Dennis Cometti in '89: the best call ever?

Channel Seven recently featured the 1989 grand final on Footy Flashbacks. Another tribute to this match would be superfluous. The game has been dissected and mythologised like no other match.

It has gone ahead of iconic deciders like 1966, 1970 and 1977, and for anyone aged 30-50 (and many others that fall outside that category) the instant response, when asked what’s the greatest grand final they’ve seen, will be “89”.

So it’s not the match that needs to be discussed, it’s the call. Here I am today to make a case that Dennis Cometti’s call of the match is the greatest ever.

First my bias needs to be disclosed. I watched the 1989 grand final as an eight-year-old while on holiday on the Gold Coast. It remains one of the most memorable moments of my life (sad you may say), and while I loved footy immensely already, my heart was well and truly taken that day.

Despite not being a Geelong or Hawthorn supporter, I would have watched this match in full or part at least 25 times over the following 10 years. It never lost its appeal.

Dennis Cometti holds an esteemed view in the football world today, more universally loved today than any other caller. His catchphrases are part of pop culture.

It’s easy to forget that this was not always the case. When Cometti was first heard regularly by Victorian football followers after the 1987 expansion, the response varied between flummox and derision. There was a kind of footy xenophobia that Victorians displayed in the early years of going national and the attitude to Cometti was indicative.

Who was this bloke from Perth?

He’s always calling Eagles matches, he must be biased.

What’s this centimetre perfect crap?

He sounds like an FM radio DJ (which he was once upon a time).

Part of it was the sudden transition between the safe days of the VFL – Louie and Peter Landy, Bobby Skilton. A bit of Sandy Roberts was about as radical as it got.

Without disrespect to Lou in particular, if you watch back a Richards/Landy call from the mid-1980s and compared it to Cometti’s call of 89, you’d swear they were 25 years apart.

He was a man slightly out of step with the backwards view of the day, and while he memorably called the Eagles first premiership in 1992 (punctuated by the ‘cork in the ocean’ description of a miraculous Peter Wilson goal) the ascension of Bruce MacAvaney to top dog in the box during the 90s meant that it was only when he moved to Channel Nine in the TV rights shake-up of 2002 that we all woke up to how good the guy was.

So what did Cometti do on that day in 89?

First of all, let’s look at his calling partners.

Ian Robertson – enthusiastic and workmanlike best describes his style, an adequate second banana but nothing ground-breaking here. It is however interesting to note that Roberston was also second banana to MacAvaney in his mid-90s Friday night pomp.

The argument can be mounted that in the commentary box the ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ theory reigns. The present dream team of Cometti/MacAvaney is not what we all hoped it would be. I’d take ’89 Cometti and ’90s Friday night Bruce on their own over the duo every time.

Don Scott, known as ‘hard-hitting’ in his commentary days, or as we all suspected ‘grumpy’, had a commentary style that was the opposite of his dress sense.

In the ’89 grand final he was hyper critical of Geelong, which completely overshadowed anything else he said. He particularly targeted Garry Hocking, often without reason.

In the 1991 second Semi Final, he lambasted Hocking for three quarters despite the fact that he was keeping the Cats in the game. Eventually he begrudgingly admitted after Hocking smothered a Hawk kick in traffic , followed up by gathering, evading and kicking a goal, that “it wasn’t a bad goal”.

So if this call was going to live up to the match, Dennis needed to carry it. And he did so magnificently. In fact, Dennis’ call made this match even better. What’s forgotten is that for all of the individual brilliance and unforgettable moments, it was a five-goal game for three and half quarters. It took skill to harness the chaos of the day while keeping belief that this match was great, and Dennis did it.

This was Dennis playing the straight man, long before the pop culture references and knowing wordplay that he will most likely go down in history for. I imagine him as the focussed athlete who had copped criticism, and that day, on the biggest stage, he was not leaving anything to chance.

His delivery and flow has always been his strength, and in the frenetic pace of ’89 he stayed calm with the right amount of flourish, never lowering himself to hysterics to get his message across.

Nobody else of this era (and perhaps other eras) could have controlled the call the way he did on this day. He was flawless in calling players, the action and in giving his (inferior) co-commentators space to work. He was ‘centimetre perfect’ from siren to siren.

In later times he’s held the gravitas to expand editorially during his calls. He is always insightful, but that day he was the up and comer who was going to play the perfect calling game and as such had no time for any indulgence.

As Don railed about Geelong treating it as a home and away game and Hawthorn’s superiority, Dennis saw that Geelong were holding their own after quarter time, and with luck they would come. Midway through the second quarter he called that ‘momentum was shifting’ , and it did though it didn’t play out on the scoreboard to the last quarter. Dennis believed before everyone else that we were seeing a classic.

He acted as the conductor to the television-watching audience, making us believe too.

While none of his most memorable calls of the day will quite match the iconic nature of ‘Jesaulenko, you beauty’, ‘I tipped this’ or ‘hit the boundary’ from Mike Williamson and Ted Whitten in’70 and ’66 respectively, he managed many on the next rung that seamlessly wove into his larger masterpiece.

After Ablett had taken his falling one hand mark deep in the pocket while arm-locked with Scott Maginness, and then coolly slotted a checkside kick from the boundary, he said, “cleared by Hawthorn to Geelong in 1983, will he come back to haunt them? Checkside kick…… nonchalant”. His measured delivery matched the tone that Ablett had set.

As Geelong frantically made up ground in the last quarter and bombed the ball forward, he said: “Why not, the miracle worker is down there”. He summed up what we were all thinking.

And perhaps the best, as Ablett recovered from a marking contest to rhythmically gather the ball as if that’s what he’d always planned before neatly snapping on his left, Cometti also didn’t need to break stride: “finds it on the ground, his eighth goal”.

As pandemonium was breaking out at the G and in front of TV sets with Geelong edging closer to Hawthorn and Ablett edging closer to God, Dennis edged closer to poetry among the hysteria.

There are memorable calls, of which footy has many. The call of the 1966 decider is quite rightly the one that most romantics hold dearest.

But to hold up a footy call against the best in world sport, Dennis in 1989 is without peer.

As the final seconds ticked down and it became clear that the Hawks would hold on to win consecutive Premierships, Dennis spoke of the ‘dream of back to back pennants’. I’ve never heard this term used before or since in VFL/AFL football, though it’s entirely appropriate that Dennis would finish his tour de force this way.

Bravo, Dennis Cometti: always accurate, always interesting and always above the pack.