I can remember the exact moment when Dane Swan became Dane Swan.
It was a Friday night at the MCG in Round 9, 2006, Collingwood against the Bulldogs. In a tight fourth quarter, with Nathan Buckley and Scott West leading their respective sides, a clumsy 22-year-old with little pedigree broke the game open for the Pies.
Back then, Swan didn’t have the sheer strength or conviction of movement that would later define the way he played. He darted around the ground with a charming naivety, sprinting from contest to contest like an egg with four limbs – a sneak preview of the competition’s pre-eminent waddler.
There was no ink back then either. In 2006, Swan’s aesthetic was much more congruous with his unassuming, bashful style of play. He had a mop of a haircut that looked like the one your mum would give you in Year 8, and he had a demeanour of youthful sincerity that echoed Cameron in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’.
But the kid could run. And that Friday night he ran all over the Bulldogs, kicking two of his three goals in the last quarter en route to 29 touches in a best on ground performance. Although we didn’t know it at the time, it was the goal he passed off in the final quarter which was most prophetic.
With 12 minutes left in the fourth quarter, Heath Shaw, as is his custom, scrubs a kick along the far wing, and Swan and Daniel Cross hotly pursue the loose ball, side by side. Swan, as he would do so many times over the next decade, uses both hands to push Cross off the ball in a manner so casual it would almost feel cheap if it wasn’t so damn effective, gathers the ball himself and then explodes at pace down the wing.
After three bounces, Swan comes to an awkward halt, and then short jabs a floating chip that dies well short of the ideal spot for Anthony Rocca, but gets there in the end. That passage was Dane Swan in a nutshell. Explosive, disjointed athleticism and suspect execution that ‘gets there in the end’.
As impressive as he was that night, it’s still remarkable to believe that same kid, the 58th pick in the 2001 draft (ten of the picks taken ahead of Swan in the draft never played an AFL game, including pick 51: ‘PASS’), would go on to play 250 games and become one of the three most decorated players of his generation.
Five times All-Australian, three best and fairest, two Anzac medals, the 2010 MVP, a premiership, a Brownlow Medal and five different seasons of 20 votes or more (by comparison, Luke Hodge, the number one pick in Swan’s draft, has had zero such seasons). Chris Judd and Gary Ablett Jr, two of the 20 greatest football players of all-time, are Swan’s only true rivals for accolades among players drafted in the 21st century.
While his resume argues otherwise, there’s no way Swan will go down in history on the same platform as Ablett or Judd. Players like Judd, Ablett, Lance Franklin, Adam Goodes and Nat Fyfe are revered on a different level to Swan. We’re in perpetual awe of their gifts and we treat them like physical gods, which, in a way, they are.
People have marvelled at Swan throughout his career but for a different and implicitly condescending reason. Swan has always inspired awe in people, but the awe isn’t out of admiration; it’s out of confusion. The bloke can’t kick, he’s average height, looks a little overweight and has the composure of an over-excited seven-year-old on Christmas morning.
And yet he’s won a Brownlow medal and was the best player on a team that won a premiership. He’s the first ever transcendent superstar that I can remember where people genuinely questioned, even in his prime, whether he was actually good?
While such bemusement is largely justified given his aesthetic, there’s always been an endearing poetry in the way Swan plays. You just have to look a little harder for it. There’s a unique classicism in his style of play – the fact that, to the naked eye, all he seems to do is see the ball, run after it, pick it up and then awkwardly kick it as far forward as he can. It’s like Dane Swan is the greatest Under-12s player of all time.
No, there’s no grace to his game that his last name might imply. But there is a power to Swan that perfectly complements Scott Pendlebury, the player who has soaked up the grace quotient in the Collingwood midfield the past decade. Swan’s downhill momentum – the ability to manufacture pace and strength from tight quarters – is matched only by Judd.
What makes Swan such a sympathetic football player is that he seems so much like us. While Judd’s momentum and dash mimics a celestial gazelle, Swan runs around like headless poultry. You could put Swan in the line-up for Broadmeadows or Ringwood this weekend and he wouldn’t seem out of place. He’s one of us.
While stars like Sam Mitchell and Ablett always seem to exercise an almost eerie control over proceedings, as though they’re operating on some extra-terrestrial wavelength of the time-space continuum, Swan has always existed on our wavelength. There’s nothing cool or superior about the way he plays. His mouth always seems to be ajar when he’s running and his eyes are uncommonly wide open. When he plays football he looks like he’s Sandra Bullock re-entering the atmosphere in ‘Gravity’, operating in a constant state of intense panic.
From 2009 to 2013, Swan’s idiosyncratic athleticism made him one of the two or three best midfielders in the game (over that period he’d be third for me, behind those extra-terrestrials Ablett and Mitchell). He averaged over 30 disposals and effectively a goal a game in each of those years, combining elite strength, a preternatural knowledge for how to find the ball and the most damaging burst running the competition has ever seen.
Ironically, and perhaps a little tragically, the player so often laughed at for his physique has had his effectiveness curtailed by diminishing athleticism. Swan’s effective disposal percentage has dropped each of the past six years, now hovering at a shocking 62.6 per cent.
Given his modest skill by foot and his heavy reliance on explosive pace, Swan was never going to be a player that aged especially well, and that’s proven to be the case. So often a player that spent his games exploding into space, 2014 and 2015 have seen Swan come right back to the pack, both figuratively and literally.
As long as Swan retains his instincts for how to find the ball as well as a semblance of his once storied strength and speed, he’ll remain a solid AFL midfielder. That’s been the case this year, so far an improvement on his dismal 2014 campaign – he already has more clearances, inside 50s, goals and goal assists in 13 games this season than he did in 17 last season. But he’s not ‘Dane Swan’ anymore.
There are still flashes of the 2011 Brownlow medallist though. A booming goal from outside 50 against Carlton in Round 5, a throwback game in Round 3 against the Saints replete with those needless but somehow charming one-twos that Swan has been pulling for a decade.
Over the next 18 months, though, as Swan’s likely final contract expires, those flashes will almost certainly become fewer and fewer. So savour the Great Dane while you can, because it’s only a matter of time before the superstar we fancied as one of us actually is one of us.
Diplomatically answered, Darcy!
For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the now-traditional Anzac Day clash at the MCG, there has been one thing conspicuously lacking over…
Old mate summing it up better than anyone possibly could!
