In the 1994 preliminary final, North Melbourne learned, in the cruellest way imaginable, that, to quote Dennis Cometti, ‘there is no justice in football’.
Mick Martyn had just watched the ball float over his head, into the waiting arms of Gary Ablett Senior – the man he had kept in check for much of a thrilling, pulsating match – only seconds before the siren, with scores tied.
The Kangaroos’ loss to Collingwood on Saturday had nowhere near those stakes, but in the context of a season that has been catastrophe after catastrophe, fans would be forgiven for feeling just as heartbroken. After all, Martyn’s Roos were about to win two premierships in the next five years.
Footy is a cold, dark place where dreams go to die.
1,712.2 kilometres to the north (thanks, Google Maps), and Gold Coast seemed about to learn a similar lesson.
They don’t have the history to have that much heartbreak written on the walls, but a pair of narrow losses in the last fortnight, both to fellow finals hopefuls in Port Adelaide and Collingwood, were as shattering as they were season-defining.
After an insipid second quarter that saw them head for the sheds 34 points behind Richmond, in a third straight eight-point game, and it seemed the strain had taken its toll. Hopes of a maiden finals series were dead in the water.
Footy is a cold, dark place where dreams go to die.
In every possible way bar on the scoreboard, North would have been deserved victors at the MCG. Coming up against an opponent that, be it a case of taking the challenge lightly or just plain having a stinker, couldn’t match them in any facet of the game, the Roos blitzed their more fancied opponents out of the centre, outhunted them without the ball, and made the most of a defence left worryingly feeble in the absence of Darcy Moore.
There were mistakes from the Roos, sure – they weren’t about to do a complete 180 and wallop the Pies by 10 goals – but for the first time since the early rounds, there was a workable, identifiable game plan to the way they went about it. Extract it out of the guts, get it forward by any measure, and either win the next contest or pressure it enough to prevent a slingshot ripping through them the other way.
It sounds simple, but in reality it’s anything but. You need players capable of executing it. As for the first part, Luke Davies-Uniacke seemed capable of doing it all himself.
There hasn’t been a more complete performance by a midfielder in 2022. From the very first bounce, in which he won the ball out of the centre and banged it forward for Todd Goldstein to take a strong contested mark, the Magpies just couldn’t stop him.
It seemed like the head-to-head battle was with Jack Crisp, in the midst of an All Australian-calibre season: but Crisp’s strength is his spread from the stoppages and all-day gut running. Someone’s still got to, most of the time, get the ball to him, and Davies-Uniacke was single-handedly preventing that from happening. It’s quite hard to get any ball movement going when it’s the other side with the Sherrin.
By quarter time, the Roos’ number 9 had had it 11 times. Four of them were clearances, three drove North inside 50, and three led to scores. It was the sort of one-man wrecking ball not seen since it was Gary Ablett and a bunch of kids for early-days Gold Coast.
In the past, he’s often had a bright start before fizzling out, but on Saturday he went right on with it from there. With six possessions and three tackles in the final quarter, he was one of the few Kangaroos to not wilt in the face of the Magpies’ final-quarter onslaught.
The final damage was 33 disposals, 14 inside 50s (the Roos alone only mustered 25 last week!), seven centre clearances and 12 in total, and 11 tackles. He alone didn’t deserve to be on the losing side.
Ben Ainsworth, like Davies-Uniacke, was taken with pick four in a national draft: his 2016, the Kangaroo’s 12 months later. Both have quietly gone about career-best seasons in 2022, after a period in the wilderness where the burden of being a young hopeful in a struggling side would permanently stifle their development.
Ainsworth wasn’t just fighting a one-man battle for the Suns: he was required to. The only Sun to so much as give a yelp in that first half, he busted a gut working up the ground from the half-forward line, before pushing back to become an attacking option.
The latter dried up with the Suns taken to the cleaners in the second term, but the former continued. By half time, he had 14 touches, seven marks, a goal, and admiration from former greats Nick Riewoldt and Garry Lyon.
Forget leading the troops off: none of the others were fit to clean the mud from his boots.
As good as Davies-Uniacke was, he at least had help. Todd Goldstein has seemed rejuvenated this year whenever asked to carry the number one ruck mantle like the good old days; with Tristan Xerri out with a shoulder injury and Callum Coleman-Jones used sparingly and ineffectively, he seized his chance.
Goldstein has been around for so long, and spent enough of the back end of his career in a weak side, that we seem to forget that at his peak he was the best ruckman in the game. Today provided a telling reminder, as he continually outpointed a worthy opponent in Darcy Cameron, both around the ground and with his tap work. If Davies-Uniacke was the heart, big Goldy was the coronary artery.
Battering rams Jed Anderson and Hugh Greenwood played their best games of the season, providing LDU with the grunt around him to open up space for the magic to happen. These two are tackling machines, Greenwood especially, and didn’t allow a highly dangerous Magpies midfield any space all afternoon.
Regularly, the Pies would seem on the verge of a rare centre clearance, only for Anderson or Greenwood to get in with a last-gasp one-percenter to either force a draw, or get it to Davies-Uniacke. For the first time all season, North’s midfield seemed balanced perfectly.
Up forward, Nick Larkey found himself with no opponent capable of matching him in the air, or, as it happened, on the ground. Don’t pay any heed to his stats this year – you try getting a kick in a forward line that gets enough supply about once every eleven weeks – focus on his bags when he actually has a chance to unleash.
