The returning coach says he has ‘unfinished business’ after taking on a job loaded with emotional risk – both for him and the clubIt’s halfway through the final quarter of the 2015 preliminary final. Hawthorn has played almost flawless football, but the Dockers are rattling home. Nathan Fyfe is running around with a broken leg, because that’s what you do when you play for Ross Lyon. The crowd is febrile – later we will learn that a woman has been punched in the face and that a Hawthorn player has been whacked over the head with an inflatable anchor. The Fremantle defender Tendai Mzungu switches play with a 20-metre kick across half back. His target is Tom Sheridan, who’s playing...
The coach’s dismissal caught most analysts off guard although the least surprised was likely a supporter base at its wits endIn the off-season, optimism blooms the cheek of every footy fan and club leader. Andrew Bassat, the founder of Seek and the president of St Kilda, was certainly bullish about his footy club and his senior coach heading into 2022. “I fully expect Brett to be our long-term coach and I fully expect — no pressure at all — Brett to become our second premiership coach,” he said. For the first few months, things were tracking nicely. They weren’t exactly a team you’d cancel all plans to go and watch. But they were in the top four. Against Geelong, they...
The Geelong captain entered the MCG carrying Gary Ablett Jnr’s son and exited it handing his boots to the Auskick boyThe team Joel Selwood led out on Saturday was the oldest to ever take the field in a VFL/AFL game. It was his 40th final. At the top of the race, Gary Ablett Jnr nodded to his former captain and handed over his son, Levi, who has a rare degenerative disease. Selwood, one of the most booed footballers in the history of the game, could have been elected, unopposed, the first Australian president at that exact moment.Thirty years ago, almost to the day, young Levi’s grandfather ran onto the MCG with murder in his eyes. He spent the first half...
The compelling storylines recede and the bread and circuses all seem a bit silly given what we now knowEverything was going so well for the AFL. They’d just signed off on a mind-boggling TV rights deal. The football had been exquisite. The stadiums had been heaving. The Brownlow Medal count was compelling. The outgoing CEO was on a giant victory lap. The grand final was one of the most eagerly anticipated in years.That all changed with Wednesday morning’s piece on the ABC website. It evoked a sense this entire competition is built on bullshit, that it’s hard to take anything coming from the mouths of clubs seriously. Football clubs, and the entire industry that feeds off the game, throw around...
There was no need for any fun facilitators in a game that stacks up alongside classics of the pastBefore we get to Saturday’s preliminary final, forgive me as I shake my fist at a cloud. For reasons no-one can explain, or take responsibility for, they now blare music after every goal at the MCG. The stadium was one of the last to succumb to this execrable trend. But in a finals series where more than quarter of a million people have turned up to three MCG games, apparently the atmosphere needs to be augmented with lashings of Kool and the Gang, Kenny Loggins and Chad Kroeger. Preliminary final weekend is supposed to be the people’s round. The following week is...