Grand Final Forecast: Hawthorn vs West Coast

The two best teams have made it to the first Saturday in October. With recent history largely a nil-all draw, this will be a true test of who truly is the premier of the AFL in 2015. It’s the 2015 AFL grand final, and here’s my forecast.

AFL GRAND FINAL LIVE SCORES

Masters versus apprentices; it’s the champion Hawks against what has emerged as the heir to the throne in the West Coast Eagles. Both written off at various points of the year, each have emerged with near-full strength teams, and are set to make this a classic.

The Hawks are playing for history: a three-peat, and for one third of the team, a chance to join an illustrious club of four-time premiership winners.

The Eagles, well, it is now abundantly clear that their’s has been a slow, methodical build, and one that is just gathering pace.

It’s also master versus apprentice in the coaches’ box. The zero-time winner of AFL Coach of the Year Alastair Clarkson faces his old attacking line coach Adam Simpson. We’re almost at the point where Clarkson is less likely to coach against people he hasn’t mentored, aren’t we?

So will it be #anyonebutHawthorn? Or are the Hawks two hours from immortality?

AFL grand final
Hawthorn versus West Coast
The first Saturday in October, 2:30pm (AEST)
Melbourne Cricket Ground, Victoria

The ledger stands at 1-1, with both the Eagles and Hawks sticking a gold star on the wall following games at Subiaco Oval in season 2015.

Their Round 19 encounter was won by the hard-running Hawks, who closed down West Coast’s space and made us all think regular programming would resume in September.

West Coast didn’t subscribe to that, making Hawthorn look foolish in the first week of the finals. The final margin was 32 points (which was very close to Hawthorn’s combined losing margin in their six losses during the regular season), but that doesn’t do the game justice. At three-quarter time, the Eagles were up by 50, having kept the Hawks to a paltry 4.9.33 in 90 minutes of domination.

Whether Week 1’s match-up was merely Hawthorn on a bad day, West Coast on a good day, or a sign that the champs were about to be overtaken is nothing more than a curiosity at this point. The facts are that West Coast out Hawthorn’d Hawthorn on their home deck. The Hawks took just 54 marks around the ground – their lowest tally of the year. Their next lowest tally was 56, and came in a loss to Richmond in Round 18; the next lowest was 69 in a loss to Sydney.

It’s not a uniquely Hawthorn thing – keep the ball off any team and they’ll find it hard to kick goals – but when Hawthorn win, it usually comes with a lot of field marking.

You know this, of course, because it’s been talked about all year. West Coast did it by playing their zone behind the ball, but also by manning up through the middle of the ground.

The game was on West Coast’s terms by around the middle of the second quarter, and the Eagles had Hawthorn on toast from that point onwards. The Hawks had more of the ball over the course of the game, but were simply blunted moving forward. Grant Birchall, Isaac Smith and Shaun Burgoyne were limited to a combined 27 kicks, down from a season average of 37.

But there was something else at play, too.

At the best of times, Hawthorn move the ball forward using the left wing, which isn’t surprising given their penchant for southpaws. It forces their opponent to play on the left side of the ground, and brings Hawthorn’s skills dominance into play.

In the qualifying final, West Coast flipped the bird. Any time they received the ball on half back, they tried to transfer to the right side of the ground; where West Coast have a number of right-footed ball users. The possession maps in this game are quite remarkable in that respect. Sam Mitchell had 35 touches, but his effect on the game was minimal.

Both teams largely conceded one side of the ground, and backed their ball users to get the ball into the hands of their forwards. West Coast’s zone defence was strong enough to hold up in the face of Hawthorn’s string of medium sized forwards – Hawthorn’s folded.

There’s a massive caveat to this: Alastair Clarkson didn’t adjust. Don’t expect that to happen this time around.

After last weekend’s victory against Fremantle in Perth, the Hawks became the first Victorian side to win a preliminary final outside of Victoria. They have finished inside the top four for five straight years, made four straight grand finals, and are on the brink of bringing home three premierships in that time.

Even if they don’t win, there is a strong argument that they have overtaken 2007-12 Geelong as the best team of the modern era.

Throughout this year, the doubters have crept in again and again. Admittedly, I was one of them earlier in the season. But the team that will be suiting up – thankfully, in brown and gold, not Power Ranger – on Saturday will be one of the most battle weary and skilful that we have seen in the modern AFL era. The Hawks will start the game with more than 3600 combined games of experience in their line-up, compared to 2500 for the Eagles.

