairs while Gray went about doing his thing. As much as there may have been space, it was also a teachable moment in the sporting cliché of “willing your team over the line”.
Willing his team over the line has become almost a habit for Geelong’s Patrick Dangerfield, and he too has often been part of a game’s defining act. But sometimes “the moment” isn’t a poetic one.
In an otherwise tedious affair between Geelong and Carlton under the roof at Etihad, an ugly tackle by Dangerfield left Carlton’s ruckman Matthew Kruezer concussed.
On-field and off, Dangerfield is unmediated by nuance, but this moment will be dissected and examined with differing levels of gradation as to his intent. If you trust the Match Review Panel’s precedent – and granted this is a sizeable if – Dangerfield’s tackle will be considered in the same light as that of Jarrad Waite’s on Adelaide’s Tom Lynch in round seven that cost Waite a suspension.
Increasingly, in this age of the highly ritualised apology, the first course of action for a player in Dangerfield’s circumstance would be to apologise, even if you believe you’ve been falsely accused. But Dangerfield is not one for the irony of prescribing sincerity in order to manipulate public opinion, instead defending his tackle on Kreuzer by saying he “felt it was a fair tackle... so I don’t see an issue with it, but it’s not up to me”.
Which is true. This is ultimately a call for the MRP. At stake is Dangerfield’s bid for successive Brownlow medals. If suspended (which he has not been in 196 games), there is every chance that Dangerfield will still poll the most votes, but instead take the podium as last year’s winner to present the medal to the man with the second-most votes. And that would be some moment.
