Home ground advantage - just steer clear of the graveyard

Brad Sewell of Hawthorn in action during the AFL ANZAC Day Round 05 match between the Hawthorn Hawks and the West Coast Eagles at Aurora Stadium. Slattery Images

The system under which Victorian-based clubs mostly play “home” games at either the MCG or Docklands has all but robbed those clubs of traditional home-ground advantage.

The obvious exception is Geelong, who have eight games at Kardinia Park this season and are notoriously hard to beat there.

Less obvious, but nearly as helpful, is Hawthorn’s edge at York Park in Launceston, where the Hawks have now won nine of their past 12 games – three out of three in 2006, two from four in 2007, three from four last year and one from one so far this year.

There are three more to come, of which the Hawks should win at least two, with the round 19 blockbuster against St Kilda the big question mark.

Hawthorn showed against West Coast on Saturday night that they have absorbed the most vital bit of local knowledge about York Park – you don’t try to attack via the right-hand flank when kicking to the Invermay Park end.

It’s been a known graveyard, particularly for right-footers, since Roy Cazaly was playing with local team City, and it was noticeable that Buddy Franklin made most of his leads at that northern end to the grandstand side.

In fact the teams outscored their northern end efforts two to one by kicking 12 of the game’s total 18 goals at the city end.

Two West Coast misses from the dead pocket were very costly in the final quarter, followed as they were by the fourth goals to both Jarryd Roughead and Garry Moss that virtually sealed the result.

The timely but widely expected Hawthorn win was just part of a fascinating round, with other highlights including St Kilda and Fremantle exceeding expectations with the ease of their victories over Port Adelaide and Sydney.

Could it be that the Saints are at long last going to make a serious assault on all those jokes about two premierships on the one day? If they win three of their next four I’ll jump on the running board, if not the whole bandwagon.

Essendon’s epic Anzac Day win over Collingwood, Carlton’s clinical destruction of the Bulldogs and Richmond’s restoration of a bit of faith by beating North Melbourne were other highlights, with the Demons v Crows shambles the only dampener.

A couple of the weekend’s efforts by scribes and commentators were right up there with some of the best over the years, too.

Jenny McAsey of The Australian wrote that Sydney midfielder Jarrad McVeigh revealed that club stalwart drank “some green algae” during games when teammates were downing more conventional sports-drink concoctions.

“I wouldn’t get near it,” McVeigh added unsurprisingly.

That brought to mind the fondness of a Tasmanian old-timer called Merv Mitchell, who played for North Launceston and later East Launceston, for a “pony” (four or five fluid ounces, I forget which, in the old measure) of sweet sherry during the three-quarter-time huddle.

And the tale of how a football-loving priest’s call for a swig of brandy as a rough and ready painkiller for a player with a broken arm after a game with Latrobe, also in Tasmania, couldn’t be met.

“Warne-Smith drank the last of it at half-time,” a member of the training staff said, referring to the great Ivor, who later won two Brownlow Medals playing for Melbourne.

Then we were told, as quick as a flash after the event on Sunday, that the Western Bulldogs’ Jarrad Grant was the 172nd, or some equally unbelievably numbered, player to hit the goalpost with his first kick in the VFL/AFL. Do we believe it? Who’s going to argue?

And later in the same game Dennis Cometti pithily described Carlton’s Setanta O’hAilpin as having “delusions of adequacy” after making a bumbling skill error.

The same S. O’h, back from a suspension for bashing a teammate and putting the boot into his bum during a pre-season practice game, had come under notice in the first quarter when, running into an open goal, he blazed away from 45 metres and – yes, Virginia – kicked a behind.