There have always been players you secretly love that play against your team, and Paul Couch was one of them. I’ve got a feeling I wasn’t alone on that one, everyone was sad when he passed away on Saturday.
Malcolm Blight-era Geelong played football like you did when you were a kid. Or what you dreamed about as a kid.
Taking speckies, kicking long goals, running around with a smile on your face. I’m sure it was more scientific and stressful than that for the Cats, but that team embodied everything that was good about the game and people smiled.
What fans would give to see that team play again in this era.
Gary Ablett was the superstar but Couch was the most watchable of the next rung of stars that included his running mates Garry Hocking and Mark Bairstow. His charm was in his movement, or lack of. He wasn’t quick, and he wasn’t built like an adonis, but he got to the right spots.
When Couch got possession he seemed to take an eternity to drop the ball on to that left foot with both hands hovering longer than most kicking styles. It wasn’t quite ungainly as much as it was measured and distinctive and invariably it would find a target and travel a large distance. It takes longer to load a cannon than a water pistol.
Couch was pure schoolyard footy, athletic prowess irrelevant, all that mattered was getting it and showing off your skills. You won by being good, not by science. Midfielders in the late 1980s didn’t regularly kick goals from beyond 50 metres but Couch did as Geelong came alive in his 1989 Brownlow season.
For all the stigma of the four grand final losses, Couch never dipped below 20 possessions at a time when possessions were relevant. He never dominated on grand final day but he never shrunk. In any final where Geelong’s season ended, across his career Couch never dipped below 20 touches, and five games from the end of his career he had 32 in a final against eventual premiers North Melbourne.
Couch was supposedly finished time and time again but he kept getting the ball and kept kicking it with deadly precision. And he always found a way to kick goals.
Couch’s death is a tragedy. In a very different postcode, Couch and Geelong not winning a premiership is a football tragedy.
But then maybe it’s up to us to take a more balanced look at sport beyond the Australian culture that winning is the only judgment. Can we enjoy sport for what it is and not the entry in the history books?
West Coast may have won those grand finals in the 1990s, but it was the Geelong teams of Couch and company that made me love the game.
What should we value more?
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