In 2010 Dayne Beams was as close to a nobody as a promising young player could be.
He was the 20th or 21st player picked every week for Collingwood, a talented 20-year-old in his second season who had stagnated after an exciting debut campaign.
He would show flashes of indisputable class – improbably clean gathers from congestion, incisive runs cutting from the deep wing to the heart of the corridor – but he had a propensity to completely disappear from games.
It was easy to watch Collingwood and go 40-minute stretches not knowing whether Beams was playing or whether he’d been a late withdrawal.
Beams was Collingwood’s most anonymous player in their two grand finals against St Kilda, with 12 touches in the draw, 11 in the win for 56 champion data points total across the two encounters – barely half as many as the next lowest ranked player.
2011 was similarly disappointing, with Beams missing a chunk of the season through injury and then failing to get a kick in the preliminary final against Hawthorn before missing the grand final.
Entering 2012, Beams was at the crossroads. He was a ‘promising player’ three years removed from the initial promise. He was a peripheral team member, someone whose name was thrown around by fans as trade bait.
And then Luke Ball tore his ACL.
Prior to Ball doing his knee against Carlton in Round 3 of 2012, Beams had more than 26 touches just nine times in 58 games. Since Ball’s injury opened up a vacant spot in the midfield, Beams has broken that number in 38 out of 48 healthy games.
But Beams didn’t just start getting more of the ball – he started making it his own. So often just another guy in the chain of handballs to put the ball at the mercy of Dane Swan’s dash or Scott Pendlebury’s brain, Beams started being Swan and Pendlebury.
After polling three Brownlow votes total in 2010 and 2011, Beams polled 19 in 2012. He’d win the best and fairest that year, the best player in a top-four team.
It turns out the best way to stop being the guy whose job it is to get the ball to the more accomplished player is just to become the more accomplished player.
Those once-fleeting clean gathers from congestion and incisive runs inbound became the status quo. He started taking players on, violently throwing himself into packs with no regard for his body, extracting the ball and having the conviction to run with it and break lines when he got it.
Always a player with a keen sense for goal, he started to hone his eye in. Since kicking 26.32 in 2010 (45 per cent accuracy), Beams has kicked 78.45 (63 per cent).
A supernova of class, courage, accumulation and polish, Dayne Beams became a star.
Beams’ evolution epitomises one of the joys of following sport. Watching a team, and the individuals within it, grow over time is the most rewarding thing about sports. Players with bad habits on losing teams grow into players with good habits on winning teams. You learn to accept the free kicks in 2006 that Dale Thomas gives away for being too ferocious and tackling someone without the ball, because without those learning curves there’s no 2011 preliminary final chase-down of Cyril Rioli, where the ferocity has been channelled.
Being a part of that maturity process, if only as an onlooker from afar, is what makes me love sports. Which is great, until Dayne Beams signs with Brisbane.
When news broke that Beams had been traded, my first thoughts weren’t about the hole it would leave in Collingwood’s midfield or how this would affect Nathan Buckley’s rebuilding plan. My instinctive reaction was simply that I wasn’t going to get to watch Dayne Beams play for my football team anymore.
I’ll still watch him play, but it won’t be the same. Once a family member, Beams is now just a kid I went to school with. Somebody that I used to know.
I don’t hold anything against Beams for wanting to leave, his reasons were totally defensible. Sometimes sport just sucks.
Jerry Seinfeld has the famous quote that at the end of the day sports fans are just rooting for laundry. The players come and go; you’re just rooting for the shirts they’re wearing. That always felt overly cynical to me, but now watching Brendon Goddard, Dale Thomas, Gary Ablett, Lance Franklin and Dayne Beams in colours that still seem foreign, it feels truer by the day.
As fans we tell ourselves that we have loyalties and (one-sided) relationships with individual players. In reality though, we’re just rooting for the guernsey. Our loyalty to certain players is only as long as their contract is with our team.
In 2011, Dale Thomas was on track to be my favourite Magpie of all time. Four years later and I applaud every time he shanks a kick. It took Ryan Griffen one press release to completely undermine 10 years of built-up goodwill with Bulldogs fans, and Tom Scully just needed to make one very sound financial decision to ensure that he would be loathed by Melbourne fans for a generation.
As much as I love watching the process of players growing over time, in the age of free agency and player movement, that process is fickle. It can’t be trusted anymore. The only thing you can rely on is that the colours on the guernsey will remain the same.
Beams’ departure means that another young player will step up, much like Beams filled the void left by Luke Ball’s injury in 2012. Jordan De Goey, Taylor Adams, Tim Broomhead, Ben Kennedy… one of these guys will emerge. They’ll show flashes that we’ll hold onto, and then eventually the flashes will become the norm. The maturity process starts again for these players Saturday night at the Gabba, Round 1.
We’ll savour De Goey’s polish, Adams’ grit and Broomhead’s zip, and look forward to watching them for the next decade.
But there Dayne Beams will be, lining up opposite them, reminding us that ‘the next decade’ might only be ‘the next six months’, and we really are just rooting for laundry.
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