The mini revolution: Hawthorn’s forward line is football’s future

In vogue, buzz terms like ‘congestion’ and ‘the rolling maul’ that have come to define the AFL have never applied to Hawthorn.

The Hawks are the league’s decongestant – a Sudafed of incisive left-foot kicking and pristine ball movement.

A perfectly oiled machine, the brown and gold are a breathtaking masterpiece of cohesion. They move in total unison, with an unparalleled ability to create empty freeway lanes for themselves in the middle of traffic jams.

They’ve become preternaturally aware of their teammates’ tendencies by this stage, developing into Australia’s answer to FC Barcelona and the Golden State Warriors.

The Hawks mimic Barca’s elaborate passing game of triangles and they rain efficient destruction like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson in Oakland.

Hawthorn have become the counter-argument to the suddenly popular contention that ‘the game must change’. Do the current rules of the game promote congestion and unattractive football? Not when Hawthorn are playing.

The old school might lament the dearth of ‘great’ centre-half forwards – Australia’s answer to the quarterback, the glam position of sport – who kick 100 goals in a season, but the Hawks have proven that such nostalgia is, as nostalgia tends to be, totally archaic.

You can have Jason Dunstall, I’ll take Cyril Rioli.

Different iterations of the Alastair Clarkson Hawks have been defined by different players. For a while it was the two-headed monster of Lance Franklin and Jarryd Roughead. Then it was the hardened silk of Sam Mitchell, Luke Hodge, Shaun Burgoyne and Jordan Lewis – unsociable warriors who combine brutal toughness with extraordinary skill and composure. Hodge is perhaps the best enduring symbol of this team, with his ferocity at the contest and his liquid whip of a left leg.

The 2015 Hawks have been defined by a new trio though. The mosquito army of Rioli, Luke Breust and Jack Gunston have in many ways come to personify Hawthorn. While teams like Collingwood and Essendon search despairingly to find tall foils for Travis Cloke and Joe Daniher, the Hawks have said goodbye to that way of thinking. They’re scaling new heights with small-ball, embodying a new trend in world sport.

The Golden State Warriors won the NBA title when they did away with classic positional paradigms and decided to go smaller than anyone in history during the Finals. Barcelona have done the same, abandoning the notion of a tall front man, long ago sending away Zlatan Ibrahimovich to the island of his own narcissism, and adding the fleet-footed bite of Luis Suarez and Neymar to complement Lionel Messi instead.

The Hawks have followed suit. They still have Roughead and the likes of David Hale and Ben McEvoy who can go forward and clunk contested marks the traditional way, but that possibility speaks to the team’s versatility and not its identity. The Hawks have five players who have kicked 25 or more goals this season, and four of them weigh 84 kilograms or less.

Cyril Rioli, all 177 centimetres and 80 kilograms of him, was Hawthorn’s goal-square focal point last Saturday evening, and he duly responded with six sublime goals. Compared to watching Tom Hawkins and Brian Lake grapple and brawl at the other end like two anachronistic gargoyles, seeing Rioli’s nous in the air, explosion at ground level, and dynamic skill with ball in hand was like witnessing the future overcome the past.

Hawkins, while imposing, is manageable. With modern defensive zoning, the ability to isolate a key forward one-on-one inside 50 is becoming less and less feasible. As is the case with Cloke, Daniher, Kurt Tippett, Nick Riewoldt, Jay Schulz and other traditional power forwards, if you can just ‘not lose’ the aerial contest with Hawkins, when the ball comes to ground, as it generally does, the advantage shifts to the defence.

That shift never occurs with Rioli, nor with Breust, Chad Wingard, Eddie Betts, Jamie Elliott, Michael Walters or Mark LeCras. These players have the savvy to be dangerous in the air and in one-on-one marking contests, and if the ball hits the deck they become even more of a nightmare. Even if they don’t win the contest, their speed and agility informs their team’s forward-half defensive pressuring.

The Hawks lost the game’s best tall forward since Wayne Carey and somehow got better as a result. Without Franklin, Hawthorn was forced to adjust their forward structure on the fly and in the process they found the future of modern football.

A power forward is a blessing and a curse. The ability to have a bailout marking option when nothing seems available should be a significant asset, but often it just bails a team out of creativity. The high, long bomb to the tip of the goal-square is football’s Hail Mary, but whereas the Yanks reserve it for only the direst of situations, in our code we use it almost as a first resort.

Patience is a sporting virtue, and the Hawks’ meticulous short passing and ability to pinpoint a target, any target, inside 50 is revolutionising the game.

Unfortunately for the rest of the league, you need a pioneer to start a revolution. Steph Curry, Lionel Messi and Cyril Rioli don’t grow on trees. But natural selection will place a premium on those who flaunt desirable speed and elite kicking ability, and the league will see an influx of these gifted types.

The tall forward will not die, but he will evolve, and may end up looking more like Jeremy Cameron, Jake Stringer and Jack Gunston over time – 190cm-plus players defined by their nimbleness. There will always be outliers, and it will be fascinating to see if recent number one picks Jonathon Patton, Tom Boyd and Paddy McCartin can succeed in spite of the paradigm that seems to be shifting against them.

Justin Leppitsch might despair that his Brisbane Lions can’t take the next step without a key forward, but such longing may soon become antiquated.

While a big man who can take a mark and kick straight will always be valuable (just look at what Josh Kennedy and Jack Darling did in the first quarter against Fremantle last weekend), their significance has diminished in the modern game.

As space becomes tighter and tighter, it only makes sense that those most adept to slip through the cracks will be the ones who thrive.