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Beast mode: Franklin, again, is the key to the grand final

28th September, 2016
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Will Buddy Franklin carry the Swans to glory? Or will he not perform on the big stage? (AAP Image/David Moir)
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28th September, 2016
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Genius is sharp and sudden. It doesn’t run to a timeline, and it doesn’t wait for a single date – like the final Saturday of a season. It’s unexpected, and that’s what makes it so special.

This is the problem confronting Lance Franklin. His genius is unquestioned – perhaps unparalleled. His timing may not be.

We expect the greats of the game to stand tallest when the stakes are highest. Saturday will be Franklin’s fifth grand final. He’s underwhelmed in the first four. His two best grand finals, in 2012 and 2014, were blighted by context – wayward kicking in the former, the implosion of the rest of his team in the latter – and defeat.

His performances on the final Saturday have been perfectly respectable, but when the expectation is transcendence, respectability is a wet blanket.(Click to Tweet)

Anything short of a star turn from Franklin on Saturday will be a disappointment. It’s unfair, but it’s inevitable. When you’re that good, we expect you to be that great.

Franklin’s legend will grow immeasurably if he can replicate his last performance on the MCG’s turf. The stat sheet will remember others before him, but anyone who watched Sydney torment Geelong last Friday night will know that it was Franklin’s hand that took all the Cats’ nine lives in a single, devastating quarter.

Number 23 was everywhere when the game was in the balance – and given his dominance the game wasn’t in the balance for very long.

The complete Buddy package was on display in its purest, most majestic form – that combination of grace, skill, speed and violence that’s made him the AFL’s most imposing forward since Wayne Carey.

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Commentators love to wax lyrical about how certain key forwards are actually very proficient field kicks, but in Franklin’s case it’s true. He was beyond ‘proficient’ on Friday night, though, sinking the knife into Geelong with his deft passing, lowering his eyes and caressing soft, immaculately weighted kicks to targets inside 50.

Franklin’s genius can end you in a diverse spread of equally demoralising ways. He embarrassed Tom Lonergan, dummying and selling him enough sweet, sumptuous candy that the Geelong veteran might have passed out from a sugar overdose.

Swans' Lance Franklin kicks the ball

He destroyed Steven Motlop by paying homage to retired Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, entering Beast Mode and bulldozing over Motlop, and Motlop stayed dead for the rest of the night.

These two moments, minutes apart, encapsulate what makes Franklin so special – the grace and delicate, almost gloating poise, of the former, and the visceral, magnificent violence of the latter. There has never been anyone like him.

He’s one of the few forwards in the league who can dominate a game without impacting the scoreboard. He’d already done that in the first term against the Cats, but then added a couple of majors as if to wink at his own brilliance. The ball boomed towards goal, sliding through the air in that idiosyncratic manner that only Franklin’s kicks can.

The grand final narrative is all about the Bulldogs and for good reason. The Swans are a team you begrudgingly respect, but the Bulldogs, ludicrous as it sounds, make you feel better about the world. The mind might have a vague appreciation for the Swans, but the Dogs tug at the heart and the soul. They restore your faith in conceptions of hope and resilience, and if they win on Saturday it will hard to imagine a more remarkable, euphoric victory in Australian sport.

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Lance Franklin can turn that narrative on its head. While the football world romanticises the Dogs and anoints Patrick Dangerfield, you can’t help but feel that there’s a final act twist coming – perhaps a coronation for one of the game’s greats.

Franklin’s most iconic moments are dulled a little by their circumstances.

A 13-goal haul in a meaningless game against North Melbourne, those two running goals in the left forward pocket in a Round 13 game against Essendon, the booming match-winning goal against the Crows in the 2007 elimination final before getting blown out the week after, and that ridiculous inside-out dribbling check-side from the right boundary to put Hawthorn in front in the dying moments of the 2011 preliminary final, a moment that forced this writer to put his head in his hands in the Great Southern Stand and both lament and accept the existence of higher powers. But even that moment, as magnificent as it was, prefaced a defeat.

David Foster Wallace once famously said that genius is not replicable. If Franklin can prove him wrong on Saturday, Bulldogs fans and the vast majority of Australians will be left to weep.

All superstars have a villain’s role lurking inside them – waiting to torment a desperate people. For an afternoon, Franklin might be about to become the nation’s number one villain – but if he does we won’t loathe him for it. We’ll respond much like I did that night at the MCG in 2011. We’ll bow down in fear and reluctant appreciation, and accept that the most spirited army we’ve seen in years just didn’t have enough to topple a king.

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