The Hawks are set to defy football gravity and be better than last year

When a giant finally falls, it often looks like they’ll be too heavy to pick themselves easily off the ground.

Gravity, certainly, is the biggest argument against Hawthorn having a successful 2017.

In the context of the modern era, the Hawks had an unprecedented spell at the top, and after falling last year, logic suggests that the descent must continue in earnest.

The concerns begin with age. Despite losing Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis (another concern in itself), the Hawks enter the season as the oldest team in the competition. They often looked slow last year, especially when getting blitzed by the competition’s youthful powers, crushed by the Giants early in 2016, and run over by the Bulldogs in that seminal second half in the second week of finals.

The Hawks looked like an ageing basketball player, existing on guile and finesse out of necessity, unable to get to the rim anymore.

That guile carried them all the way to third on the ladder, tied for the most wins in the competition, and brought them to within an Isaac Smith kick holding straight instead of dying right from a sixth consecutive preliminary final. But it was all largely an illusion.

In spite of the gaudy win total, Hawthorn simply wasn’t that good last year. In the home-and-away season they went an absurd 6-0 in games decided by two goals or less, a supreme aptitude in the clutch that touched elements of both determinism and farce (good morning, Jack Fitzpatrick). And to those who might say that ‘that’s just Hawthorn’, the masters of execution, cool, calm, veteran heads destined to excel in tight situations, that’s fine until you remember that they went 1-4 in such close games the year prior.

By percentage, Hawthorn was the seventh best team in the league last season, and that’s probably a sound indicator of where they stood. They were never consistently the same team as their previous dominant incarnations, their revolutionary style reduced to remnants.

They ranked 10th in disposal differential after five straight years of being in the top two, unable to maintain possession and strangle teams to death by a thousand low, short passes like they did in years past. They were the worst contested possession team in the league and woeful in clearances.

Last year’s Hawthorn was like seeing Bob Dylan today in concert – the simple sight of the man singing the songs he once wrote is still powerful, and occasionally breathtaking, but the voice is shot, and it’s just not the same.

Which is all to say this: those predicting Hawthorn’s fall are a year late – it’s already happened. And those predicting a 2015 Geelong-type season for Hawthorn – an old power collapsing after a shaky top four appearance the year prior – might be a year off too. There’s every chance that the Hawks are more like the 2016 Cats – an experienced squad re-invigorated by an injection of midfield vitality.

Tom Mitchell and Jaeger O’Meara, the latter who has not played an AFL game since August 2014, are not Patrick Dangerfield. But they’re young and dynamic, and can re-energise a Hawthorn midfield that was beginning to look staid.

With the team in transition, players like Mitchell and O’Meara, and incumbent talents like James Sicily, Billy Hartung, Will Langford and Taylor Duryea, will be empowered to take on greater roles, and all have the abilities to fill them.

And despite the departures of Mitchell and Lewis, the Hawks remain the second most experienced list in the competition, and most of that experience is still in the thick of its prime. The forward line, as good as any in the competition, is still ripe, with Jack Gunston 25, Luke Breust 26 and Cyril Rioli 27.

Although he has lived the tortured life of at least a hundred men, the Russian novel that is Ty Vickery is only 26, and if any coach could ever unlock his talents it would be Alastair Clarkson. If not, there’s always Siberia, Tyrone.

Jarryd Roughead, the league’s best offseason addition, just turned 30, and should still be one of the game’s premier forwards. Elsewhere on the list, veteran stalwarts like Grant Birchall, James Frawley, Ben McEvoy, Paul Puopolo, Liam Shiels, Isaac Smith and Ben Stratton will all end the season on the kinder side of 30, and still have varying degrees of plenty left to give.

The average age of a first-time father in Australia is 33, so, in literal terms, it’s only the legend trifecta of Luke Hodge, Shaun Burgoyne and Josh Gibson that will end 2017 in ‘father-time’. All three, though, as has become cliché at Hawthorn, rely more on their skill and mutant intelligence than their athleticism, and even if they might be finished, the finish should still be sleek.

In particular, one suspects that like Dirk Nowitzki will be able to swish high-arcing fadeaways until he’s 50, Burgoyne will be able to dummy fools into the ether, the wonderful Abyss of Shaun, as long as he can walk.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Hawks, overrun and humbled last season, need a reinvention. Their skills are sumptuous, the best we’ve ever seen, but last year showed that their incisive silk doesn’t give them the luxury of treating contested ball like a relic reserved for the unenlightened.

Alastair Clarkson isn’t Arsene Wenger. Unlike Wenger, he’s not concerned that swimming for dear life is less artistic and cool than remaining calm and motionless as a ship sinks.

He’s reinvented Hawthorn before, and he can do it again. He’s still the best coach in the game, Australia’s Bill Bellichick, only Clarkson never voted for Donald Trump. He has the talent and tools for reinvention at his disposal, and in a new twist he can throw the ‘nobody believes in us’ card at the Hawks, who are outside the top six in premiership favouritism for the first time in a decade.

Teams around Hawthorn have more explosive talent, but also more that needs to be proved. Teams tipped by some (emphasis on ‘some’) to usurp Hawthorn for a spot in the eight – Melbourne, Collingwood, Port Adelaide – have coaches who may not be good, or who have never coached before.

This St Kilda hasn’t been there yet and much of this Essendon hasn’t played AFL football in 18 months. Even at the top of the league, GWS will have to deal for the first time with the expectations of not just being expected to win, but being expected to win it all.

The new year brings the desire to be adventurous in prognostications. It’s boring to pick the same top eight sans North Melbourne, and it’s boring to predict Hawthorn being in the mix right again. It’s more fun to predict change.

Hawthorn, though, have changed, just enough to perhaps give them a fresh lease on football life. And overseeing that change is enough consistent excellence to have the Hawks in the frame again, as they always seem to be.