- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
By late in the third quarter of West Coast’s dominant qualifying final victory over Hawthorn, with the margin at 37 points and the game virtually over, the Eagles had been brilliant, breathtaking even, but something was missing. And then it wasn’t.
From the centre bounce Nic Naitanui rose up, winked at the heavens and palmed the ball with deftness and force over the top of Ben McEvoy and Jordan Lewis to hit a running Luke Shuey in perfect stride for the cinematic centre clearance the game had lacked to that point. This was the moment that the West Coast Eagles dropped the mic on the 2015 AFL season.
It was around this time that the state of play stopped resembling one hungrier team out-performing another – it began to feel like one superior unit demolishing an inferior one into submission.
At half-time, even with West Coast’s imposing five goal to nothing second term, it felt inevitable that the Hawks would mount a ferocious comeback. The only question was whether it would fall short. When the Hawks opened the third quarter with the first four scoring shots, nobody was surprised. But then the Eagles flipped the script.
Mark LeCras’ chest started to draw the ball like a magnet, the Eagles ramped up their tackling pressure and they starting controlling the clearances. A 21-point lead had blown out to 50 by three quarter time and the game was over. Hawthorn’s comeback died before it could even get into second gear – West Coast drove into them with a semi-trailer before they left the parking lot.
The Hawks did not play well on Friday night. They fumbled the ball uncharacteristically, turned it over with shocking regularity, and rarely executed the first kick in their forays forward, let alone the final one. Jarryd Roughead and Cyril Rioli were wasteful in front of goal and Luke Hodge was a ghost in the first half. James Frawley played with an intensity that would have been more suited to a Melbourne versus Carlton tanking battle. And yet, this game was never about the Hawks’ self-inflicted wounds – it was about the Eagles never lifting their foot off Hawthorn’s throat.
Finals are as much platforms and spectacles as they are games of football. They’re moments for players to confirm their reputations or to re-invent them. We already knew that Josh Kennedy, Luke Shuey, Nic Naitanui and Mark LeCras were stars, but Friday night was a testament to exactly how bright they can shine.
Kennedy has established himself as the best forward in the game, and when his teammates couldn’t land the finishing blows in the second quarter, he stepped up with three game-shaping majors. Shuey was the game’s toughest competitor, extracting the ball from congestion, smashing through brick walls and having the class to dish deft handballs to teammates on the outside.
Naitanui’s 40 hitouts were 15 more than anyone else, and his aerial superiority made him the most influential player on the ground at stages. LeCras effectively ended the game in the third quarter, with his clinical performance proof that in the heat of finals toughness, finesse can be just as imposing as brawn.
Victorians might not be as aware of the Eagles’ exciting youth movement, but they got a stunning look at it Friday night. Brad Sheppard is already a star – composed beyond his years with incisive kicking skills and a remarkable ability to read the play. Mark Hutchings has been a revelation, with his hardened frame and tireless running ensuring that he never for a second looked out of place in a midfield battle that featured the likes of Sam Mitchell, Jordan Lewis, Andrew Gaff and Luke Shuey. Jamie Cripps is the player we all think Chris Mayne should be. Elliot Yeo is just a hell of a lot of fun.
The working class veterans all stood up too, with Matt Rosa in particular among the game’s best. Sam Butler and Xavier Ellis don’t look like much, but they’re walking clichés of the ‘they just do their job’ axiom. Sharrod Wellingham tormented Collingwood fans with occasional flashes of brilliance against a more consistent canvas of ‘what the hell are you doing, Sharrod?’ Remarkably, he’s re-invented himself as a composed half-back flanker, and in a qualifying final against freaking Hawthorn he was one of the coolest heads on the ground. That in itself is a comeback of Daniel Menzel proportions.
The Eagles are a team in the mould of the 2010 Magpies, the team Wellingham won a premiership with. Like those Pies, the Eagles hunt in packs and they win by creating fierce, unrelenting waves of pressure that generate turnovers and quick scores on the counter-attack. They’re not the most polished with their disposal (the Eagles are 10th in the competition for effective disposal percentage – the 2010 Pies were seventh) but they don’t have to be – their pace out of the contest and the space that they have after turnovers gives them a wider margin for error with their delivery than anyone else in the league.
When Collingwood annihilated a Geelong side coming off three consecutive grand finals in the 2010 preliminary final, it felt like a prelude to a premiership (which, after one false start, it was). The Eagles similarly destroyed a side coming off three consecutive grand finals, and the flag sentiment is very much the same.
The scary thing for Hawthorn and the rest of the competition is that the Eagles still have a huge scope for improvement. Matthew Priddis, the Brownlow medallist and the Eagles’ best player, will come back for the preliminary final, as will Chris Masten. It’s unclear what the Western obsession is with not taking advantage of a ruckman’s dominance, but the Eagles got belted in the clearances by Hawthorn despite Naitanui’s superiority. With Priddis returning and the lessons learned from Friday night, that shouldn’t happen again.
The premiership will be no cakewalk for the Eagles. The Hawks are proud, and they should go in favourites for their next two games. Fremantle has been unconvincing but can’t be written off. The prospect of playing a champion Hawthorn side in a grand final (which, it must be said, the Eagles still have to get to, no matter how academic that seems at this stage) at the MCG going for a three-peat is not enticing.
But premierships aren’t won by ominous prospects or the spectre of history – they’re won by the best team. If nothing else, after Friday night the Eagles have at least earned that title for now.