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The Roar

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The dog days of the AFL season are here and to be savoured

30th July, 2017
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The Blues are in the process of a rebuild. (AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy)
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30th July, 2017
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With the scoreboard reading 37-90, Marc Murphy lined up for goal after the three quarter time siren from the right boundary, and you got the sense that even he knew his kick was utterly meaningless.

Murphy’s connection with the ball was sour, and it missed right, fluttering innocuously to the ground, something that the game had already done much earlier.

‘Carlton versus Geelong, Round 19, 2017′ will only be one for the history books in the sense that it did actually take place in the world. The lone upshot from the game is that a certain player probably won’t get a one-week suspension.

It wasn’t a well-played game, and it wasn’t an especially poorly played game. It was just a ‘played’ game. Geelong were clean, and cleanliness is all you really need to win Round 19 games against teams with five wins.

The Blues, who for much of the past three months have excelled at not shooting themselves in the foot, finally got the shotgun out and pointed it downwards. Levi Casboult dropped uncontested marks, Zac Fisher lofted 20-metre passes to opponents, and Bryce Gibbs looked lost wherever he went.

It was the kind of game where players have the ball inside 50 with plenty of time and then decide to chip a short pass sideways to a contest.

And through it all, the Blues tried. Sam Docherty marched out of defence, proud, upright and with the illusion of purpose, and Dale Thomas jumped up and down on the mark like a madman, partying like it was 2011.

It was somewhere on the spectrum between pathetic and admirable, mostly veering (sympathetically) to the former. Carlton’s defence, incomprehensibly solid for so long, has become more comprehensively woeful the past fortnight. Whether other teams have figured out their structure, or the Carlton players have figured out that there’s only a month left in the season, is hard to know.

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The Blues have played like they’re waiting for an ending, and this game played out as though both teams were waiting for the siren. Patrick Dangerfield’s laconic last quarter snap, hit with the intensity of a tired child taking a shot for goal on an empty suburban oval with no one watching on a January afternoon, said it all.

Patrick Dangerfield Geelong Cats AFL 2016

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Much of the season’s last four rounds will play out as this game did, and as Richmond versus Gold Coast and West Coast versus Brisbane did. The team whose mind is elsewhere will give a brief impassioned yell, but then the team whose year is still alive will quickly quiet them, and they will stay quiet. The people in the crowd watching will be the quietest ones of all.

This isn’t a problem that has to be eradicated by a revolutionary fixture. Meaninglessness doesn’t have to be unenjoyable. There are moments in every match – an effortlessly smooth running banana goal from Harry McKay, an immaculately struck set shot from Jack Silvagni – that justify the price of admission.

The real price of these games, though, these dog days, is the helplessness, but it’s a feeling that can be stored as context, a context that makes the meaningful moments in the future all the more rewarding.

Sport needs balance to be at its most magical. The 2016 grand final was made more special by the fact that the 2015 grand final was not special. While you’re sitting at home alone on a Saturday night in a quiet room, the hum of the fridge somehow louder than usual, watching Matthew Wright pinpoint opposition players, it can be easy to lose perspective.

But Matthew Wright in late July is the fee that one has to pay for Marcus Bontempelli in late September, a fee that makes the latter so much sweeter because, irrationally or not, it makes Bontempelli feel so much more earned.

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So don’t take away our pain, Gillon McLachlan. Let us have Geelong 123, Carlton 58. Because even if we don’t want it, we might just need it.

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