Every mongrel punter and his dog – including my deaf Labrador – has an opinion on who the best ever premiership team might be.
But what about the best sides who gazed at the turf gutted? Who are September’s really memorable runners-up?
The poisoned chalice surely belongs to Geelong 1989.
It’s an unoriginal choice to begin with, but it’s true. And I’ll try to finish with something a bit stupidly original, as recompense.
1989
The Hawthorn Ogre had brawn (picture Langford’s chest), unmatchable work ethic (picture Tuck’s gnarled limbs scrapping like a starved tomcat’s) and silken skills. Their full-forward had the speed of a brumby. This was their sixth straight grand-final. Only an unusually resourceful, brilliant, resilient side could’ve beaten them.
Geelong, as we know, went close.
Warlock Gary Ablett ignited the game in seconds, rising and goaling, all focus. Would he part Corio Bay and deliver the people of Geelong salvation, or leave them to drown their sorrows?
The Cats had it all. Gary Hocking’s tunnelling and foraging and sidestepping, Paul Couch’s hustle (after a slow first half), Mark Bairstow’s carry and Mark Boss’s poise and cool horse-sense. They had endurance, imaginative coaching and the versatility 80s premiership sides cultivated; athletic forward Bruce Lidner, for example, played a blinder off half-back.
They were tough as nails. Their form was hot. Their best, everybody felt, was as good as the Hawks’ best.
So what went wrong?
Maybe the early head hunting was misguided – they misunderstood the nature of the Hawthorn beast. The more opposition teams brutalised the Hawks, the more they steeled. And the warning signs were visible early. After moustachioed general Mark Yates demolished Dermot Brereton with a steel girder hip and shoulder, the crumpled forward responded with an unsettlingly courageous mark and goal, clenching his Celtic fists in resolution.
In the last quarter the game had veered into a kind of exhausted overdrive. Cat Andrew Bews took the last bend dented, on three wheels. If the football gods had shown imagination his unlucky long shot might have bounced fortuitously.
Geelong was brilliant, brave, and just out of time.
1998
Early in the bout North Melbourne are trampling Adelaide in contested ball. Players like Winston Abraham and Brent Harvey are too strong and nimble for the Crows.
Skipper Carey, stalwart Craig Sholl and Fridge Roberts lose their nerve in front of goal. Two years earlier, Carey had confessed to being sick with nerves the morning of his first grand-final against Sydney. In this, his second, the camera catches his uneasiness after marking twenty metres out, inexplicably playing on, missing again.
The Kangaroos lead by four goals at half time but they’ve already missed fifteen shots.
After the match Dennis Pagan said if a team keeps kicking points in a grand-final, sooner or later the opposition shows up. And show up the Adelaide Crows did.
Nigel Smart kicked the party off. North’s gloomy assassin Martin Pyke had dented Smart’s chrome-dome in the first quarter. Now Smart reappeared replenished, or at least conscious, bending an improbable banana-kick from a set shot, turning the mood inside out and upside-down.
Fleet, imaginative, touched by the hand of Mal Blight, the Crows ran wild and danced all over the face of a team who lost its mojo in the heat. The Crows raised the game to rarefied heights. Hand-passing in showy sequences, flowing in waves, goaling from all angles, even Victorians were forced to marvel at the peculiar perfection of it all.
Etched in memory was when Glen Archer wrestled possession like a kid trying to win back a ball swiped by swifter kids, only to see his smothered kick swept away on another wave. The noble defender looked like a bull with a spear in its side.
What, after all that, made the Kangaroos any more impressive than Collingwood of 81 or Collingwood 66 or St Kilda 2009?
The Kangaroos of 98 hadn’t been beaten since June. They combined a kind of hectic energy and straightforwardness. Under pressure they always banded. Wayne Carey was in the form of his life. The defence, a motley mobilisation of rejuvenated rejects and snorting war-horses, left forwards considering less hazardous careers.
The team was so drilled (a bit regimented?), so Dennis Pagan (a bit too Dennis Pagan?). OK I give up. They were a team that just looked as if they were cut out to finish the job on the day.
Rarely has a team looked so sick with regret.
1987
Can anybody remember a team with more rampant momentum in September? Starved of finals action for 20 years, Swooper Northey’s inconspicuous Demons had been typically unpromising until June.
At VFL Park I watched Tony Lockett kick more goals than their entire team. At the MCG I saw Carlton’s Craig Bradley use the Demon midfield for witch’s hats. Even cuddly newcomers The Brisbane Bears beat Melbourne.
In July they scraped some wins.
In August they were blitzing teams.
They stormed September. Loosed in the Colosseum they mauled North Melbourne by fifteen goals. A week later they poleaxed glamourous Sydney.
Relative unknowns like Steven Stretch, Ricky Jackson and Sean White were suddenly stars. Robert Flower was a star, again. The Demons had pent-up hunger, and carpe diem camaraderie the camera couldn’t have missed.
Their train hurtled at Hawthorn on preliminary final day.
They were all but through, when they derailed.
A fifteen-metre penalty had never carried as much pathos.
“Don’t you ever do that again, Jim,” John Northey said to rookie Jim Stynes, conned into crossing Gary Buckenarra’s mark as the siren blared.
Eagle-eyed Buckennarra didn’t miss.
Melbourne was cast down, left wondering.
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