2015 AFL Qualifying Final

West Coast Eagles v Hawthorn

Friday 11 September 2015, Domain Stadium, Perth

Premiership Hangover…literally

Twenty3 is back for the finals! We took the year off, partly due to footy fatigue after three solid years of blogging – call it the premiership hangover, make that a premierships hangover – at Hawthorn premierships are plural – and partly because after the Round 2 loss to Essendon I nearly lost the will to live, let alone blog. But like Dipper, Dermie and Burgoyne, I live for September so I’m back on board to see the Hawks through to our historic three-peat.

Good things come in threes: little pigs, blind mice, Macbeth’s witches, the Chappell brothers, the Beckett trilogy, Stooges, the toes on a sloth, manage a trois’, Hendrix albums, Lethal Leigh…the list goes on, so it seems only right that we add Hawthorn premierships to the inventory: 2013, 2014 & 2015.

The sun is out for the first time in what seems like months, the blossoms are blooming, spicing the air with a piquant scent and the news is devoted almost entirely to football – even the biggest migration of refugees across Europe since WWII can’t keep Cyril off the front page of Friday’s Age. It must be finals time – Spring has sprung and I’m on heat for Hawthorn!

Hodgey – a man of conviction

The Hawks are well and truly primed for this year’s flag. Hodgey’s preparation is as meticulous as always – he’s down to three or four drinks before a game now.

Serving his second suspension of the year in the fortnight before the finals, Luke Hodge was caught driving while over the limit, blowing .068. Attempting to explain himself on television, he said he’d had three or four drinks at a poker night with mates. Of course all drinkers who have ever tried to cover their tracks after drinks with mates know that by three or four, he really meant five or six, and they were probably pints not pots.

Most observers were surprised that there was no blanket ban on drinking, but when a photo of the night emerged showing Campbell Brown at the table, fellow Hawks fan Baker expressed surprise that there was no blanket ban on Campbell Brown. Where there’s an off field indiscretion, he pointed out, Brown is usually somewhere nearby.

Of course Hodgey’s beer diet might be in the name of bulking up a bit to compensate for ‘lite & easy’ food diet he’s been on for the past year.

While idiotic, and perhaps indicative of a mindset not wholly focussed on the premiership campaign, Hodgey’s a bit unlucky – a victim of technology and the new puritanism. In the past a well-recognised player in this position would be waved on by the officer with the promise of a couple of Grand Final tickets, and the results of the test would be ‘misplaced’.  The technology no longer allows for that, but notwithstanding the fact that he shouldn’t have driven while under the influence, calls for Hodgey to be suspended by the club for the finals are ridiculous.  He’s received the legal fine the demerit points are deducted and he’s now the face of drink driving. No one else, save for members of the legal profession, lose their job over such an incident. Besides, we needed him.

As a two-time premiership captain and two-time Norm Smith medallist, Luke Hodge is widely respected as a man of his conviction. Unfortunately, that now means a drink driving conviction.

Hodgey keeping hydrated before a match

Buddy’s issues

The other big pre-finals story is Buddy Franklin. When is Buddy not the big story? As we all know, Buddy has withdrawn from Sydney’s final this week due to unspecified ‘mental health’ issues as well as some explicitly specified epilepsy.

Of course at Twenty3 we wish Buddy only the best – after all, this blog is named after him, after a fashion. We can’t help thinking, however, that his issues, whatever they are, might be another manifestation of the Hawthorn curse.

Evidence is mounting that players who leave Hawthorn for another club suddenly lose their ability to play on the field or cope off the field: Jonathan Hay, Mark Williams, Dermie, Jade Rawlings, Campbell Brown, there are numerous examples of players who were never the same once they swapped the brown and gold for some other team’s kit. Trent Croad is probably the best exhibit – he lost his powers when he went to Fremantle and then magically regained them when he returned to Hawthorn.

We sincerely hope this isn’t the case with Buddy. He’s probably the most exciting footballer to play the game in the past 20 years – okay Cyril’s not too bad either – so we’d love to see him recover, get back out there kicking goals, and more importantly, living well.

You are what you wear

Somehow, despite finishing third, Hawthorn are hot favourites for the flag…I mean we’re hot and all that, but you’d think the teams that finished first and second – Fremantle and West Coast – might rate a mention. I’m less certain, it is worth noting that in each of our past five premierships, 1989, 1991, 2008, 2013 and 2014, we’ve defeated Geelong at some stage in the Finals series or in the Grand Final itself, but this year they haven’t qualified for the finals, so it’s going to be tough without our finals bunnies to beat along the way. On the other hand, in 2013 we finished first and won the flag, in 2014 we finished second and won the flag, so numerology suggests that finishing third in 2015 puts us in a good position.

So we’re drawn to play the Eagles in Perth. In 1991 this was the scene of what I consider to be one of our greatest finals victories – defeating a dominant Eagles in the first final played outside Victoria. I wasn’t so confident this time around, even though we’d defeated them at the same venue a few weeks earlier.

