What is a perfect loss? If you consider it to be a loss so close that you can feel the wind of victory burning along your nasophraynx like a shot of straight absinthe, perhaps your values of defeat need to be reexamined. Oh but for this or that, but for a misplaced strike of the ball on boot or the misguided whistle from a confused arbitrator (Caddy advantage compared to the Wood advantage, hmmmm…) could the result have been different?
Yes. Of course. But so too could any number of variables have affected the final score. I don’t want to dwell on it. I’d rather focus my musings of opportunities lost in a big picture approach to things. Move the game forward and all that. And in so doing, I’m sorry to report that the AFL missed a golden opportunity in the marketing of the North Melbourne versus Richmond match.
An opportunity to cast the AFL indefatigably onto the international scene.
That may not seem important to you and I, but consider- there’s a match being played in China this week for premiership points. Also, if current game day experiences become any closer to that of the NBA, we’ll soon seen footy played on polished floor boards with baskets set atop of each goal post for 12 “Swish Goal!” bonus points.
Alas for Hocking and the latest team of “apple geniuses”, I fear this was both the game’s and indeed Australia’s best chance to persuade none other than the President of the United States himself to grace us with his first official visit.
We’re going to build a great game. It’s going to be so great. No congestion. None. In fact, we’re going to build a wall right across the middle of the ground to stop congestion. And Mexico will pay for it.
The timing was perfect. As the Don posits himself as the negotiator in chief of North Koren de-nuclearisation, what better an opportunity for him to place himself within pitching wedge distance of the South Pacific arena whilst personally brokering the safety of the south eastern Australian population from another impending disaster.
He would have come. Trump knows a publicity opportunity when he sees one. I’m not sure that Gil and the brains trust at AFL headquarters have the same nous for self-promotion. For you see, Sunday’s game was a dangerous event. And not only for those brave enthusiasts willing to endure the inevitable domestic backlash having braved the trip to Etihad rather than attend the myriad Mother’s Day lunches that coincided with the opening bounce. No, this game was dangerous for another reason entirely.
For roaming the Etihad tundra were two beasts that, upon meeting, could have assured the destruction of the world as we know it. The fact that it didn’t happen and that disaster was ultimately averted doesn’t matter.
You see, what the AFL should have done was to chopper the Don onto the ground before the bounce, have him wave briefly (no need for him to open his mouth, best for everyone…) and to hold aloft a signed guarantee from all parties declaring that Ben Cunnington and Dustin Martin had sworn “not to simultaneously ‘don’t-argue’ each other”, thereby averting a potential ripple effect that scientists predict would have destroyed all land and ocean life within a 5000 mile radius.
Alas for missed opportunities.
You’re like me…but different somehow.
And alas for those who struggle to take joy in the game as it continues to be.
From the opening bounce on Sunday this game erupted in a maelstrom of contested footy and body parts. Stoppages resembled the initial impact of shield wall warfare in Saxon Britain.
This was an intensity that North people haven’t encountered this year. Richmond brought it as they do each week. It’s what they do now.
Relying on nothing short of total buy-in from everyone from the head coach to that trainer that got belted by Rance for giving him a towel last year, Richmond are experiencing the pay off from a game plan that accentuates all their players’ strengths and the hyper-confidence that comes after experiencing that game plan render ultimate success.
Their pressure is off the charts. They swarm you at the contest like seagulls on a dropped chip. They dare you to try and handball through their mesh of midfielders and behind this Rance, Astbury, Broad, Grimes and whoever else is in their defensive setup for the week waits patiently for the inevitable hack-kick forward that signals the opposition’s effective surrendering of the game’s key positional battle.
Once the ball is won, they break forward and attack in a rolling wave of carriers and supporting runners. It’s doubly genius in a way, as not only does it work – but it both requires and engenders a “team” ethos in its execution.
What an environment against which to test yourself.
The first quarter was over in the blink of an eye. Brown had soared like some sort of prehistoric reptile to mark and goal over Rance. Wood had got on his bike and worked his way onto the scoreboard. It was bedlam. But beautiful, professional bedlam in the face of the Richmond assault.
And it never let up. You see, Gil, this is why it’s ok to have nothing except the Auskickers on at half time. In matches like this, where the intensity of the players pulsates through the stands like an electric current, the end of quarter breaks are a chance to re-live or recoil, to soak up or repress the joys and traumas to which you were an invested witness.
The second quarter started and it was again like the meeting of prize rams in a small paddock. From half chances Simpkin and Atley showed their class and for a moment Shinboners young and old thought we had wrested the momentum.
But you don’t win a premiership and then forget how. Unless you’re the Bulldogs. Oooooh burn.
The latter half of the term saw the Tigers relentlessness rewarded in 10 minutes of sustained territorial domination. Again, the fact that we soaked up their pressure and possession as well as we did shows you the difference in organisation and execution that our defence now owns and executes.
