Round 17 - Hawthorn v Western Bulldogs

Saturday 20 July 2013, Aurora Stadium

A tale of two teams

The  1961 Grand Final
- the last time a Hawthorn Bulldogs
match mattered. 

I put in an extended session at the gym on Saturday morning, not because I’m pushing myself to new peaks, or rather troughs, of physical exertion, but because one of the televisions above the treadmills was replaying a Hawthorn Bulldogs fixture from a few years ago. It was early in the third and the scores were close when I climbed on the bike, so I had no choice but to stay until I found out the result.

First I had to work out when the match was played.  The players provided the clues. Brent Renouf, Beau Muston and Wade Skipper were going around for the Hawks, while for the Dogs, Rocket Eade was in the box and Barry Hall, Brad Johnston and the bloke with the big ears who wore no.1 and looked like Merlin from the TV series were running around. Shaun Burgoyne’s presence helped me establish that it was probably 2010 and I could then settle down to enjoy the match.

It was still tight at the main break, but spectacular goals from Mitchell and Hodge put us in front (by now I could remember the game) and then Buddy seemed to seal the deal with a trademark long goal from 50 out on the boundary. A late goal to the Dogs, however, after a baffling decision to pay 50 against Buddy (it was one of those games where the umpires devoted themselves to penalising Buddy) brought it back to within a goal. Our boys hung on heroically, but only just, for the ball was heading towards the Bulldogs goal square when the siren sounded.

Watching this match caused me to reflect on the long history of memorable games between Hawthorn and Footscray/Western Bulldogs, and all those classic encounters over the years…and I realised, not without some degree of disquiet, that in fact there’d hardly been any.  Both teams had joined the league 88 years ago in 1925, yet in all that time had barely played a significant match.

Okay, obviously there’d been the 1961 Grand Final – our first flag, so quite significant, but there are very few other matches of any import that I can recall.

In 1984 Leigh Matthews played his 300th game and Michael Tuck his 250th on the same day at Western Oval. Then in 1985 we contested both the Qualifying and Preliminary Finals, the latter of which was Leigh Matthews’ penultimate game which he marked by coming from the bench to kick two goals and send us to the Grand Final.

In 2007 I recall Buddy kicked 2.11 at Docklands in a big Hawks win and then in 2008 he kicked 8 in the Qualifying Final, which the Hawks also won easily. The very next time we played them, however, in 2009, I watched in horror as the Hawks, reigning premiers, went in at half time trailing 13.10 to 0.4 – that’s right, not a single goal in the first half.

Since then, there was the afternoon when Jordan Lewis, running back with the flight of the ball got kicked in the head by Hargrave – and didn’t even get a free kick despite the head supposedly being sacrosanct. But my memory of other momentous matches is as sketchy as Jordan Lewis’ after that incident.

A tale of two kicks

Kyle - can now be teased for
something other than his red hair

- photo hawthornfc.com.au

Of the aggregate 389 kicks recorded by Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs during their Round 17 encounter, the match, having very little else to distinguish it, has come to be defined by just two of them. One travelled approximately 70 metres and is a contender for goal of the year, and the other travelled just 10 metres and is a contender for miss of the year.  Both kicks came from Hawthorn players and represent the yin and yang of Hawthorn.

The first kick by Luke Hodge is perhaps noteworthy as much for the way he gathered the ball as for the actual kick. Taking the ball from the centre stoppage, Bulldog Ryan Griffin turned on to his right and sunk his boot into it to send it forward, but succeeded in kicking it directly into the chest of the oncoming Hodge who, without breaking stride, carried the ball for two or three steps before launching a massive kick that landed in an empty goal square and bounced through for a goal.

The second kick from Kyle Cheney was the result of a 50 metre penalty against Jordan Roughead, which put the man on the mark just 5 metres out, meaning that Cheney was kicking from the goal square. In a game where Hawthorn had already kicked inaccurately, Cheney set a new benchmark of waywardness, shanking it into the goal post.

Kyle is a name of Scottish origin meaning ‘strait’ as in a narrow sea channel, not to be confused with its homophone ‘straight’, as in direct, accurate kick from 5 metres out!

Of course it’s easy to laugh at a miss like this, but anyone who has ever lined up a ‘gimmee’ will know that it’s not as easy as it looks and that a goal square looms longer and larger in reality when you’ve got to kick over a man on the mark than it appears on TV.

To test the degree of difficulty of the kick I took my 13 year old son and a Match Day Sherrin down to the local park. I planted myself on the mark 5 metres out and gave him 10 kicks to see how many he could kick accurately. I sledged, I jumped about waving my arms, I vilified him, I called his mother rude names, I questioned his patrimony (Hey, hold on – that’s me), but he still calmly slotted 10 out of 10. So perhaps it is as easy as it looks.

I considered conducting the same experiment with my 80 year old mum to test the accuracy of the time honoured sledge, “My mother could kick that!”, but her eyesight is going, affecting her balance and she is walking with a limp, so I didn’t want to be the agency of a terrible accident just for the sake of a pointless experiment. The point being, however, that if a 13 year old school boy can kick it, a 24 year old professional footballer, even an ex-Melbourne player, should be able to.

In fairness, Kyle wasn’t the only player to miss from the goal square. All up I counted five players in various circumstances: In the first quarter Gunston sprayed a hurried snap shot, in the final quarter The Poo missed the ball entirely attempting a kick off the ground, whereas for the Dogs, Stevens missed in the second and Jones from off the ground in the third. It was just that sort of match.

The first quarter made for engaging and diverting viewing with Hawthorn creating numerous and regular scoring opportunities. Although they didn’t take all of them, you got a sense that eventually the sheer weight of numbers would result in an influx of goals.

But it didn’t eventuate, not until the final quarter at least. Over the course of the second and third quarters, both teams kicked just 3.6 each. Hodge’s goal was the lone highlight of the second quarter, unless you count Cheney’s spectacular miss, and the third quarter was a dour, messy affair, with neither team making any progress. The action was as stagnant and frustrating as watching the Australian top order trying to eke out runs at Lords, or the government trying to cobble together a coherent asylum seeker policy.

In the final quarter the match seemed to right itself with Hawthorn running in four goals in five minutes through Lewis, The Poo and Simpkin (2) to get the lead out to 44 points, something like the margin we were anticipating. Then the Dogs threw in one last plot twist kicking four goals in the final three minutes to bring the margin back to 19 points.

Overall, it was a game that lived up to the rich history between these two clubs.


Final scores: Hawthorn 13 17 95 d Western Bulldogs 11 10 76


What we learned: With the birth of the royal baby, the Queen now has a full compliment of heirs on the interchange bench: Charles, William and the baby prince, with Harry in the subs vest.



What we already knew: that Channel 9 has no hypocrisy alarm. On Thursday the Mornings team of Sonia Kruger and David Campbell previewed a segment critical of those who participate in 'fat shaming', the practice of photographing larger people in humiliating poses and posting the pics on social media sites. Much tut tutting was set to ensue. In the very next segment, however, Ken Sutcliffe joined them and discussed the streaker in the previous night's State of Origin clash - joking about his size and suggesting you could sell advertising space on his generous girth. Hello? Fat shaming anyone?