Round 6 - Richmond v Hawthorn

Round 6 – Richmond v Hawthorn
MCG, Sunday 27 April 2014

Saint Sam and Saint Shaun

The crowd gathers to pay tribute to
Sam Mitchell and Shaun Burgoyne

On the same day that the Vatican held a double canonisation ceremony for Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, Hawthorn celebrated its own double canonisation of sorts with the 250th game for both Sam Mitchell and Shaun Burgoyne, whose good works have engendered much devotion, and arguably far fewer sex scandals than those of the Popes.

Not since the day in 1984 when Leigh Matthews played his 300th game and Michael Tuck played his 250th has there been such cause for double celebration.

Such is the reverence in which these men are held that even adherents of opposing faiths tried to join in the celebration. The spectator who jumped the fence in the final quarter may have held up play while security apprehended him, but he was still the only person in a Richmond jumper who looked likely to take clean possession in Richmond’s backline. He was certainly the only one to successfully break through Hawthorn’s forward press.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to the match due to junior sporting obligations. The main cause for disappointment is that normally I would attend a Hawthorn-Richmond match with my brother Graeme, a Tiges fan. The past two years he’s been able to belt out the “yellow and black” refrain in their song and gloat as each surprising Richmond goal sailed through. This year, coming off a loss and smarting from our recent poor record against Richmond, I had a sneaking suspicion that we’d smash them and I wanted to be the one high-fiving fellow supporters and belting our own “yellow and brown” refrain.

Sure enough, by the time I got to a television half way through the third quarter the Hawks led by a satisfying 43 points. And even though the first moment of live action I saw was a goal to Richmond’s Brandon Ellis after Luke Hodge was penalised 50 metres for crossing the mark, the game was effectively over. 

From that moment on I saw the Hawks add nine goals straight to Richmond’s 3.7 to mark a 66 point drubbing and end any fanciful notions Tiger fans might entertain of extending their two-game hoodoo over Hawthorn.

Once more from the top

As soon as the final siren sounded I summoned the miracle of modern recording technology and started from the beginning. As exhilarating as it is to take in a game live, I’ve always found it wholly satisfying to watch a match with advance knowledge of victory. There’s a reduced thrill factor perhaps, but at least its angst free. 

Hawthorn opened the scoring in the first minute of the match with a goal from Jack Gunston after a strong mark. From there, for the entire first quarter, the ball rarely strayed from Hawthorn hands, or indeed from our forward 50. It was as if there was a bias inside it.

On the rare occasion Richmond did go forward, Sam Mitchell simply retrieved it and fed back to our midfielders and runners to send it back in. Indeed, Mitchell patrolled the half-back line like a school bully protecting his patch of the playground, or one of Immigration Minister Scott Morrisson’s frigates protecting the borders of Australian waters, not letting anything through, or towing back anything that unexpectedly slipped past.

Even now Buddy and Hawthorn's inaccuracy
are synonymous

The only reason the match wasn’t over as a contest by quarter time was that Hawthorn’s kicking was as erratic as Buddy Franklin’s driving. Where Buddy drove his girlfriend’s Jeep into parked cars during the week, managing to miss the middle of the road entirely, Hawthorn’s shots on goal also swerved wide to miss the middle. Much has been made this season of Hawthorn’s impressive ‘spread’ of goal kickers, as if our attack were some sort of condiment, but in this first quarter alone, we had six different players kick behinds: Birchall, Hale (twice), Roughead, Mitchell, Duryea and Hodge.

Still, with 11 scoring shots to two at quarter time, and with Jeep being one of Richmond’s major sponsors, it looked like the car maker was in for its second big crash of the week.

When Hale marked strongly and goaled within the first minute of the second quarter, it was beginning to look like a pile-up might be forming. From thereon however, Richmond tried a containment plan, slowing the play and swarming around the ball to make sure Hawthorn didn’t get it out. It worked to a degree in that it stopped Hawthorn from scoring, but inevitably, it also prevented Richmond from making any headway into the deficit. Hawthorn’s second of the quarter came when Breust penetrated Richmond’s off-side trap and put the Poo through to score a big goal. This gave us a second quarter scoreline of 2.2 to 1.1 which meant that despite the containment, Hawthorn still effectively doubled Richmond's score for the quarter.

Saint Cyril

Better than a "Lloydy" tatt

Hawthorn kicked two goals in the first minute of the third quarter to turn a handy 26 point half-time lead into a commanding 38 point lead. The first came from Cyril within 16 seconds of the restart, but he also kicked three more for the quarter, the second of which came after an audacious vertical leap to intercept an attempted handball over his head from which he landed cleanly, scooted around a dumbfounded Ricky Pettard, and goaled.

Just the day before Matthew Lloyd had written an article in The Age criticising Cyril’s output – four goals in a quarter enough for you Lloydy?

The Hawks kicked eight goals to one for the quarter and Cyril couldn’t have been more scintillating.  So he’s not as consistent as Gary Ablett as Lloyd argues, well who is, and he doesn’t do this every week, well who could, but he did do it against Essendon, and he did it again this week. That’s two match winning quarters in six rounds. I’d say that’s a reasonable strike rate. Besides, you don’t need to pump it out for four quarters if one quarter of brilliance is enough.  

The final quarter was largely marking time, though Breust kicked a good soccer goal, Langford passed cleverly to Gunston for another, Hill bounced one through and Rough also slotted one. The final quarter was also Richmond’s best on the scoreboard, or least worst, for they added 3.4, but even then, the ground invader was the sole Richmond highlight.