And all that Richmond did, they did without their main man. From the opening bounce Ben Jacobs tailed Dustin Martin like a street urchin from Dickensian London. He was in Dusty’s back pocket all day and there was nothing Dusty could do about it.
Martin’s one attempt at a don’t argue nearly re-arranged Simpkin’s face and was duly penalised. In the end he was removed from the midfield and surreptitiously placed into the forward line. God bless Ben Jacobs. It’s as close as you’ll from Hardwick to an admission of defeat.
But, as great teams before them, Richmond have plenty of options to step up to the plate in the absence of a Martin demolition job. Perhaps giddy on the endorphin rush that must have occurred upon the realisation that Jacobs had gone to Martin and not to him, Cotchin stepped up and played a captain’s game for the ages. His hair may look like it’s a re-used wig from a Jonas Brothers tribute band, but he can play footy.
And at either end the Tiges got great return from their medium sized soldiers.
At one end we kept kicking the footy to Vlaustin. At the other end Josh Caddy really annoyed me and others by kicking goals at inopportune times. Inopportune times for North, that is. It seems like every team has a player with a face that annoys opposition supporters. Richmond have two in Caddy and Riewoldt. I used to really like The Killers. Now I associate them with morbid fantasies of Riewoldt falling off the stage in a rush of post-Grand Final enthusiasm.
But never fear. I’m prepare to wait for as long as it takes for the 2017 premiership to no longer be an excuse for appearing to be a grub. I’m looking in your direction, Conca.
AFL and TV executives at Gil’s home for a discussion about the state of the game.
I’m also prepared to wait for as long as it takes for people to realise that it may be the constant tinkering, the incessant need to ‘tweak’ that may be effecting our relationship with the game far more than the number of players contesting a ball up on a half forward flank.
I wrote this some weeks ago, (you can read the full piece here). I’ll write it again, verbatim, as it’s something worth remembering in these times of “entertainment or nothing”:
Footy isn’t really about high scores, you know. It’s not really even about the skill. Sure, all those things are wonderful, and the uniqueness of the game is such that we’ll always be captivated and celebrate the spekkies and long bombs and boonanas with all the joy of childhood.
But ultimately, it’s about the contest. In that sense, the appeal of footy isn’t what sets it apart from other sports, but what brings all sport together. And that’s actually a good thing. A wonderful thing. And you can’t manufacture it via a committee meeting.
There’s more than a little whiff of the Roman patrician about footy commentary these days. From the talk-back lines to the talk show panel, a sneering patronage has seeped into our relationship with a game that now, it seems, needs to meet a set of aesthetic guidelines before it meets with our approval.
The critique of everything is everywhere and never ending. Blokes who wouldn’t know what the word forensic actually means sit in studio spaces with names like “The Laboratory” and pick apart the minutia of a game and its players whilst extolling the values of an imaginary “best version of footy” with a pedanticism that borders on the pathological.
Or more simply put, there’s a heap of people making cash off the back of a game that would exist in a purer form if 90 percent of them were sitting in the stands with a pie and a Courage Draught.
Against this backdrop of sneering modernism, Sunday’s game was a spit at its feet.
Upon the sounding of the final siren, Cunnington and Cotchin should have cast their muddied and bloodied boots into the corporate section of the Medallion Club (Russell Crowe / Maximus style), and in the ensuing chaos of spilled Crown Lager, shouted defiantly:
“Are you not entertained? Are you not, entertained!?”
I was entertained. The wider football world was entertained. In any other universe, Cotchin would get 3 Brownlow votes and a ticker tape parade for his effort on Sunday. As it was, his game will live in the shadow of the a bloke who looks as though he’d rocked up to the ground straight from the milking shed.
In the hands of this man, the football becomes only one thing: Compliant.
What can you say about Cunnington? The stats say a fair bit.
38 disposals. 32 of them contested.
That’s 32 contested possessions. New world record. Think about that for a while, because I still don’t quite know what to do with the information. He also took a few contested marks, ‘don’t argued’ Cotchin out of his own hair and shrugged another Tiger into Row G of the members wing.
Perhaps Brad Scott described Cunnington’s game the best: Total domination.
I’d like to buy Cunnington a beer. I’d like to buy him a slab. I’d like to learn to home brew so I could make him the greatest beer of all time and then buy him a pot of it.
But I suspect he’d tell me not to bother and ask me to chuck him a can of VB.
Cunnington doesn’t shave his legs. He doesn’t wear boots that glow in the dark. He’s bald. He doesn’t do media. On Monday morning he was probably fishing somewhere in Port Phillip Bay before running his tinny up onto the beach to join in the morning recovery session.
Put him in black and white stripes and tell me he wouldn’t have been multiple All Australian by now.
Put him in navy hoops and they’d have gotten enough government funding to upgrade Kardinia Park to a capacity of 80,000 – 60,000 of which would be seated in the ‘Cunners Stand’.
