Last Friday night it felt like the Bulldogs were beating the Hawks by 40 in the contested possession count. Then you looked at the stats and realised they were beating them by 50.
It was a ferocious, unrelenting performance, the spiritual successor to the frenzied pressure that the 2013 Dockers and 2010 Magpies generated to dominate their own finals victories. Hawthorn were stuck in a pinball machine of defensive mania at the MCG, trapped inside with unleashed animals biting at their jugular all night long.
All season the Hawks were beaten and beaten badly in contested ball, but they were so good at using the ball on the occasions they did win it that it often didn’t matter. The Bulldogs had a novel, somewhat genius antidote to that strategy – just don’t let Hawthorn ever win the ball.
The first quarter and a half played out as every Bulldog fan and neutral feared. The effort from the Dogs was there but the composure wasn’t. Tory Dickson, their premier marksman, missed regulation set shots, and Matthew Boyd, their reliable old hand in defence, looked uncharacteristically rattled.
On the other hand, the Hawks, in a trope as befitting of them as the Germans, were brilliantly efficient, with Shaun Burgoyne and Cyril Rioli controlling proceedings early with their silky, deft movement and sumptuous skills. But the game turned on the back of the Bulldogs’ own two most dynamic talents, when Jake Stringer and Marcus Bontempelli started to exert their influence.
It wasn’t until Stringer’s second quarter goal, an instance of classic Stringer, where he controlled the ball with his foot, exploded through contact and then belted a high arcing snap through the goal and into the Melbourne night, that the Bulldogs started to look like themselves.
Bontempelli took Stringer’s cue and started to get among everything, finishing the game as its dominant figure. This is going to be Bontempelli’s league one day soon, and on Friday he produced two of his first real iconic moments that Bulldogs fans will long remember. Both, symbolically, were at the expense of Luke Hodge.
The first came in the second quarter immediately after Stringer’s goal, where Bontempelli out-marked Hodge inside 50 and then calmly slotted the set shot with conviction.
Bontempelli had the sit on the ball initially, tracking it over his left shoulder, then he turned around to his right shoulder, momentarily lost sight of the ball’s flight before relocating it immediately, just in time to outmuscle Hawthorn’s lionhearted veteran champion, brushing him aside like his last name was Tapscott. Bontempelli then had the composure to go back under the bright lights and finish the goal, a shot that was never in doubt. It was the type of breathtaking play that makes a fan-base believe.
The second moment was just as special, Bontempelli’s brilliant steal of Hodge’s handball in the first minute of the final quarter setting up Dickson’s goal that effectively ended the contest. Just call it ‘The Intercept’ – the dagger that finally put the champion Hawks to their knees, and who better to have been wielding the knife than Marcus Bontempelli.
They were two plays that surmise what makes him so special. The physicality, hardness and poise of the first, and the deft, cerebral artfulness and polish of the second.
So often the great teams exist in the mould of their greatest players. Just look at the Hawks, for so long embodied by the brilliant foursome of Hodge, Burgoyne, Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis, four players who represent an impossible combination of skill and toughness.
The Bulldogs are a team growing in Bontempelli’s image. They’ve long played with his physicality, desperation and vigour around the contest, and they’re learning with every game to play with his grace and touch.
Polished grit – that’s Marcus Bontempelli, and that’s the Western Bulldogs. Their ferocity at the contest is unmatched, but so are their quick, centimetre perfect hands. Their kicking skills, while perfectly respectable, are never going to be confused with Hawthorn’s, but their skills by hand might.
They’re loaded with cerebral players around the contest – Tom Liberatore, Caleb Daniel, Luke Dahlhaus, Lachie Hunter, and Bontempelli – who can win the ball and then only need a split second to put on their Sam Mitchell costumes and place it perfectly to advantage by hand. They hustle, and then they flow.
The Hawks, at their best, move the ball like a slingshot.
The Jack Gunston goal in the first quarter was vintage Bordeaux wine Hawthorn. A magnificent piece of timing in defence from James Frawley, a brilliantly weighted, incisive, risky-but-it’s-not-actually-risky-because-it’s-so-perfect kick from James Sicily into the middle and then Burgoyne, getting pushed to the ground, delivers an immaculate pass onto Gunston’s chest running into an open goal. Defence becomes attack with the simplest of movements, the slightest of turns, and it’s magnificent. That’s Hawthorn’s legacy.
The Bulldogs don’t quite play with that same artfulness. No one does, and maybe no one ever will. They’re not a slingshot – they’re a sledgehammer.
They bludgeon the opponent into submission, and when their opponent is on the ground they make their break for daylight, panting themselves the whole time, retaining just enough energy to finish the job before passing out.
The sledgehammer won on Friday night, and the Hawks, already gasping for air, were strangled into submission by a team that was younger, faster and harder.
Youth, pace and hardness are things the GWS Giants do pretty well too. But when the Dogs tackle the Giants on Saturday they’ll be no David – this is a clash of two goliaths, and two teams that are going to stand that tall for some time. It’s the first chapter of what could loom as the next great rivalry in Australian sport.
Whatever happens, the Bulldogs have already won the respect of the competition and the hearts of every neutral. They’ve beaten last year’s two grand finalists, in W.A. and Victoria, and neither game, ultimately, was especially close.
They have their identity and they have their scalps. Now all that’s left is their trophy.(Click to Tweet)
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