Round 10 - Port Adelaide v Hawthorn

Adelaide Oval, Saturday 24 May 2014

A Night at the Opera

Hawthorn's rooms before the match

Hawthorn matches are currently viewed in light of which players are not playing rather than the players that are.  It’s a bit like the forthcoming Queen tour announced this week – the band that is, not the monarch – who will take to Australian stages later in the year with only 50% of their first choice players. Missing will be Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, and John Deacon, who has retired. That leaves only guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor from the original line-up.



For this top of the table clash the Hawks were missing Jarryd Roughead (suspension), Sam Mitchell (hamstring), Cyril Rioli (hamstring), Brain Lake (calf) and Josh Gibson (pectoral). So that’s our best forward (Roughead), our best half-forward (Rioli), our best midfielder (Mitchell), our best half back (Gibson) and our best backman (Lake).  And then our ruckman Ben McEvoy limped off after half-time. In truth, Hawthorn’s predicament is more akin to Queen without even Brian May, and with Roger Taylor having one hand tied behind his back.

Gibson’s case is the most intriguing. With the Hawks having a bye after the Sydney game, Gibson took the chance to fly to LA to visit his girlfriend, American TV host, Renee Bargh. He left with a sore shoulder and returned with a torn pectoral muscle, which makes you wonder exactly what they got up to…and how often. And if it was as much fun as it sounds, why he returned at all. The most interesting aspect of all of this is that the slightly built, but beautiful Ms Bargh managed to hurt Gibson in ways that neither Travis Cloke, Buddy Franklin, Tom Hawkins nor any of the AFL’s supposed power forwards could.

Port started the match as strong favourites, but most Hawks fans were just hoping for no further injuries. I wasn’t able to watch the match as, to cite the name of Queen’s fourth album; I was spending ‘A Night at the Opera’. Well not quite the opera, I was at Howler, a bar in Brunswick to see American songstress, St Vincent play. Normally I’d have been torn between the two events, but I didn’t give the Hawks much chance with so many senior players missing and playing at an unfamiliar venue. Besides, I’d set the record function so the plan was to go to the gig, keep a check on the scores and watch the match back later.

Is that a hawk in the Queen logo? 

The Game

I saw snippets of the first quarter as I was getting ready and after Port kicked the first few goals it looked like we might suffer a big defeat. I was confident that the Hawks would work their way back into the match, but I was going to have to follow it via the AFL Live app. Rather than have the app on at all times, I elected to check in every 10 minutes or so. This wasn’t a battery saving decision, just a vain hope that there’d be a sudden improvement in the scoreline. However, each time I checked in we were four goals or more behind.

When I heard that McEvoy was hurt, the song ‘Another one Bites the Dust’ from Queen’s eighth album ‘The Game’ immediately sprang to mind.

A half-time scoreline of  8.3 to 4.4 as I arrived at the venue wasn’t promising. I met my friend John, got in some beers, Hawthorn Pale Ale seemed fitting, and we grabbed a seat to take in the support act, D.D Dumbo. He was pretty good actually. A sort of one man band, he started each track by setting up a beat or a riff on a loop and then proceeding to add multiple layers over the top as he played guitar and sang. It was interesting enough to distract me from the game at least.

It’s a curious experience following the match via app. It’s like playing online pokies; every time you press refresh or check the screen you’re at the mercy of some technological algorithm just hoping for the right numbers to appear. You get your hopes up as you click for the update, only to have them dashed when you see the score is 11.5.71 to 6.5. 41. I felt as deflated as an online gambler down to their last $10 of credit.

The Miracle

At that point I focused more on D.D Dumbo’s performance and thought how useful he’d be in the Hawks right now – someone who could do it all. Like Roughead I suppose. Then I put in my last $1 and refreshed the app, and couldn’t believe it – my numbers had come up! The Hawks were coming back. It was 11.7 to 10.6 and we were back in the game at three quarter time.

I fired off a quick “Come on Hawks!” text to Chan-Tha who was also taking in the game via digital means from a beer expo.

By the time the final quarter started I was in the crush of St Vincent fans waiting for her to come on stage. The electric buzz of her opening track, Rattlesnake, reverberated in the room as she appeared and I strained for a good view. Chan-Tha texted back “losing again”. I got a score update as St Vincent began her next song, “Birth in Reverse” and the opening lines of the song, “Oh what an ordinary day” summed up my mood as I noticed that Port had added two early final quarter goals.  We pulled one back, but when I next checked Port had bagged another. To call on another Queen title, we required a ‘miracle’ to bring this one home. I hadn’t given up, but I focused my attention on St Vincent who was putting on a dynamic and powerful performance. She was singing “I want all of your mind” and while I couldn’t quite give her all of it, as I was keeping an eye on the score until the end of the match, I was certainly happy to lose myself in the show.