All this and more is true – and I suspect he doesn’t give a half glass of choggy milk.
He’s a footy player. Pure and unadulterated. And they’re not that common anymore.
Whatever he’s telling you to do…do it, Jed.
In his mighty wake, Jed Anderson played the best game of his career.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve written a version of the above sentence already this year. 28 disposals. 16 of them contested. 7 clearances and 5 tackles. A chance to put us in front with a couple of minutes to go. It’s ok, Jed. You and your hair are off the charts at the moment, mate. And footy has a funny way of evening things up. Next time, that shot on goal will sail through the big sticks.
From a quiet-by-his-standard first half, Higgins rolled into the action like a luxury car finding a freeway after being stuck in the CBD for an hour. He put us in front in the last and I dared to dream.
MacMillan was everywhere we needed him to be in the arrow storm of Richmond offensive pressure.
Scott Thompson might not feature much in the All Australian discussion this year, but he should. He’s back in career best form. Riewoldt disappeared into the Melbourne haze like a missed tram after a couple of goals in the first half. Elsewhere, the Goldstein Nankervis battle was an intriguing dichotomy between Goldstein’s tap-work and Nankervis’ influence around the ground.
Had Brown kicked those two final goals to carry us unto victory, well…I probably would have streaked down Punt Road and draped my royal blue and white scarf over the statue of Jack Dyer at the front of Punt Road Oval – but as it was Big Red did the best he could in the face of a man who at this point has to do I’m not sure what to give away a free kick.
The worst and best part of Sunday’s expedition was that we were so close, so very close to victory – even in the face experiencing a year’s worth of heinous moments when attempting to kick the ball to our forward’s advantage and a couple of eye-boggling howlers in defensive contests (I’m looking at the Riewoldt mark in the second and the Lambert mark in the third).
Richmond fans will rightly point to their whole-team defensive pressure and its effect on our disposal and decision making. That’s fine. But the Richmond defensive unit are already confident enough – they didn’t need the added bonus of us kicking it to them like they were a collective group of younger brothers who we’d been told to give the ball to by Mum or else we wouldn’t be allowed to play next time.
More so because from the third quarter we’d seemingly re-calibrated our required defensive output to meet the standards of the reigning champions.
We upped the ante around the ball and all of a sudden the Richmond defence was put to the test. Wood again. Waite from the goal line. Brown again.
And when MacMillan went rampaging off the half back line, received the give from Anderson and launched it home from outside fifty, well…both James Brown and I are glad the double bolting of the nuts on the Etihad roof complied with industry requirements.
The last quarter was a fitting culmination to the game.
And for the comrades in royal blue and white something akin to an advanced accreditation exam in zen meditation. North had the last nine entries inside 50 and in the final minutes saw Ben Brown spray a couple of set shots that he’d normally eat on toast for breakfast. He’ll be right.
And Tigers fans can continue to thump their chests and know that as it stands, the most effective way to combat their team is to bring a game of pressure and relentlessness at the footy that will result in contests for the ages.
The much-touted clash of the defences lived up to the hype. And I loved that in the (now sustained) absence of Vickers-Willis, Brad Scott and co. decided not to select a team to negate the swarming mosquito fleet of Richmond’s modus operandi, but rather re-call Daw and Waite in a defiant “throw down” at the feet of Hardwick and his men.
You bring your best. We’ll bring ours. Meet you in the middle.
They did. These are two proud teams who know what it’s like to get their jumpers dirty for a win. The match reached an intensity usually seen in September. And beside the premiers for four pulsating quarters, the Shinboners ran step for step.
When it counted, we were there. The final stages of the game were played in our forward fifty. We created the chances. We’d done everything right. We just couldn’t impact the crucial, crucial final element. The bloody scoreboard.
And so, we lost. But gee whiz, it was compelling viewing. If that’s the state of footy, we’re going ok.
Not because there was no congestion. Not because it was a free wheeling shootout with key forwards dominating the forward arc like the days of Carey and Richardson.
For in fact, the game was none of these things.
What it was, was a fierce, unrelenting contest. No more, no less. And it’s all I ever want from the game.
This bloke would have enjoyed the game on Sunday. And check out the similarities to the Cunnington pic. above…
Giants in Hobart on Saturday. They’re wounded and they’re dangerous. Dangerous on field and off. You don’t need a degree in contemporary geo-politics to know that the AFL in its current form would sacrifice its own history in a heartbeat to maintain an artificial footy pulses in artificial footy places.
Let’s beat the AFL in the cold and sleet and biting wind of a real footy town.
Hopefully with a biting wind so strong that (if we can get him down there) Trump’s hair will at long last (and in keeping with true American values) be liberated by a passing gust to live the roaming, capricious life of air born flotsam.
Come on you Roo boys.
O'Shanassy street 