The "McLachlanism"

In a game where the action is less than totally compelling, other than whatever Cyril is up to, those calling the game have more time to fill and less content with which to fill it. The usual result is meaningless prattle. In this case we had Bruce with his stats of course, and Cameron Ling with his astute reading of the game, but we also had Hamish McLachlan with what might be called his observations, but are really more like random thought bubbles that would be better if they burst before they reached his tongue.

A malapropism is a figure of speech that describes an occasion when the speaker uses an incorrect word in the place of a similar sounding word. Some of Hamish’s less thought through utterances could occasion the coining of a new figure of speech, the McLachlanism, defined as when a speaker uses a term that is not actually a word, entirely the wrong word, or an anecdote so irrelevant that non-sequiter doesn’t fit the bill and so uninteresting that boring doesn’t quite do the job either. Hamish provided examples of all three in Saturday’s call.

Even before the match began, when Jonathan Simpkin appeared on screen wearing the green substitute vest, Hamish McLachlan let slip the bombshell that his old chemistry teacher always used to wear a vest. Amazing! My guess is it wasn’t a fluro green vest, unless the teacher also doubled as the school crossing attendant or the general maintenance man in whatever exclusive school Hamish calls his alma mater. If Hamish was as fluent in science as he was in English, it is likely that the garment was some sort of protective vest to mitigate against whatever young Hamish might be doing with the Bunsen burner.

Then in the first quarter as Luke Hodge lined up a goal Hamish thought to highlight some of Hodgey’s leadership attributes, saying that he is often seen “generaling” the troops, thus introducing a new verb to the lexicon. And this ‘generaling’ apparently takes places while he is “paroling” the half-back line - from what misdemeanour Hodgey is on parole Hamish didn’t specify.

In the final quarter as the ground invader took to the field dressed in a Richmond jumper and long shorts, Hamish could be heard more than once referring to him as a “streaker!” A 'streaker' is normally associated with nudity. True, he had bare feet, but any other visible flesh was entirely in Hamish’s imagination.

In truth one of the more curious examples of the McLachlanism came from Bruce, but it was about Hamish and therefore possibly revealing in ways that we may never fully understand. As Richmond’s Sam Lloyd took possession of the ball, Hamish provided the information that Richmond is Lloyd’s fifth club in five years, and added the caveat that he’s like Elizabeth Taylor and husbands, having had “plenty of them”.

Is that Lizzy and 8th hubby Larry Fortenski...
or Robert Smith and Dermie?
Watch out Hamish, you're next!

Bruce took up the analogy highlighting that Lizzy knew how to “find a fella” and that she “got to eight didn’t she Hame?” See how Bruce even worked a stat into this exchange, although unusually for Bruce he was incorrect, if only on a technicality, for although Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times, she only had seven husbands, having married Richard Burton twice. Most bizarrely, however, was Bruce’s next quip when he remarked to Hamish, “You know, I reckon you were probably the next on the list by the way.”

It might have been interesting to know why Bruce thought Hamish could possibly be Elizabeth Taylor’s next husband, given that her last marriage ended in 1996 when she was 64 years old and Hamish 21, and she died in 2011, but sadly no one had time to unpack this observation because the umpire paid Gibson a free kick for holding the ball and the Hawks were away.

Even more interesting, or possibly scary, is that Hamish’s brother Gillon has this week been appointed to take over the role of AFL CEO from Andrew Demetriou. For the sake of the AFL let’s hope Gillon was the one who paid attention at school.  

And in Hamish’s defence, at least he didn’t drop the C-bomb on air as polished media performer Eddie McGuire did when interviewing Port’s Kane Cornes.

Final scores: Hawthorn 18 10 118 d Richmond 7 10 52

Attendance:52,990

Ladder position 2nd

What we learned: Even  more controversial than Eddie’s gaffe perhaps was the bombshell from the Western Bulldogs cheer squad, whose banner for their match against Adelaide this weekend carried the directive, “Time to come out” which could have meant that the team had been in the rooms for so long that the kids were getting impatient and changed the message while they were on the ground. Or was it an exasperated plea for the first openly gay player to finally reveal his identity? Is there a Western Bulldog with an explosive confession perhaps? My guess is it isn’t Bob Murphy; his taste in music - Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash et al - doesn’t sound like the soundtrack to any gay gatherings I’ve ever been to. I think we can also rule out Luke Dalhaus on the basis that gay men don’t do dreadlocks, or any other hairstyle not requiring product. Whoever it is, it is good to know that there is one area of the game in which the Bulldogs might take the lead.

What we already knew: that the last small forward to win the Coleman medal (even though it didn’t exist by that name at the time) was Leigh Matthews. Well we knew it at least a full minute before Bruce McAvaney worked it out.

The question was posed by Nick Maxwell in the commentary booth after Luke Breust volleyed through a goal in the final quarter, his 17^th for the season keeping him among the leading contenders so far this season. All Hawks fans listening immediately said the name Leigh Matthews under their breath, but it took Bruce a full minute to work it out. Impressively he got the goals (68) and the year (1975) correct.

Elsewhere: We also knew that Melbourne and Sydney would put on one of the dullest games not involving Ross Lyon. With Paul Roos at Melbourne’s helm and John Longmire in charge of Sydney, a dour defensive struggle doesn’t begin to describe how the inaction unfolded.

The buzz topic in footy circles in the week leading up to the match was ‘congestion’ – and I’m not referring to traffic congestion or at least the density of parked cars that Buddy rammed his girlfriend’s Jeep into in suburban Sydney – but to the rolling pack of players around the ball at all times. So a match involving teams marshalled by two coaches who were the principal architects – along with Ross Lyon – of the bore years of 2005/06 was only ever going to underline the problem. 

In the end, the game was so boring and uneventful that congestion was the least of its problems, and once Buddy injured his knee, that story took over as the only topic of the game under general discussion.