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Sitting in the MCG’s Great Southern Stand on Saturday night, hearing the Bombers supporters cheer their team before the bounce thunderously and triumphantly, seeing them wave their scarves maniacally, the scene didn’t exactly feel dirty, but it didn’t feel clean either.
It existed in the netherworld in between that Essendon have lived in for the past four years.
There was something uncomfortable about the cheers being much louder for a team convicted of cheating than they were for a man returning from cancer, but little of fandom is rational, and even less is fair or balanced.
The raucous support for Essendon on the night felt like the fierce, feverish, unashamedly crazed screams of ‘ball!’ that come from the crowd the instant an opposition player is tackled, paying no heed to whether any free kick should actually be paid.
Whether it was ‘blood energy’ or something a little more pure, the Bombers’ players certainly seemed to feed off of it. There was a line of thought that Essendon would suffer on the field from a lack of continuity – the rustiness of key cogs not having played in 18 months – and that Hawthorn, a pristine model of continuity, would thus expose them.
Not to be.
The Bombers played like a team liberated from the past, while the Hawks played like one suffocated by it. The winners played with freedom – unburdened and adventurous – while the losers played vaguely not to lose.
The most poetic moment, for this neutral anyway, occurred in the final term when Travis Colyer tried to outsprint James Frawley from a clear positional deficit. Colyer never really had a shot, but he tried anyway, attempting to zoom by Frawley like a kid on a school oval.
It was symbolic of the night, where Essendon played like men set free, desperate to express themselves in whichever way possible, while Hawthorn just stood there and reacted, looking disappointingly content to simply be the backdrop to what was actually happening.
Beyond the drama and the symbolism, Essendon just looked like a very solid football team. They were incisive while Hawthorn were insipid. The foot skills of Dyson Heppell, Zach Merrett and Brendon Goddard sublime, all three of them showing that courage isn’t just about taking a hit, it can be about caressing a pass through traffic, and the results can be just as uplifting for a team. Of the two teams on the night, only one looked like Hawthorn, unfortunately for the Hawks.
Essendon has always had a list construction that makes sense. They have star players in all three phases and enough depth to get by. With Cale Hooker forward, Michael Hurley back and Jake Carlisle gone, the key position structure looks to have finally fallen into place.
The Watson/Heppell Bombers have never really had a clean run at success, constrained by injuries or worries. Now they have a shot, and on the basis of Saturday night, when their aim was outstanding, the worries might be left for the rest of the competition.
Then again, maybe the Hawks are just bad. They looked old, tired and, more than anything, lifeless at the MCG. They looked like a team standing only as a monument to its former self.
But it’s Round 1, a time more for cheers than conclusions. In a month things will be clearer. How we should feel about Essendon and their ‘return’ probably won’t be, but in a saga where the public judged them culpable, then innocent, then maybe, well, yeah, probably, sort of guilty, and the authorities found them not guilty and then guilty, clarity is likely never coming.
All that can be done now is to watch the football, thank God. On the ‘defiance’ front, the roars for Essendon are hard to get behind.
On the ‘our football team is back and the games mean something again’ front, it’s much easier to support the Essendon fans in their loudness.