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As it was happening, in mid-ascent, you could feel that even Dustin Martin himself was beginning to be overwhelmed by the occasion, by the demonstration of his own greatness.
Towards the end of the third quarter, with the game firmly in Martin’s grasp, the opponent suffocated by his strength, the MCG reached a previously untapped volume. Martin converted from the tip of the square, gifted a free kick that probably shouldn’t have been. It was as though the umpires themselves had bought into the hype – and it was difficult to blame them.
As Martin jogged back after the goal, the score now 77-46, he looked almost lost. It made sense. At that moment, he was at the pinnacle of the sport. Where was there left to go?
The Geelong second half was Martin’s masterpiece. This game was his new, better masterpiece. Everything that makes Martin so special was on display at its most profound and majestic.
With the Tigers struggling in the first quarter, outplayed in a game being played on GWS’s terms – on the outside, in transition, with an emphasis on precision skills – Martin had a GWS moment as good as any of his opponents were capable of. He marked inside 50 on a hard lead, wheeled around and pierced Josh Caddy with a low scything bullet at the edge of the square, to set up a goal that put Richmond back in front. The pass was almost confronting, a moment of indelible clarity, where waves calmed and the sea parted.
It looks at times, only briefly mind you, that the Tigers don’t quite belong. Their skills by foot leave something to be desired, and when the game is end-to-end, they look eminently mortal. But then Martin steadies them, with the ethereal, deft magic that doesn’t come as naturally to his teammates (or, for that matter, anyone), and then all of a sudden they’re back, and not nearly so mortal.
The Tigers were uneven in the first half, probably lucky to have their slimmest of leads. But then they settled, and then it was over. They’d already wrestled back the ascendancy before Martin’s three-goal clinic – and they’d done so mainly by turning the game into more of a wrestle.
Dustin Martin of Richmond (AAP Image/Joe Castro)
The ground began to feel much smaller and more cramped, the wide open space the Giants streamed through in the first half now a field of angry, connected bodies to struggle against. In these close quarters, Martin’s strength finished the game.
The fend-offs started to feature, separation created, Martin giving a breathless game moments of magnificent oxygen. He held his ground like no one else can, got a little lucky with the umpires, and finished supremely to give the Tigers a 31-point lead that the crowd made feel twice as big.
Martin’s opening goal of the final term seemingly ended it, the crème-de-Dusty, an absurdly quick sidestep running away from goal to lose his man at the top of the square followed by the quintessential Martin finish, an emphatic check-side where the whole body moved in perfect unison.
And then, if the result was clouded in anything resembling doubt, it was erased with a final contribution of genius, a brilliantly weighted pass to set up Jack Riewoldt’s lone goal, the finest link in the game’s finest chain, begun by Daniel Rioli’s subtle but perfect little knock forward on the far wing.
Richmond is so much more than Dustin Martin, and that’s why they’re in the grand final. But so often, Martin is everything for them. At the most pivotal points yesterday he was just that, and now, next Saturday, they have the chance to grip ‘everything’ in their hands.