Here’s an argument for the office this week: this is the most unpredictable and engrossing season of AFL football ever. Discuss. If we limit the frame of reference to the weekend just gone, it is an easy argument to make.
Usually come winter the herd begins to thin, but after a weekend where Brisbane dismantled Fremantle, Essendon humiliated Port Adelaide and the 17th-placed Carlton wrung out a win and a great deal of fun against second-placed Greater Western Sydney, evaluating anything this season can be done just as effectively by shaking a Magic 8 Ball as it can be by watching hours of film.
In the twilight of Saturday, two days after re-signing forward Josh Schache, the hitherto unloved Brisbane Lions played like a club set free from heavy chains – although Dayne Zorko has hardly been bound this year, metaphorically or otherwise. Through 12 weeks, the Brisbane best-and-fairest winner is the only player not named Dusty or Dangerfield to have averaged more than 25 possessions, five clearances and a goal a game. By half-time on Saturday, he’d already racked up 19, eight and one respectively.
In the “traditional” football states, the 5ft 9in Zorko is like one of those slightly distorted airport announcements you don’t quite catch but suspect might be important. There is no doubting his importance to Brisbane, just as there is no doubt that to break through for a thumping 57-point win after a run of nine losses matters to a young group like the Lions.
“At some point in time you need to get some emotional nourishment for the group and we were able to get that tonight,” said Brisbane coach Chris Fagan. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but that’s the brand we want to play.”
One club that knows a little about “brand” is Essendon, and on Saturday they went some way to re-establishing their on-field reputation with a dominating performance against Port Adelaide that only the most partisan Bomber fans would have seen coming – and even most of them would not have anticipated what they saw from Cale Hooker.
Hooker won Essendon’s best-and-fairest as a defender in 2015, but has been a point of fan frustration and online forum contention this year due to John Worsfold’s persistence in playing him forward. It can’t have been much fun for Hooker going from the key man down back to being the support act up forward, but after five first-half goals, there was no doubting who was the star among many at Etihad Stadium on Saturday night.
But there is something of Sisyphus in Essendon. Jobe Watson, Zach Merrett and Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti play in an exciting, daring fashion that delights the football world, and then their fans boo Port Adelaide’s Paddy Ryder every time he touches the ball.
Having initially expressed a desire to remain with the Bombers during the supplements saga, the scrutiny eventually wore Ryder down and he requested a trade at the end of 2014.
That Ryder served a 12-month ban last year along with 33 of his former team-mates should’ve been enough to provide some perspective to those Essendon fans that booed. Then again, if a concern raised last week by former Bomber Nathan Lovett-Murray over the health of his daughter (who was conceived after the Bombers’ 2012 supplement program) was not enough to provide a sympathetic disposition, than the cause is likely a lost one.
Sympathy and the Carlton Football Club have been strangers for some time, but in the dying light of Sunday afternoon, even neutral football fans were willing them to a win against Greater Western Sydney.
In most sports there exists a proxy war between proponents of the high-octane offence practiced by the Giants and traditionalists who insist that such systems inevitably falter to a superior defence. The traditionalist line of thinking isn’t as easily marketable for a club in the early days of a rebuild, but just because it’s not an easy sell doesn’t mean that it’s not worth buying – and the Blues’ players and supporters have bought in.
The primordial game style from which the Carlton reinvention is evolving is built around a defensive structure (of which former Giants, Lachie Plowman and Caleb Marchbank are important pieces) that could one day see Brendon Bolton receive Queen’s Birthday honours for his work as football’s foremost civil engineer. Although it must be said that Carlton’s defensive structure is built on one of the game’s most fundamental of principles – the spare man.
On Sunday, the Giants midfielders won almost twice as many clearances and blew Carlton’s doors off for inside 50s. Yet the Blues were able to absorb just about everything the Giants threw at them and then swing to attack through the agency of Sam Docherty. That Docherty is regularly spoken as an All-Australian half-back-flanker is of no surprise to those who’ve watched his progress during the past two years. That Liam Jones was spoken of as an influential defender is a surprise. In a list of adjectives likely to be ascribed to Jones, “influential” falls somewhere well below “flakey.” After an indifferent career as a forward and navy blue whipping boy, Jones was impressive at reading the play, flew confidently into packs and at hit a target with all but one of his 14 possessions.
But if any one player personified the passion in Carlton’s gritty one-point win, it was 150th-gamer Matthew Kruezer. And if there was one play that personified the man those at the club call “Tractor” it was the one with 11 minutes to go in the last quarter when he barrelled over his opponent, followed up and kicked the ball off the ground 40 metres into the arms of Dale Thomas who set up Matthew Wright for what would prove a crucial goal. It was another example of how Kruezer plays football as though it is the central trouble of his life – so much so that you suspect the feeling he gets from busting through packs will stick with him like a phantom-limb sensation long after his football career is over. But given the 28-year-old is in career-best form, you suspect there’s a fair bit of football to play out yet.
And there’s plenty to play out in this most unpredictable of seasons. Wins on the weekend from Carlton, Brisbane and Essendon were less an act of footballing rug pulling than an alteration of perspective. There is no such thing as a certainty in such an unpredictable season – and Monday’s game between Melbourne and Collingwood in front of more than 70,000 at the MCG provided further proof of that.
In what was undeniably one of the games of the season, Melbourne seemed headed for a listless defeat that played into every tired ski-season stereotype before kicking six goals to two in the third quarter to set up an anxious final quarter. It also set the stage for Jack Watts to once and for all exorcise his debut demons from the same game eight years ago, when the Pies targeted the physically and mentally ill-prepared first draft pick. Paul Roos, the coach who Watts credits for his decision to stay at Melbourne, still believes Watts’s debut was not one of merit, but by virtue of a marketing stunt – one that backfired not just for the club, but for arguably a large part of Watts’s oft-criticised career.
With 90 seconds to go and less than a kick in it, Watts grabbed the ball just outside Melbourne’s 50-metre arc, took a bounce and calmly kicked the sealer from an angle acute enough for Melbourne supporters to ride every one of its 25 metres with hearts in mouths. Having played the role of Melbourne’s unlikely saviour, Watts extended his arms with an emotion that the confines of the English language could barely do justice.
It was a fitting finale to a round that was, yes… the most unpredictable and engrossing – the latest instalment in a year of AFL football that has been illustrative of the broader context of our times, which are for want of a better term, an uncertain and unholy mess.
