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If Hawthorn’s home-and-away seasons were a Hollywood film, they would be Robert De Niro and Al Pacino’s Heat. And it’s not just because Ryan Schoenmakers wants Val Kilmer’s hair.
(If you haven’t seen Heat, be warned, spoilers are coming. Also, go see Heat, it came out 21 years ago.)
Heat and Hawthorn’s seasons are both long, perhaps excessively so, but there’s more than enough quality and regular moments of brilliance to ensure they’re never a grind to watch.
More importantly, the tantalising threat of greatness always lingers. Like all the great ones, you never want to lose too much focus, because you might miss a passage that you’ll remember for a long time.
You can be lulled into a false sense of security, that ‘maybe this isn’t that special’, and then Shaun Burgoyne is silking goals from 50 metres on the run, and De Niro and Pacino are sitting down in that restaurant.
Both films always end the same way. The protagonist (and really, Hawthorn have been the AFL’s protagonist for the past four years – they’re the team that matters, and then there’s everyone else) kills the antagonist, and then they hold your hand as you die. Or, if you’re the West Coast Eagles, you get your hand stomped on repeatedly.
The problem with Heat is also its greatest strength – it flicks the switch. Slow, prosaic backstory (Ashley Judd, anyone?) starts to overwhelm, and then bang (literally), there’s De Niro and Kilmer robbing a bank.
Flicking the switch in sport has never been as easy. Form is fickle, and momentum is the game’s lifeblood. Complacency can kill cohesion. There have been plenty of teams that looked the same on paper, and at times on the field, as the champions they once were, but couldn’t replicate their ultimate success.
The 2010 Cats, 2011 Saints, 2012 Pies, 2013 Swans and 2014 Dockers all largely resembled their iterations that made grand finals the year prior, but something always felt off. They could never quite flick the switch, and the gear that made them so special started to elude them.
The switch can be flicked though, within seasons and within games. The 2011 Magpies made a living out of flicking the switch, falling asleep and giving teams four or five-goal headstarts, then entering Destruction Mode and wasting teams by 60 points (if the opposition was lucky).
That team is also a cautionary tale for the dark side of the switch, though. After winning 13 of their first 18 games by over 40 points, Collingwood won just one of their last seven by such a margin, limping to the finish line with uninspiring wins and two heavy losses to Geelong – the latter, of course, in the grand final.
It’s fitting that the last time that Collingwood team flicked the switch successfully was against Hawthorn. After kicking five goals in three quarters and falling down 17 points in the 2011 preliminary final, the Pies finally found their gear, kicking five in the last term to run out three-point winners. That Friday night was the last time that Hawthorn’s year ended before the season’s final Saturday.
The 2016 Hawks are dealing with the same problem that afflicts all the great teams: boredom. When you’ve played in four grand finals in a row, winning three of them, the home-and-away season ceases to really matter. It’s a means to an end. Hawthorn’s season starts not just in September, but late in September. This club’s only metric of success is premiership cups.
They have nothing to prove, and they’re stuck in a 23-round environment where everyone else has everything to prove. In August last year, it was written in this space that the Eagles should heed the words of The Wire‘s Omar Little before their blockbuster Round 19 clash with the Hawks: “Come at the king, you best not miss.”
Those words have echoed in the ears of every team the Hawks have faced over the past four years. They’re the kings, and they get everyone’s best shot. For the other 17 teams, their seasons are defined by how they play against Hawthorn. The Bulldogs and Crows play the Hawks tight, and the Cats and Giants wallop them – now all four of those teams are premiership contenders.
If you’re the Hawks, how do you get up for a Saturday afternoon Round 4 game in Launceston against the Saints, when your only measure is historic greatness? And on the other hand, how do you not get up for that game if you’re the Saints?
Hawthorn’s reality is that if they finish the home-and-away season in eighth spot and their list is healthy, they will deserve to be premiership favourites. They’ve built up that championship equity. In a way, that’s liberating, but for the 22 matches leading up to that point, it can be almost suffocating.
With or without their injuries, the Hawks have been disjointed this year. The cadences of their usually pristine ball movement have been off, with kicks and handballs in the chain just slightly askew, a little wide of the mark, or weighted a little incorrectly. Their contested ball and clearance numbers have been deplorable.
But there’s not much to take from this. The Hawks have never been a truly elite contested ball team – they’ve ranked eighth, fifth and ninth in contested possession differential in their premiership seasons. The clearance stats are more peculiar, but given that the personnel is largely the same as the team that was second in clearance differential last season, and the fact that Sam Mitchell doesn’t age, they seem like an aberration at this stage.
The Hawks have little to be concerned about. They’re not playing well, but they’re hurt, and they showed in the West Coast game that their best is still dominant. A juggernaut hasn’t emerged to stop them either. This isn’t 2001 or 2010, when the premiership Bombers and Cats take their foot off the gas and get overrun by a rampaging Brisbane and Collingwood. The Swans, Eagles, Cats, Dogs, Crows, Kangaroos and Giants all pose interesting questions, but still none of them emphatically suggest that the answer is going to be anything other than ‘Hawthorn’.
The Hawks started last year 4-4 with three losses against teams that didn’t make the eight. The 2008 Cats lost one game before the grand final and it was by 86 points. The 2001-04 Brisbane Lions, Hawthorn’s biggest rival in the argument for ‘greatest team of the modern era’, never finished top of the ladder.
Great teams have days off, and even seasons off. Flicking the switch is dangerous, but it can be done. When the Hawks flick the switch and remain in darkness, we’ll know about it. But for now, the reliability of their wiring is still football’s best bet.