A rare double dynasty demise in the AFL

As an American with a footy addiction, one of my childrens’ favourite things to tease me about is that because of the timezones, I enjoy my Saturday afternoon games on Friday night.

Therefore I’m listening to news from the future – “The world can’t end tonight; Dad’s already listening to tomorrow!”.

So understand that when I tell you I was listening to the end of two dynasties simultaneously on Friday night, I’m referring to the events at the University of Tasmania and the MCG on Saturday afternoon, local time.

To witness the end of a dynasty is a rare thing because by definition dynasties themselves are rare. Having two clubs that you could consider simultaneous dynasties requires not only that the teams be unusually dominant over a period of five or ten years but also that they both win multiple titles despite the other team’s similar success.

Hawthorn won three consecutive titles in 2013-15, a fourth in 2007 and made finals in nine of the last ten years, including being top three the last six years straight.

Sydney made finals in 13 of the last 14 years, although they won just two titles in that time. They’ve also been top four with a double chance each of the last five years and made grand finals in three of those five years. Throw Geelong in there, whose record over the last ten years is similar, and there are arguably three semi-dynasties in the 2010s in the AFL.

And last weekend two of those dynasties came crashing down at the same time, on competing channels.

Both teams started the season 0-4 to everyone’s surprise, but there was still hope. The Hawks rose from the dead in Round 5, wiping out finalist West Coast by 50 points, putting the obituaries on hold for a few days.

Meanwhile, fixture watchers looked at Rounds 6 to 10 for the Swans, projected five easy wins and reminded us that the one team with a track record of rising from the dead to reach finals was Sydney. So though my clock had ticked late in Friday, there was still life in those two cadavers: “They’ll get better! They may not make it to the top 8, but they’re still decent!”.

But then Round 6 happened.

The Saints started well, but they weren’t putting the Hawks away when they had their chances.

Meanwhile Sydney was struggling to impart their obvious superiority over the youngsters of Carlton, even losing the lead briefly in the second before taking a slim eight-point lead into the long break. It was easy to blame the wet conditions, the kind that allows underdogs to stay close and the conditions that allowed the Blues their only win in Round 3.

As the final hour of my Friday night came and went, so did the chances of the two old powerhouses. First, we watched Hawthorn do something unbelievable against St Kilda in the third: they gave up. The phrase ‘scored at will’ was invented for St Kilda’s third quarter. The poor announcers struggled mightily to find some parallel for the total surrender Hawthorn displayed on their happy hunting grounds in Tasmania.

Had they had the Swans broadcast on in the booth, they would have found their parallel. Sydney surrendered five straight goals to a team they’d been favoured to beat by 37 points. They closed the lead to nine with a quarter to go, and we foolishly thought they would still reel in the ‘obviously inferior’ Carlton team.

Back on the island, the last death spasms ran through the muscles of the Hawks. Jarryd Roughhead and Luke Breust put 14 points on the board to start the fourth, and at the same moment Sydney was closing to nine. Let the record show that at approximately 3:30pm on Saturday, 29 April 2017, both franchise dynasties breathed their last.

Hawthorn by an astonishing 75 points to a team they were favoured to beat, and Sydney allowed the Blues to rip off the first three goals to start the fourth.

All dynasties die eventually. The UCLA men’s college basketball dynasty ended when their coach retired. The Soviet hockey team and the American basketball team stopped winning every gold medal when their own internal systems changed and the rest of the world caught up. The New York Yankees stopped winning every other World Series after 1964.

Someday, the University of Connecticut will stop being the bell cow of women’s basketball teams, the New England Patriots will lose both coach Bill Belechick and quarterback Tom Brady and return to being ordinary, and the Perth Wildcats will not make the NBL finals.

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What was so amazing was to watch both obituaries write themselves simultaneously. The only two examples I could come up with of something close to ‘simultaneous dynasty death’ were both much more predictable than this one, and neither were all that ‘together’.

Up to 1991 the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics had dominated the NBA for a decade behind three or four star players, in particular the Lakers’ Magic Johnson and the Celtics’ Larry Bird, who had been rivals since the famous 1979 NCAA college basketball title game they first met in.

Bird retired that year, his team having drifted from the top rung and not made finals for a couple of years, and Magic’s sudden retirement because of his HIV-positive status left the Lakers in a lurch, and they didn’t return to the finals until the days of Kobe and Shaq and after Michael Jordan retired. The two teams didn’t collapse at the same time, or even the same year.

The other candidate might be in Major League Baseball, where the ‘Big Red Machine’, the Cincinnati Reds, dominated the national league while the eccentric Oakland As dominated the american league between 1970 and 1976.

In that run the Reds won five division titles, including four league championships and consecutive World Series titles in 1975-76. The As won five straight division titles between 1971 and 75 and three straight World Series titles between 1972 and 74.

But after their division title and failure to advance beyond the league championship series, they traded away significant talent and fell from the ranks of the great teams, pre-empting the demise of the Reds by a couple of years.

So what we witnessed this weekend was just about unprecedented. The only way to top it is if Geelong’s loss to Collingwood ends up being the first of, say, a 17-game losing streak to end the season.

While on these weekly wanderings it was hard not to notice the common thread between the two teams: complete collapses in defence. By the second half of each game Hawthorn and Sydney were both engaged in the finger-pointing and the energy-saving for offence attitude that engulfs losing teams.

Neither club’s defence will improve until the players get out of their current ‘me first’ mode and return to the ‘we’ attitude that was evident in the classic Giants vs Bulldogs game the night before – or, in my case, at 4am on Friday, and worth every moment of lost sleep!