It is said a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.
To write the first chapter of season 2019, you’ve barely scratched the surface if you’ve blown through 16 selves. Outside of Adelaide falling short of expectations and Carlton accounting for more than 1,500 cases of relapsed alcoholism, it’s been a hard season to grasp.
Halfway through the second quarter on Thursday night, Melbourne’s season look destined for the same dustbin sitting behind the MCC for the last ten years bar the last. But co-captain Nathan Jones played with an intent that implied he could bend the fate of the Dees’ season back into position, kicking three – his third at the 20-minute mark of the last quarter putting the game just about out of reach for the Swans – to lead Melbourne to a 22-point win.
On Friday night, the otherwise excitable Collingwood featured in one of the more dour prime-time games at the MCG, beating the Western Bulldogs the way a sinkhole devours a house: slowly, then all at once.
At times Bulldogs ruckman Tim English must have felt himself standing in a hole at least a foot deep, as the Pies’ Brody Grundy jumped all over him to give Collingwood an advantage at 17 clearances. English’s hit-outs to advantage had a similar impact to that of key forward Josh Schache – that is to say, zero.
The following night on the road in Adelaide, Richmond barely had a puncher’s chance without Dustin Martin, Alex Rance, Trent Cotchin and Jack Riewoldt. That’s an awful lot of magnificence to have sitting in the stands.
Thankfully for the Tigers there remained a good deal of quality at either end of the ground, with Tom Lynch kicking six goals and Dylan Grimes taking six decisive defensive marks in a last quarter that had fans from both teams clenched their teeth as if biting rope.
Nathan Broad ensured Justin Westhoff had a miserable night, and Richmond may have found a player in Jack Ross who they took with pick 43 in last year’s draft, as they held on in a thriller against Port Adelaide.
It followed an earlier thriller between Geelong and the visiting Greater Western Sydney. Down 22-points the Giants climbed off the Cattery canvas to win their first game at Kardinia Park. There is a lot to like about Josh Kelly, Stephen Coniglio, Lachie Whitfield, Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper – a midfield that is so insistently brilliant that it must send chills through even Collingwood’s midfield coach.
On brilliance, down the road at the MCG, Anthony “Walla” McDonald-Tipungwuti kicked a career-best seven goals to help Essendon end the Brisbane Lions unbeaten run and steady their own season at 2-2.
It has been said that McDonald-Tipungwuti is a Bomber bellwether, and for the season’s first two weeks it was not an inaccurate observation. But much like a needy child, the time came when McDonald-Tipungwuti defied inattention.
On Saturday you sensed he was on early, a self-knowing smile floating across his face as he kicked goals three and four (and five, six and seven). But his statistics aren’t half as fulfilling as the aesthetic joy of his sheer football invention. On the weekend, he was the game’s most influential player, tearing every last shred of meat from the bone with manic forward pressure and tackling.
Moving away from aesthetic joy, on Sunday Carlton tried to join both Melbourne and North on the winner’s list for the first time this season.
In a game that at times resembled a bar fight in a musical comedy, it appeared that come the end of round four, that would be so. But a Jack Bowes snap goal in the dying light delivered of a two-point win for the Gold Coast and despair for those in navy blue.
David Foster Wallace said that “mediocrity is contextual” and while some may laud the Blues’ effort over the first month, the context is they are the only team yet to win a game. For the first time in a generation the club has been honest with its fans, but as the losses pile up the club becomes defined not by hope but by despair.
Zero-and-four is bound to sound like eschatology but in a season such as this – where teams such as the Gold Coast, St Kilda and Brisbane (all 3-1) have all at times played as if nobody was working off some old version of them – reinvention remains possible.
After years of trying, the AFL may have just stumbled onto a competition where anyone can win on any given day and where your tipping from week to week, is wildly inaccurate. The only honest answer to how does the season play out from here is “I don’t know.”