He kicked six against a WAFL West Coast in the Roos’ only win; his five today, a combination of nerveless set shots after strong pack marks and clever roving of his own efforts to bring the ball to ground, were twice as good.
At the opposite end of the ground, Ben McKay showed, despite David Noble’s baffling recent notion to try and turn him into a forward, he’s simply too good in defence to be anywhere else. Unlike the rest of the team, he grew better as the match wore on, with more to do.
With the Pies surging in the last quarter, they’d have won by four of five goals if not for McKay’s presence. Frequently leading his opponent, mostly an out of sorts Brody Mihocek, to the ball, he claimed intercept mark after intercept mark. Even more than Davies-Uniacke at that point, he seemed capable of holding the Pies at bay.
It’s basically the building blocks of a quality side: a superstar midfielder surrounded by workhorses, a dominant ruckman, a gun key forward and a gun key back. There’s a blueprint there for Noble, or whomever is coach in 2023 (he’s surely bought himself the rest of the season with an effort like that) to develop this side.
The sky isn’t the limit, but then nor is the limit just two feet above rock bottom.
Hugh Greenwood of the Kangaroos is dejected after defeat to the Magpies. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
For the Roos, their purple patch extended to three-qurter time – a 26-point lead that was surely the match. The Suns showed some ticker in the second to stop the rot, with the Tigers beginning to show signs of a slide – as good as Shai Bolton was, he had the odd moment he’d love back in hindsight – but the gap was still 28 points.
It was at this point, though, Ainsworth found some mates. Noah Anderson’s outside run was finally allied with pinpoint passing, often a handicap in the past. Matt Rowell started to fight off the tough tackling of Jack Graham and Dion Prestia. Mabior Chol began to look a threat in the air. Jarrod Witts took control of a captivating ruck duel against Toby Nankervis and Ivan Soldo.
Still, it seemed as though that second quarter would doom their efforts. For footy, after all, is a cold, dark place where dreams go to die.
In the end, the Pies only needed 30 minutes of brilliance to overrun a 26-point three quarter time deficit – a mark of both the electric football the black and white can play, the amount of petrol tickets the Roos had spent, and the fact that this is still a wooden spoon team.
Dominant out of the guts even more so than the Roos had been for the first three quarters, the Magpies’ experienced leaders all stepped up. Scott Pendlebury and Steele Sidebottom’s intelligent ball use and leadership are just so pivotal still for a side that could become rudderless without them, and Pendlebury remains the ultimate break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option to run through the middle.
Sidebottom had 15 touches for the day, and I’m willing to bet every single one was valuable to some degree. None more so than his ice-cool set shot deep into the final term, to push the Pies’ lead out beyond a goal and effectively seal the deal. There is still nobody Craig McRae would rather have kicking for goal with so much at stake.
It would be unfair to say the Magpies didn’t deserve to win – no victory in the history of any sport has ever been unearned, and four-quarter fitness is a key tenet of the game – it’s just that the Roos didn’t deserve to lose. All the talk about honourable losses and breaking 45-plus-point losing streaks is codswallop – I’m very much hoping Noble pulled off a repeat of Terry Wallace’s ‘I’ll spew up’ speech in the rooms afterwards.
Had the Roos got up, it would have been football at its finest: the ultimate example of an underdog rising to the challenge against a cocksure opponent, and scraping through with pure heart.
Think Seabiscuit. Think the Mighty Ducks. Think Robert Downey Junior. Think Kim Kardash – okay, you see where I’m going here (or if not, head here).
It would have been the stuff of fairytales, not least for all the talk that Noble’s time will be up as early as this coming week, and for the shameless Tasmania-baiting of the Magpies’ former president. The irony would have been delicious.
But fairytales are for storybooks. Footy is a cold, dark place where dreams go to die.
Someone just forgot to tell the Suns.
Noah Anderson of the Suns celebrates after kicking the match winning goal. (Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
With every passing minute, the Suns kept coming, kept harassing, kept believing. Richmond became the villains in a Mahatma Gandhi quote – first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Two quick goals might have been cancelled by a Jack Riewoldt steadier, but the Suns had the wind in their sails now. Daniel Rioli’s menacing dash from half-back had been curtailed, with the intercepting of Dylan Grimes now the last point of defence.
The cracks began to show in the triple premiers: Jason Castagna somehow contrived to run into an open goal, forget that there was an opposition, and had his game-sealing kick smothered by Charlie Ballard. Penny for Damien Hardwick’s thoughts.
The Suns could only manage a Nick Holman behind from the end-to-end play straight after, but the Tigers continued to make mistakes. Jayden Short tried to dally too long in returning the ball on the mark, gifting Rowell a 50m penalty.
Was the young gun up to the task? Yes sir. An accidental Chol goal with a minute on the clock, running onto a loose ball in the goal square and tapping in, set up the grandstand finish.
They couldn’t, could they?
The Tigers took the clearance, but the Suns wouldn’t be denied. Hurtling the ball forward by hook or by crook, one desperate kick after another, before Holman’s high ball found Day in the pocket. Inboard to Anderson. Siren.
Goodness knows how many times Anderson envisioned this moment as a child. But on the verge of glory, of the Suns’ finest hour, his right boot never wavered.
Footy is a warm, bright place where dreams come true.
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