The final score suggested that Hawthorn continued to fight hard and kept coming back. I’ll probably watch the game during the week just to see how it actually unfolded and who played well. It’s difficult to know to what degree our injuries contributed to the outcome, but in the end I wasn’t too disappointed; playing Port Adelaide in Adelaide is always difficult, and with the crowds packing out the Adelaide Oval, it has become a hostile environment for visiting teams. With the loss to Sydney and the bye, however, it’s now been a month since we won! Thank God we have GWS next week.

With most of our injured players out for extended periods, it is going to be tough to maintain our momentum through the middle part of the season, but if we can hang in there and win enough games to make the finals, and we have all of our players fixed, fit and firing – and we can keep Gibbo away from his girlfriend - then we might just become the first team to win the flag from outside the top four. At that point we can join in with Freddie to belt out Queen’s great anthem, “We are the Champions” when they do their lap of honour. I noted during the 2013 lap that the recording is a bit scratchy and wondered if perhaps they’re still using the original 7-inch single.

That’s something to look forward to at least, because surely nothing else could go wrong…


Final scores: Port Adelaide 15 10 100  d  Hawthorn 13 8 86

Ladder position: 4th

Attendance: 

…well, as it turns out a lot more could go wrong. Our main ma, coaching maestro Alastair Clarkson has been admitted to hospital with Guillain-Barre syndrome, an inflammation of the nerves in the spinal cord. He’ll be out of action indefinitely. This is a very serious condition – not just something he picked up from drinking the water in Adelaide. You wonder if Clarko isn’t just trying to show up all those overpaid pretty boys with their soft tissue injuries, wellness forms and rehab coaches as the hypochondriacs he suspects them to be.

Our season may well be in jeopardy now, but Clarko’s recovery is more important than Hawthorn’s current premiership campaign. Alastair Clarkson is one of Hawthorn’s great coaching figures and while we want him back at the helm, first and foremost we want him to be healthy and well...and then back at the helm.

One measure of a coach is how many premierships they win – Clarko has two. Another measure is how many of their assistants are poached for senior coaching roles with other clubs. At present there are three: Damian Hardwick (Richmond), Adam Simpson (West Coast) and Leon Cameron (GWS). Four if you count Brendan Bolton, or ‘Bolts’ as he is inevitably known, who will be stepping in for Clarkson.

A less tangible but possibly more important measure might be the degree of esteem and adoration in which he is held by Hawthorn fans. We love him. We love that he describes Sam Mitchell getting 40 touches as ‘pleasing’ rather than ‘awe inspiring’, that every other club is a ‘formidable opponent’ and that whenever we lose he refers to ‘licking our wounds’ – which given the current rehab list will require some fervent slurping. We love that he punched a hole in the wall of the coaches box when we let Collingwood get within 40 points; we love that he had to be physically restrained from punching a hole in Matthew Lloyd after Lloyd had ironed out Brad Sewell in 2009; we love that he called a reporter a ‘knob head’ for being, well, a knob head. These incidents that have others questioning his temperament are among the very reasons he has endeared himself to Hawks fans, although the two premierships have certainly helped…

Get well soon Clarko!

What we learned: if we didn’t already know it, we learned that some things are more important than football and whether your team wins…and that is the health and well-being of those who are directly responsible for making your team win.

What we already knew: that Gary Ablett would escape any sort of punishment for ‘allegedly’ elbowing Liam Picken from the Western Bulldogs in the head (see how I used the proper legal term ‘allegedly’ meaning he did it, but we’re not allowed to say so). I suspect the AFL is also pleased that they will be spared the embarrassment of having to present the Brownlow medal to someone who has finished 20 votes behind Ablett. Not that I’m alleging a fix of any sort, but the only match review or tribunal decisions to rival this as foregone conclusions are those involving Sydney players, who as part of their cost of living allowance, are entitled to knock players or indeed umpires unconscious without any repercussions. Just as in the 2005 Preliminary Final when Barry Hall was judged not to have ‘punched’ Matt Maguire of St Kilda, despite his fist going directly into Maguire’s midriff.