For a start we were wearing our Power Rangers outfit. This little number features a gold brocade yolk over a shimmering silver front teamed with white shorts and white socks. Sure it’s spring fashion week in Melbourne, but that doesn’t mean we have to dress for the catwalk. In the debate over worst strips ever, our one-off navy top with brown and gold harlequin pattern always comes in at number one, but this new clash strip looks certain to usurp it.

It’s got a marching girl, ice dancer vibe that not only renders it unsuitable for football, but makes it look too camp even for Mardi-Gras.

I’m at my friend Chan-Tha’s for the match with a few Hawks fans, one Eagles fan and a few randoms who ostensibly don’t care. A couple of the boys have gone to Perth for the match. We are envious at first, but by ¾ time we’re glad to be back in Melbourne, away from the horror show.

I know umpires are only human and want to be loved, but they became addicted to the roars of approval that greeted them every time they awarded the Eagles a free kick – so they kept awarding them.

It is often commented that the crowd in Perth virtually constitute an extra player for the home team, and this is why. A few weeks earlier the Eagles crowd were at the centre of the Adam Goodes booing controversy. While it is widely understood as being racist, the Eagles crowd, in their defence, pretty much boo anyone not wearing an Eagles jumper. And vehemently so. The Sydney home crowd may be the most ignorant, in that they still have no idea of the rules, and simply don’t understand any decision that goes against Sydney, the Eagles crowd, even more so than the Port Adelaide and Freo crowds, are by far the most feral.  They hate everyone equally.

Predictably they are booing Hodge on this night. You do have to wonder about Eagles fans – these are the same people who gave Ben Cousins, a well known ice addict, a standing ovation and named a wing after Chris Mainwarring who died from a drug overdose – yet they boo a bloke who had three or four, okay, five or six drinks. Go figure.

Tricky conditions – wind, rain and Eagles fans – made scoring tough.  As a result, goals for both teams only came through errors; Hawthorn clangers or Eagles indiscretions – Xavier Ellis’ coathanger tackle on Cyril that resulted in a 50 m penalty and may rob the X man of playing further part in the finals.

The first quarter was relatively even and we looked reasonably dangerous when we went forward. Cyril was playing like he meant it, and we matched the Eagles for endeavour. We even led by 1 point at quarter time. But the second and third quarters saw the Hawks outscored 10 goals to 2, and we were 50 points behind at ¾ time. I don’t want to inventory the horror goal for goal, or clanger for clanger, but it was our worst performance for the season – and this in a year when we lost to both Essendon and the Giants.

Hodge played like he was still sheepish about his recent bender, or possibly still hungover, Rough made uncharacteristic errors, at one point dropping a simple chest mark, recovering only to miss a simple shot on goal, Shiels was sloppy, Breust and Smith ineffective. But it is unfair to single out individual players or specific incidents; Hawthorn was simply outplayed by a better team on the night.

Also Clarkson was outcoached by former lieutenant Adam Simpson. Like Hardwick before him this season, a former Hawks assistant has worked out how to stop Hawthorn scoring, or even moving the ball with anything like fluidity. Admittedly, Clarkson made some strange moves, starting with Frawley up front, and then moving Lake up forward. It’s hard to know what the thinking behind Lake going forward is, though doubtless the genius behind this move will become obvious when he kicks five goals in the Grand Final and wins another Norm Smith medal. It may have just been a pragmatic move caused by Gunston going off with a likely season ending ankle injury. Clarko, after all, has a few credits in the bank when it comes to coaching. It is just possible that a three-time premiership coach knows a little more about the role than me or any other lounge room pundit.

All in all it was a disastrous night for the Hawks. Our finals campaign hasn’t been helped by assistant coach Brendan Bolton leaving to accept the senior coaching role at Carlton (I mean good on him, but couldn’t it wait – aren’t there AFL rules preventing this?), nor by the tragedy of Brett Ratten’s son being killed in a car accident, or indeed by the news of Buddy’s issues. The players would be inhuman if they weren’t affected by these events.  If we can win the flag from here – and it’s not impossible – then we’ll have pulled off one of the greatest premierships of all time.

Final scores: West Coast 14 12 96 d Hawthorn 9 10 64.

What we learned: Alastair Clarkson’s mantra of when one soldier goes down, you just bring in another has been adopted not just by other clubs, but has even crept into the literary world. This week new books have been published by authors purporting to be other people. David Lagercrantz is continuing ‘The Girl…’ series in the wake of Stieg Larsson’s death, while Anthony Horowitz is writing the James Bond books that Ian Fleming can no longer write, also due to having died.

Still in the world of, ahem, culture, news in that Bryan Adams is to perform at the Grand Final. Bogan music like that probably deserves an all-WA Grand Final.

What we already knew: When Brisbane won the third of their three-peat premierships in 2003, they too lost the qualifying final intertstate (to Collingwood), only to recover and eventually defeat Sydney in Sydney in the Preliminary Final, before reversing the earlier result against Collingwood in the Grand Final. Could this all be part of Clarko’s masterplan?