Grand final preview? The stakes of West Coast vs Hawthorn

“Come at the king, you best not miss.” The West Coast Eagles will be heeding the words of Omar Little from The Wire on Saturday night at Domain Stadium.

For the past four years, Hawthorn have been the AFL’s Stringer Bell – an unassuming leader, coldly measured and efficient, but brutal and unforgiving when they have to be.

The ladder might imply otherwise, but we know, and they know, that the Hawks are still the league’s kings.

The Eagles are their closest contender.

By most metrics, Saturday night will be a match-up of the AFL’s two best teams. The Hawks and Eagles rank top two in the league for inside 50 differential, marks inside 50, disposal efficiency, points scored and percentage. The concern for West Coast is that they run second to their three-peat aspiring rivals in each of those categories.

The fact that neither team is coming off a win should not diminish Saturday night’s drama. Last Friday night was in many ways Richmond’s biggest game in a decade, while for the Hawks it was their fourth most important game of the past five weeks.

Up north the Eagles dominated the Gold Coast in virtually every stat, they just didn’t win the game. The whole match was bizarre and the last five minutes were an exercise in surrealism, like a bad dream sequence in a David Lynch film. As flippant as it may be, sometimes you can just write off games as, “Well, that was weird.”

After eight wins in a row for Hawthorn and 12 in 13 games for West Coast, both these teams were due let-downs – it’s fitting that they happened within 24 hours of each other.

Given that they’re six points clear at the top of the ladder and have only been beaten twice all season, Fremantle has an argument to be included in the contender discussion. But they’re 27 percentage points behind the Eagles, 37 behind Hawthorn, and they haven’t had a truly impressive win since demolishing North Melbourne in Round 8.

The Dockers might have the stingiest defence in the league (although Hawthorn and West Coast have both only conceded 32 more points than Fremantle this season) but they lack the offensive firepower to match-up to their more explosive rivals, ranking a meek ninth in points scored.

Freo can mount their case next week by toppling their neighbours in what is looming as arguably the most meaningful Western Derby of all time, but for the time being they’re running two spots below their ladder position in the contender argument.

There have been a number of astounding narratives in the AFL this year: the Bulldogs’ feel-good phoenix-like rise from the ashes, Port Adelaide’s unforeseeable descent into mediocrity, and Essendon’s impressive efforts week after week to establish new boundaries for their insipidness, to name a few. But in reality, and in the context of what really matters, all these stories pale in comparison to the remarkable transformation of West Coast.

Along with Luke Beveridge, Adam Simpson has been the coach of the season, and his defensive web is compensating for his team’s crippled height in the back-line. On the weekend the Hawks, with their potent ball movement and four-headed hydra of Jarryd Roughead, Jack Gunston, Luke Breust and Cyril Rioli, will be the greatest test yet for West Coast’s defence and will likely reveal to us whether the structure is just an impressively elaborate configuration of smoke and mirrors or something more solid.

If the Eagles win, a home qualifying final is all but sewn up and they’ll be two home victories away from their first grand final since ‘who would have thought the sequel would be just as good as the original?‘

If they lose, an eminently navigable road to the big dance becomes littered with landmines. Third place will become a troublingly realistic possibility and with it a path to the grand final that may have to go through Hawthorn at the MCG, the suddenly ominous Tigers, and the Dockers in the derby that would break Western Australia.

The stakes are far lower for Hawthorn. So long as they finish in the top four they will be flag favourites and rightfully so. The 2003 Brisbane Lions and 2005 Sydney Swans both had to win interstate finals en route to the flag, and although Hawthorn have not had to play such a final since 2010, leaving Victoria’s borders should hold no fear for them.

So often heavyweight clashes that come when finals are just over the horizon come down to ‘who does it mean more to?’

In 2008 when a young, surging Hawthorn played a 15-1 defending champion Geelong in Round 17 in front of 86,000 people at the MCG, the game meant infinitely more to the Hawks. When you’re a young team and you just don’t quite know if you’re good enough, you need that proven performance against the real deal as affirmation of your legitimacy. You need something to hold onto – to make what you think what you actually know.

The Hawks didn’t win that game, but they proved their credibility by taking Geelong down to the final minutes. Two months later they had the ultimate credibility in trophy form.

On Saturday night, the Eagles will be those young Hawks. The game just means more to them. They don’t have to win but they need to take something positive from the clash. A one-sided Hawthorn victory would be just as crushing mentally for the Eagles as it would be practically.

Whatever happens, this game will have serious repercussions for September, and potentially October. Sometimes grand finals are decided in the second week of August.