The Eagles don’t have a single 200 game player, Hawthorn have eight.

All this is to say champion teams don’t become champion teams by being terrible at football. The notion of being a ‘big game’ team is a bit of a fallacy, but being an experienced, successful team isn’t.

As far as the match-ups go, a lot centres on what West Coast decide to do with Sam Mitchell. Ross Lyon said there’s no point tagging him, because he gets the ball anyway – you’re better off trying to use that player to do damage the other way. We saw in the qualifying final this may be true.

West Coast haven’t really played a hard tag too often this year, and when they have it’s tended to be Matt Rosa on the outside rather than around the contest. Expect to see an attacking player try to go to Mitchell – Luke Shuey springs to mind, unless the Hawks put the hard-tagging Liam Shiels on him.

Luke Hodge has had an interesting finals series. He’s become a pseudo-tagger, going to the best midfielder in Hawthorn’s semi-final (Patrick Dangerfield) and preliminary final (Nat Fyfe) in an effort to make them more accountable. He made Dangerfield pay with four goals, and led the Hawks in kicks as Fyfe was hobbled anywhere but around clearances.

Hodge versus Matt Priddis will be a fascinating little battle, if that’s the way Clarkson goes.

Andrew Gaff and Jordan Lewis will likely go head-to-head on the outside, and that’s a clear win for Hawthorn if the Hawks can get the ball cleanly out of clearances. Gaff is a strong player with the ball in hand, but is still a year or two away from becoming a true two-way player. I could see a lot of Lewis third-man-up situations cropping up in this one, if that’s the match-up that comes to pass.

Ruck-wise, this has to be a clear win for West Coast. Nic Naitaui jumped all over David Hale and Ben McEvoy in the qualifying final, and the only time the Hawks looked like getting the ascendency was when Callum Sinclair took position. But it didn’t translate to a win in the clearances for West Coast, with the Hawks content to stop the Eagles from running forward or indeed preferring to rove to Naitanui’s hand. That’ll likely be the outcome once again.

I suspect the Hawthorn forward line will look dramatically different in this game: James Frawley won’t play forward.

He was made to look foolish for much of the game, as the zone defence of the Eagles crushed his ability to mark. That’s something of a game changer – Frawley back gives the Hawks a match-up for both Josh Kennedy and Jack Darling, and frees the interceptor-in-chief, Josh Gibson, to float around and be effective. Darling had a stinker, while Kennedy kicked three goals.

West Coast’s small forwards gave Hawthorn a headache in the qualifying final – they were a significant factor behind the lack of drive from Birchall, Burgoyne and Smith – with Josh Hill (three), Mark LeCras (two) and Jamie Cripps (two) all getting off the chain at various points. With Gibson freed up, I wouldn’t expect that to be repeated.

Down Hawthorn’s end, with no Frawley clogging up space the forward 50 will be freer for the mid-sized Hawks to play their ground-ball game. We got some insight into how the Hawks may try and manage the Eagles’ zone in their game against Fremantle last week: kicking the ball along the ground. It sounds crazy, and in some ways it is, but on a number of occasions the Hawks purposefully delivered the ball into the scoring zone on the bounce.

That’s one way to counter a very good intercepting system.

The other key factor here is that Luke Breust seems to have found some form in recent weeks, after a very lean month which culminated in a poor showing in the qualifying final. While he’s not likely to kick six goals against this West Coast defence, equally he’s not likely to be kept to 0.2 again, given Frawley won’t be there to get in the way.

And then there’s Cyril Rioli, who has been spending more time through the middle of the ground. He’s a ground-ball machine, and I would expect him to gravitate forward for much of this game to capitalise on West Coast’s zoning structures.

Who wins? I said in yesterday’s teaser that I was backing the Hawks by 24 points, but that after having a deeper look at the last time they met and respective match-ups this may change.

I have changed my tip. But I still expect Hawthorn to be the victor.

Hawthorn will be the victor in this one, in an 85-70 kind of game. I like to pick in six-point increments, so let’s say Hawthorn by 18. And I’ll stick with Grant Birchall as my pick for the Norm Smith – his drive off half back will be critical to Hawthorn’s victory.

That’s my grand final forecast. What’s yours?

Go Eagles!