Waiting for Goddard: Essendon's star disappointment

The best game that Brendon Goddard ever played is the worst thing that ever happened to him.

Goddard’s dominant display in the first 2010 grand final was one of the handful of truly great individual football performances of the modern era.

31 touches, five clearances, six rebound 50s, two goals and three contested marks – the last of which stands tall among the best marks in AFL history given its timing.

Goddard’s influence that day was as devastating as it was diverse. It’s difficult to think of another performance where you could make a legitimate argument that one player was the best defender, midfielder and forward in one game, let alone one grand final.

That is the gift of Goddard – he might be the only player in the league that could play every position on the field aside from ruck at an above average level. This versatility has also been Goddard’s curse though – when a man plays every position, he also plays no position. For his coaches, figuring out where Goddard is best deployed has been like trying to drunkenly solve a broken Rubik’s Cube.

After his heroism in the 2010 grand finals, Goddard’s name started to rightfully get thrown around in the ‘best player in the competition’ discussion. He had been a superstar all season, ranking top seven in the league in disposals, contested possessions, uncontested possessions, marks and goal assists.

For no explicitly discernible reason, after 2010 things have slowly fallen apart for Goddard. Once a player so majestically light on his feet, Goddard has become a weighed down footballer, seemingly flattened by the heavy burden of expectation that 2010 produced. His drop has hardly been calamitous, but it has been significant.

A fire that bordered on impressively excessive has been reduced to a passive flicker. After asserting his influence over games as a leading man, Goddard has become just another character in the play. He took 38 contested marks in 2010 and hasn’t topped 14 in a season for the past five years. In 2010 Goddard took the game on, averaging 1.4 bounces per game but he hasn’t eclipsed 0.8 bounces in any season since then.

After 24 goal assists and 85 clearances in 2010, he hasn’t bested 16 or 66 since. His contested possessions and inside 50s have fallen off too. Once an incisive, devastatingly impactful Swiss army knife of a player, now 30 years old Brendon Goddard resembles more of a functional butter knife.

To call Goddard a ‘disappointment’ is entirely relative. He remains an excellent football player – he would be one of the six or seven best players on every team in the league. His disposal efficiency has been incredibly consistent at elite levels over his entire career, shading 80 per cent – or in other words, 20 per cent higher than Taylor Adams.

His composure is Burgoyne-esque and his decision-making is presidential. And yet, he leaves you wanting more. When a player is a capable of turning grand finals by himself and dominating virtually every facet of the game, ‘consistently very good’ tastes like a lukewarm beer.

Brendon Goddard is worth his salary and Essendon have to be content with the output of their 2013 Best and Fairest winner and most consistently good player of the past four years along with Jobe Watson and Dyson Heppell. But contentment is often the ugly little brother to ecstasy, something that Goddard hasn’t truly produced since he used Harry O’Brien as a step-ladder to heaven with seven minutes left in the drawn grand final.

The football world was figuratively and literally at Goddard’s feet at that moment. It felt like the dawn and the arrival of a transcendent talent. How were we to know that the symbolism wasn’t in the impossible, breathtaking ascension of that mark, but rather the composed, perfectly respectable and yet unremarkable descent.

Since 2010 Brendon Goddard has not made an All-Australian team and he hasn’t polled double digit Brownlow votes in a season. He has remained a terrific football player but one can’t help but be overwhelmed by disappointment at Goddard’s underwhelming post-2010 performance.

In a way it’s unfair to penalise a player because they once flashed transcendent brilliance. But at the same time, that’s life – when you’ve shown that you can touch God, a grounded existence feels like a requiem for a dream.

It’s for that reason that we might look back at Brendon Goddard’s career as a disappointment – relentlessly coloured by the shadow of a greatness that he promised, briefly held onto, and then let fade away.