Cloke and blunted dagger: Why teams must avoid Travis

There were moments in Travis Cloke’s 12 years at Collingwood where it looked like he was on the verge of towering over the competition with his colossal stature, and might finally grip it in his vice-like hands.

I sat in the stands of the MCG for the 2011 grand final and witnessed the ‘Travis Cloke game’.

Cloke entered the season finale as the All Australian centre half forward. The most powerful and imposing physical force in the league.

The one player you didn’t want to cut in front of at the cab rank next to Flinders St Station at 4am.

In the first half of the grand final he imposed his will like no other player. He kicked three goals, all incredible shots from outside 50 (the first was from beyond 70), and manhandled his opponents like they were schoolkids, making Harry Taylor look like Harry Potter without the powers.

But then Tom Lonergan moved onto Cloke in the second half and took him out of the game. Cloke was totally unsighted after halftime, making the transition from imposing to impotent, and Collingwood lost. A performance that looked like it might be remembered for decades didn’t even make it to 7pm.

It was perfectly symbolic of Cloke’s career – a player who promised so much, delivered more than a little, but ultimately left you with a bitter taste in your mouth. (Click to Tweet)

Cloke’s breathtaking first half serves as nothing but a footnote to that grand final, and his career will only make for a sentence or two in the book of Collingwood’s most sustained era of success since the 1950s, when for so long it looked like it would have its own paragraph, at least.

The numbers have never done justice to Cloke, positively or negatively. Yes, he’s only kicked above 40 goals in three of his 12 seasons. But his value was never as goalkicker – how could it be with the way he kicked for goal – it was as the link man between defence and attack, the player who would bail out plodding movement and the long ball lofted in desperation to the wing with a bruising, unlikely pack mark that kept the chains moving.

His work-rate for a man of his size was the best in the league outside of Nick Riewoldt. He covered the ground improbably well for a 108-kilogram titan, and got to more contests than seemed reasonable.

But that figure, its stature and its reality – the Adonis who kept on running – has been dismantled, and what’s left is entirely unremarkable.

Once the man who bailed out plodding movement, now Cloke is that plodding movement. Given his size, his most iconic moments – the brutish victories in one-on-one contests, the destructive pack marks – and his lack of grace at the best of times, it’s easy to forget that Cloke in his youth and his prime was surprisingly agile.

That’s gone. Now he’s painfully lumbering, with the turning circle of a truck. Between Cloke and Nathan Brown, it’s been a rough year at both ends for Collingwood fans wanting some lateral quickness from their key position players.

The question that the Bulldogs, Cloke’s declared team of choice for 2017, need to ponder is simple: what exactly does Travis Cloke do well anymore?

In his prime his strengths were self-evident: Herculean strength, hands of glue, and phenomenal endurance. Those steady hands have started to tremble, and while he’s still got the occasional breathtaking clunk in him, now he regularly spills regulation marks. He doesn’t cover the ground nearly as well anymore, and his strength, while still impressive, is no longer remarkable. And he’s not making up for those deficiencies with a deadeye for goal.

That sadly is going to be how I remember Cloke most. I’ll remember the fact that he spent several years as one of the top three of four forwards in the league, yet I cringed whenever he marked inside 50, hoping that Alan Didak or Scott Pendlebury might be mercifully running past for a handball.

It’s difficult to describe the existential pain that comes with supporting a star forward who can’t kick. Richmond and St Kilda fans know a bit about it – with their histories with Matthew Richardson and Riewoldt – but when it comes to goal-kicking debacles, Cloke’s golden crown shines the brightest.

The only person who had less faith in Travis Cloke kicking for goal than I did was Travis Cloke. You could see the dread on his face, the palpable nerves, the thoughts going through his head of ‘I can do this. I can do this. I definitely can’t do this.’

The upside of his woeful inaccuracy was that the times he got it right were some of the most euphoric you could imagine. Shock multiples ecstasy tenfold. His set-shot goal to put Collingwood in front in the 2011 preliminary final against Hawthorn with five minutes to go might be the loudest I’ve heard the MCG – tens of thousands of rabid Collingwood fans, myself among them, screaming in agonised jubilation, revelling in a moment of bliss that never should have been.

The downside was when he almost cost Collingwood a premiership by missing two point-blank shots at goal just before halftime of the first 2010 decider. If he makes either of those, which any 12-year-old with a semblance of hand-eye coordination would be expected to, Leon Davis gets to say that he played in a premiership.

That was the Travis Cloke life as a Collingwood fan. He was a tough player to love. Between the soul-crushing set-shot misses and the fact that he had a permanent snarl on his face, always looking like he’d had seven too many and was about to beat up the guy with the topknot grinding his girlfriend on the dance-floor, you could never cherish Cloke the same way you could a Didak.

But he always seemed to lift in finals and his effort until this season could rarely be questioned. His best was transcendent, with some of the most dominant individual performances in recent AFL history, games that reminded you of the sheer authority and influence a classical power forward can have on a game (seven goals, 14 marks – six contested – against Richmond in 2013 springs to mind).

It sure was a time, Travis – a good time? I’m not entirely sure, but a time all the same.

Enjoy Bulldogs fans, or Richmond fans, or, God forbid, Collingwood fans – whoever finds him on their list next season. At the best of times, Travis was a struggle. And those times are long gone.