Almanac Footy: Bombers at Rest

 

 

 

 

The 1999 Preliminary Final. Essendon minor premiers, the best team in the competition by a distance. Carlton had finished the home and away season in sixth, a side David Parkin had publicly called ‘B-grade’ only weeks earlier — after a 76-point hiding at the hands of those same Bombers. Nobody gave Carlton a chance. Nobody was wrong to think that way. And that is exactly the point. One point, as it turned out, thanks to Fraser Brown’s tackle on the bastard Dean Wallis.

 

Six years earlier, they had beaten Carlton by 44 points in a Grand Final. You can’t understand the one-point win without that loss. The 1999 Essendon was not just talented but convinced — a club that made you feel the weight of what you were trying to do to them, right up until you did it. Carlton’s greatest moment outside a premiership. Inseparable from the quality of the opponent.

 

To put it plainly: Carlton needed Essendon to be what they were.

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Pop-culturalist and contrarian Chuck Klosterman has spent considerable energy thinking about villains, which is either a very American preoccupation or a very useful one, and possibly both. He argues that the heel — the bad guy, the black hat — isn’t incidental to the story. They are load bearing. The villain’s quality sets the ceiling on what the whole enterprise can mean.

 

A credible antagonist is why someone leaves Warrnambool at 6am, parks in Footscray, gets on the wrong train and pays $90 without a second thought to stand in the rain at the Ponsford End. Strip that away and the hero is just someone who wins sometimes – and nobody suffers beautifully just to win. They suffer to beat someone worth beating.

 

By this measure, Essendon had been one of the most important clubs in the competition. They were big enough to matter, talented enough to genuinely hurt you, and — this is said with complete sincerity, for what that’s worth — arrogant enough that despising them required no effort at all. The ASADA scandal didn’t change the hatred; it clarified it, gave it a legal framework and a WADA dossier. They had cheated. They had, when caught, wrapped the club’s considerable self-regard around themselves and dared the sport to unwrap it. You could dislike them without qualification and wake up the next morning feeling clean.

 

The ASADA years were, in a dark and grudgingly admiring way, Essendon at their most essentially themselves. Grand in their wrongdoing. Committed to the bit. If you’re going to be corrupt, at least be corrupt with conviction.

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What has happened since has the structure of a slow leak — each season finding a new and slightly lower floor.

 

Essendon have not won a final for more than twenty years. Zach Merrett — six best-and-fairests, 250-plus games, a man whose entire public identity was built around loyalty to the club, spent last year’s trade period trying to get to Hawthorn. His management tabled trade scenarios with the arithmetic of a man who had already, in his mind, left the building, moved in, and redecorated. The club held firm, the deal collapsed in the final hours of deadline day, and Merrett returned — handed over the captaincy, had dinner with teammates who had gone to the press to describe how hurt and angry they were, cleared the air, shook hands, and then went out and had 32 touches in Round 1 against the club he had tried to join. A professional, say what you like.

 

Brad Scott spoke about the importance of “regular check-ins.” About ensuring there was “never a void in communication.” A man managing a situation, which is a different thing from leading one, and if he knows the difference, he has chosen not to mention it. Every Essendon supporter who has sat through the last twenty-odd years knows exactly what that distinction means, even if nobody at the club will say it out loud.

 

And then, in Round 2, Essendon lost to Port Adelaide by ten goals.

 

Matthew Lloyd said it plain: no passion, no intent. Lloyd, their greatest modern-day forward, felt no particular need to protect the club’s feelings. Because sixty-three points doesn’t leave much room for diplomacy, or indeed for any of the other things Brad Scott likes to talk about.

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Here is what I expected to feel watching all of this: satisfied. But it’s curdled.

 

This is the club whose 1993 flag sits in the memory like a bad debt. This is the club whose ASADA-era self-pity was so comprehensive, so baroque in its self-regard, that it almost warranted a kind of aesthetic respect. Those 85,000 members who renew every year — real people, it should be said, who love their club the way we love ours  — deserve better than what they are being handed.

 

What they are getting instead is a captain who would rather be somewhere else, a coach speaking the language of workplace mediation, and a scoreline that tells you, before the season has properly drawn breath, that this year will look like the last one.

 

In 2023 Carlton beat Melbourne in a semi-final by two points, Blake Acres marking and goaling with less than a minute left, the MCG doing what the MCG only does a handful of times in a generation — convincing 96,000 people simultaneously that concrete can move. For a few minutes the MCG belonged entirely to the present tense. It was, for longer than expected, entirely sufficient.

 

The Essendon thought came later. To want them to be the Essendon that made 1999 mean something. To want the argument to resume.

 

Instead, they have not won a final since John Howard was in the Lodge.

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Rabbit at Rest is the last in John Updike’s series following Harry Angstrom — a man whose identity was formed entirely at a moment of peak performance, who spends the rest of his life at an unresolvable distance from who he was then. He cannot go back. He cannot stop measuring. By the end, the rest in the title is not a pause. It is a verdict.

 

Klosterman understands this. Updike understood it before him. Anyone who has watched a once-great sporting institution slowly make peace with its own diminishment understands it: the loss of a proper villain is not a neutral event. It doesn’t just diminish the heel. It diminishes the shape of the whole story.

 

Merrett will leave. He tried once and the door held. It won’t hold a second time, and most people know this, including, you suspect, the people at the club whose job it is to pretend otherwise. The members will renew regardless — there is something genuinely honourable in that, even if the club has not recently done much to earn it. Brad Scott will speak about resilience and process. Port Adelaide will not be the last team to beat them by sixty points.

 

The stands of the MCG in 1999 were filled with Carlton supporters who understood exactly what the one-point win meant, and why it needed Essendon to mean as much as it did.

 

In a way, he still does. Essendon’s Round 2 thrashing is not a result as much as it is an answer to a question nobody wanted to ask. And the rest, for Essendon — the long, unhurried rest — is no longer a pause between acts. It is the condition they have settled into without quite deciding to, the thing they have become without noticing the moment they became it.

 

The problem — the real one, the one that sits under all of this — is that they don’t appear to know the difference anymore.

 

 

More from The People’s Elbow can be read Here.

 

 

 

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