The immediate future of the Brisbane Lions isn’t ultra bright, but at least they’ve got Dayne Beams.
More, it feels, than in years past, the new AFL season is being driven by narratives of stars returning from serious injuries.
After a pair of false starts, Gary Ablett will try and channel his inner Nick Riewoldt in finding a twilight prime to guide Gold Coast towards the finals, or in a more reasonable goal, towards competence.
Nat Fyfe is still the best player in the AFL when healthy. He’ll spend 2017 attempting to remove the last two words from that sentence.
The returns of captains Jarryd Roughead and Robert Murphy are two of the best stories in the AFL, and they’re also two of the league’s best players.
But spare a thought for another captain and returning star, a forgotten man on the league’s most forgettable team.
Dayne Beams has had one of the strangest careers of any AFL superstar. At the end of 2011, Beams was a nowhere man, an expired phenom whose season ended with two possessions in a preliminary final. And then the next year he became one of the AFL’s top 15 players, the best performer on a team that featured Dane Swan, Scott Pendlebury and Travis Cloke at the height of their primes.
Most players have at the least the semblance of a linear development. Not Beams, who went to go to bed one night as Andrew Gaze and woke up the next morning as Kevin Durant.
The problem with Beams was always his tendency to disappear. He remedied this by deciding to just always be everywhere.
Where once quarters would elapse without him having a meaningful possession, suddenly his touches were dynamic and devastating. So often an anonymous link in the chain to brilliance, Beams became the brilliance himself, his clean hands extracting the ball from the muck, his gait impossibly smooth – marauding and upright.
He ran with purpose and conviction, cutting inside and taking the game on, living with the swagger reserved for players so good that they know that their risks aren’t really risks.
Beams even developed his own singular iconic play, where time and time again, seemingly always with nine minutes to play in the final quarter and a thin lead looking vulnerable, he would rove a stoppage deep inside forward 50, emerge with a clear but exceedingly temporary path, and boom a snap towards goal higher than any other player in the league, and see it go through the middle of the big sticks as his weight carried him towards the right boundary.
2012 wasn’t just a magnificent blip for Beams – since he woke up as a superstar he’s stayed awake. But while his star has remained intact, his body has not.
There are two types of worrying injury histories – the one where the same thing keeps getting hurt over and over again, and the one where everything keeps getting hurt over and over again.
Beams is a victim of the latter. A torn quad kept him out for the first 15 weeks of 2013, knee ligament damage ended his 2014 prematurely, a nagging shoulder became too loud to ignore in 2015, cutting his season short by five games (although not stopping him from winning the best and fairest), and last year knee tendinitis restricted to him to a mere two games.
As a result, Beams, entering his first year as Brisbane’s captain, hasn’t played three consecutive games of AFL football since July 2015. He hasn’t played 20 games in a season since 2012, and since then, of the 89 possible games he could have played, he’s suited up for just 45 of them.
Beams looked like himself in the preseason, as he always seems to coming off injury, moving smoothly, accumulating, and even kicking one of those opportunistic snapped goals against the Crows.
If Beams can stay healthy in 2017, alongside Tom Rockliff, Dayne Zorko, Daniel Rich, Mitch Robinson, Allen Christensen (when fit), Ryan Bastinac and Stefan Martin, he could lead a Brisbane midfield that should flirt with competence and might even be ‘good’. The defence and forward line will be a football cataclysm, but such is life at the AFL’s most woeful club.
The Lions are playing for 2020, and from a rationalist perspective, what’s most important in 2017 is how their youth develops. It’s a stable not nearly as rich as it should be considering the Lions haven’t finished higher than 12th since 2009. Yet players like Eric Hipwood, a tantalising mix of size, pace and kicking purity, and last year’s first round picks Hugh McCluggage and Jarrod Berry are the future. This season they’ll show flashes, portending a football existence that isn’t so bleak.
But a vague future isn’t enough to sustain a fan-base, especially one as beaten down as Brisbane’s. They need a present they can hold onto, and Beams, the healthy superstar version, is their best shot at that.
He won’t make all their wrongs turn right, but he’ll allow Lions fans to look to the light, however briefly. He’s a reason in himself to watch the football, which is one more than Brisbane fans have had in a while.
We’re taking a look at one player from each team that needs to make a difference this week, starting with the ANZAC Day games.
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