To hear veteran broadcaster Tim Lane tell it on Saturday morning, this was “the most significant weekend of finals football in the AFL’s history”. In the sobering light of Monday, this is no longer an opinion, it simply is.
On Friday night, the rivalry of the modern era produced a game that will be talked about in the same reverent tones as the fabled 1989 grand final. For a game between Hawthorn and Geelong to not only live up to expectations, but to elevate itself to a footballing art form takes some doing. And just as great art is consequent of contrast, Friday night did not want for beauty or brutality.
Patrick Dangerfield touched the ball 20 times in the second-half and broke tackles at whim, while Jordan Lewis provided as much grunt as polish for Hawthorn. Luke Hodge hit up team-mates, as well as any Selwood he could find, and the Selwoods in turn belted Sam Mitchell. For two hours it was a knot of pressure, animosity and for those watching, anxiety. After two hours, all that separated Hawthorn from Geelong was three points. With a half-a-minute to go, the air was as tight as a held breath.
There are many reasons to hate Hawthorn, but nothing fuels this hostility more than their instinctive ability to find a way to win when it matters. With the ball at full-back, not one of the 87,500-odd spectators at the MCG put a coast-to-coast, game-winning goal beyond Hawthorn – those in brown and gold jumpers, and the self-entitlement that comes from supporting the winning-est team of our time, probably expected it. When Luke Bruest marked in space on Hawthorn’s forward line and moments later found Isaac Smith 40 metres out with just seconds left, they could be forgiven for thinking the passage of play was sent by the Lord Himself to facilitate the win.
With ball in hand and the game on his boot, Smith’s face seemed to be wearing an expression halfway between bemusement and hauteur. He didn’t look nervous. With a quick wry smile, he barely looked like he gave a shit. It was a reminder that Hawthorn derives so much of its abundant confidence by being hated. They are the psychomagnotheric “mood” slime in Ghostbusters II, which courses beneath the streets of New York City, becoming more and more potent by feeding on people’s negative emotions. As the siren sounded and Smith lined up to kick Hawthorn into another preliminary final, the mood on streets throughout Australia was as black as night and surging. You could almost hear the collective under-the-breath muttering, “you have got to be f....”
But something incredible happened. Smith missed.
Smith missed and the Hawks must now take the long road if they are to equal the four-peat feat of Jock McHale’s Depression-era Collingwood. Despite traversing the same path last year, there’s an underlying feeling that to do it twice might just be beyond them. However, celebrating the potential fall of the Hawthorn empire is like the satiety borne from MSG-laden, food court Chinese – felt keenly, but not for long. Watching GWS dismantle Sydney, the hitherto premiership favourites, by six goals the very next day was capable of tingeing any thrill with nausea. This was not a football fever dream. The power shift was as profoundly felt as a Shane Mumford tackle.
In September, a footballer may have to find out who he is more times in a single afternoon than most do during the entire season. It is hard to think of a single young Giant who came out of that game without having developed a hardened finals carapace. They met every challenge the Swans threw at them in the first half – and plenty of those were physical in what was a ferocious, bruising afternoon. After the break, the unrelenting attack and outside run of the Giants’ midfield, along with three goals from Jeremy Cameron, blew the game open. When Tom Scully kicked the sealer, it didn’t just bring the resentment of every Demons supporter to the surface, it shook football’s existing world order.
If you were daunted by the big-game confidence of GWS on Saturday, just be advised there’s going to be a lot more of it. In 2016 they have made the not insignificant leap from likeable and charmingly good, to feared and predictably good. The Sydney rivalry has similarly developed from one constructed in the AFL’s marketing department, to one that is genuinely territorial and will sell out the return clash at Spotless Stadium three times over for the next five years. There’s enough young talent on both lists to suggest this rivalry will be an enduring one.
Sydney will return to their home, the SCG, on Saturday with their tail between their legs and without the AFL’s hamstrung Rising Star Callum Mills and Kurt Tippett, who is nursing a fractured jaw. Waiting for them will be the second-best Cinderella-story of the 2016 season, Adelaide, who broke an already hobbled North Melbourne with a 15-goal second-half.
Eddie Betts was thrilled to be at the Crows’ first Adelaide Oval final, not by saying as much, but by kicking six goals. When his football career is over, there will be enough people in Adelaide happy to cough up $100 an hour for Betts to make a career of entertaining children on their birthdays. North Melbourne’s Drew Petrie, Michael Firrito and Nick Dal Santo will need to find other lines of work and sooner, having farewelled AFL football in the disappointing yet predictable 10-goal loss. As unpalatable as it may be to North Melbourne people, there are reports that at least four Victorian clubs are interested keeping Brent Harvey’s career door ajar.
Hawthorn’s window is still wide open, but the job doesn’t get any easier from here, facing the Western Bulldogs, who smoked the West Coast Eagles on Thursday-night TV. The Bulldogs made their opponents look like a tin-pot finals’ fraud, pinballing the football around Subiaco at such a clip to make the 16-6 Eagles appear as vanilla and slow moving as McDonald’s soft-serve. It was the Bulldogs’ best win in 10 years, with match-winning contributions across every line – from the 6ft 6in Tom Boyd, the man with a haircut straight out of Hollywood and a salary to match, to the helmeted, bargain basement Caleb Daniel, who at 5ft 5in uses the ball and connects the dots as well as anyone in football right now.
If they win this Friday night – and that is some if when attached to an angry, rebounding Hawthorn – the Bulldogs will meet the Giants in the preliminary final. Should GWS beat the AFL’s fairy tale in waiting, they will likely assume the role of football’s most resented – and you sense that like the Hawks, the Giants will feed on it. Win the following week, and they’ll lay the foundations for an empire so powerful, we may one day look back on the Hawthorn years with a hint of affection. That’s a significant change. We’re not there yet, but this weekend the ground definitely shifted.
