On the Richter scale of embarrassing losses, Chris Scott was staring down his own Krakatoa at half-time on Monday. The 2014 thrashing at the hands of a crack Sydney side was bad. The Miracle on Grass was infuriating. And last week was an abomination. But this loomed as next level. This was Hawthorn. This was a bunch of kids. This was their most bitter rival, supposedly at its lowest ebb.
The bookmakers, fresh from their mauling from Peta Murphy at the Senate inquiry, had earlier installed the Cats as $1.20 favourites. Anyone who had watched Geelong closely in the last fortnight would have balked at those odds. The Hawks, after all, were one of the few teams to work Geelong’s locks last year. And in a season where they’d copped every dud time slot imaginable, this was one of their few marquee fixtures. For Hawthorn people, the prospect of leaving their bitter rival 0-4 and stone motherless last was as tantalising as winning a final.
Just as they did in last year’s Easter Monday game, the Hawks jumped the gates. The Cats were ghastly early. They were second to the ball, disorganised, undisciplined and leaden legged. God knows where they would have been without Jeremy Cameron. A few weeks ago, he detailed his off-season, which appeared to consist of drinking two-handed and subsisting on service station sausage rolls. For any other footballer, such a preparation would have led to premature retirement. Cameron, somehow, is in career-best form. When the Hawks threatened to blow the game away in the first term, he was one of the few Cats to stand up.
But few saw that third quarter coming. On radio, Joel Selwood was flogging hair replacement products. On TV, Cameron was spruiking for Cash Converters. On Twitter, the faithful were lamenting the end of an era. We can only guess at what Scott was saying. He’s not the hot gospelling type. He’s not the sort of coach to regularly put a rocket up his players. He assumes a baseline level of effort and focuses instead on method and system.
But then the rain cleared, the Little Leaguers toddled off and the game and Geelong’s season completely flipped. It happened so quickly that it’s best explained by the stats: 57 more disposals, 23 more contested possessions, 21 more inside-50s and 10 more clearances. The onballers, who had barely got warm all year, were in murderous touch. Patrick Dangerfield, who’d looked sluggish all season to that point, was suddenly seizing on dead balls, cannoning away and mowing down Hawthorn’s prime movers.
At three-quarter-time, the host broadcaster threw to an ad break with The Who’s Who Are You? Who, indeed, was this Geelong side? Last week, they managed seven goals on the Gold Coast. This week, they slammed that on in 15 minutes. It was the best quarter of any team this year.
On the Hawthorn bench, Sam Mitchell was entitled to be a little shellshocked. Such are the travails of the rebuild coach. When you’re starting again from scratch, you need patience. You need nerve. You need a club that’s totally aligned, that’s unequivocally got your back, that won’t jump at shadows, that won’t implode. You need a supporter base that’s on board with what you’re doing, that can see the future, that’s prepared to come along for the ride, that won’t boo you and call for your head on radio.
It helps, in Mitchell’s case, that they saw him play for more than a decade. They know his quirks, his smarts, his stubbornness, his ambition, his brilliance. There are going to be periods when nothing’s working – when your arch-rivals are racking up premierships, having adopted a completely different strategy. That hurts. It especially hurts when it’s Geelong, the club you went toe-to-toe with for almost 20 years, and who have gone down a completely different and more fruitful path. That third quarter will burn a long time for Mitchell and for Hawthorn.
And it will kickstart Geelong. The doubters were out in full force at half-time on Monday. And whoosh, they unleashed. Up until last year, they only really had two modes – slow and steady, or slow and steady followed by a last-ditch release of the handbrake. These days, they’re capable of winning any which way – slow strangulations, knife fights, jolly romps and avalanches. Their only second-half blemish came as Cameron celebrated his seventh and barrelled into the umpire. A new father, the superstar seemed for a split second to have denied the official a chance to follow suit. It was Cameron’s only tackle. It was a near miss. But it was his day.
