Sam Lalor made the obligatory phone call to his dad this week; his selection wasn’t exactly a surprise. It wasn’t exactly Marlion Pickett in grand final week. And it wasn’t exactly Richard Nixon phoning Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. It was as monosyllabic as most teenagers phoning their parents.
Many good judges consider Lalor’s dad, Steve, to be one of the best country footballers they’ve seen. He played in the Ovens and Murray league when that competition was one of the strongest in Victoria. He played in an era when a lot of good players were missed by the system, didn’t want to live in Melbourne or had their careers derailed by injury.
Sam is now the great family hope and the hope of a football club. High draft picks these days are well-placed to meet that kind of pressure. They spend their teenage years being measured, ranked, groomed, interviewed, cosseted. They adopt the pose – a kind of studied insouciance. One minute they’re talking like management consultants and the next they’re totally incoherent. When they’re drafted, there’s pile-ons, lots of “yeah-nahs”, “can’t wait to get around the boys”, “can’t wait to get stuck in”.
Last November, the first-rounders all gathered at Marvel Stadium for group photos. It was considered a crack draft and an even one; most of them were already good friends. But the hierarchy was obvious. All fanned out around the No 1 pick, the chosen one. He has one of those footy heads – Joel Selwood, Luke Hodge and Jason Horne-Francis also have it – that calm, assessing, distant look squarely focused on the next session, the next contest.
But at that precise moment, you’d almost rather be pick 70. At pick 70, you’re the rescue dog of the draft and anything else you achieve is a bonus. At No 1, anything less than Hodge is a letdown.
For every success story, there’s a cautionary tale. Tom Boyd ended up hating football. Jon Patton had three knee reconstructions and left Hawthorn in shady circumstances. Paddy McCartin suffered multiple concussions and had to retrain his neural pathways. Jamarra Ugle-Hagan is on the outer at the Western Bulldogs, and was described – not exactly warmly – by his coach, Luke Beveridge, this week as a “potential marquee-type influencer.”
The comparisons of Lalor with Dustin Martin are obvious. You can see it in their silhouettes, their fend-offs, even their ball drops. But there are differences, too: overhead marking is clearly going to be a much bigger part of Lalor’s game than Martin’s.
And their backgrounds are very different. Lalor’s had all the favours so far. He was sent to board at Geelong Grammar, with its equestrian stables, its cold plunge pools and its triple-barrelled surnames.
But he’s already had a torrid introduction to senior footy. Flying to the other side of the country for an early Monday morning scratch match – what could possibly go wrong? He’d kicked a couple of goals and was going well. But he was pushed into a contest by a West Coast player who resembles the former Family Feud host Rob Brough and ended up crumpled on the turf, holding his jaw.
A few days later, the TV journalist Mitch Cleary tweeted: “Lalor has lost a few kilograms recently – been unable to chew food.” Well, that’s reassuring for everyone involved!
Scorched earth is a risky way to run a football club. “I started in 2010,” Blair Hartley, Richmond’s boss of football talent, told Anson Cameron for his biography of Neil Balme. “My first day I sat there thinking – what the hell have I done? I watched training and the ball spent most of the time on the ground. We lost our first nine games.”
But many Tigers supporters nominate 2010 as one of their favourite seasons. They had a new young coach, some raw talent, lots of early floggings and a couple of wins that stick in the marrow. In the round one game against Carlton, they handed out jumpers to a little fella with dreadlocks, Ben Nason; a sumptuously skilled, gloriously named and appreciably proportioned Territorian, Relton Roberts; and a kid from Castlemaine, Dustin Martin. They were flogged – but better days were coming.
The chances are the Tigers are going to be really bad this year. Chances are they’re going to be annihilated on Thursday night. There’s going to be a lot of players who dine out on them – specialist boot-fillers. But it really doesn’t matter. Like in 2010, all you need is one good passage of play, one good quarter, one win that stiffens the sinews and summons the blood, one reassuring sign that the club has pulled the right rein. But like everything to do with the draft, we’re guessing, we’re projecting, and we’re hoping.
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