Almanac Footy – The 2021 AFL Grand Final revisited: Hump that coffin up round one more bend

 

 

 

I got the houndog sittin’ on the side of the road

Houndog sittin’ on the side of the road

Houndog sittin’ on the side of the highway blues

Yeah the highway blues

• Cold Chisel – Houndog

 

The pandemic sent the Western Bulldogs on the road. They rode the airwaves and the highways during the finals. Tasmania. Brisbane. Adelaide and Perth. In and out of aeroplanes and hotels. In an out of quarantine. Avoiding the pandemic on the way to the Grand Final.

 

Stoic and assured. The unfashionable, original junkyard dogs. Prowling the country, licking their wounds and forever moving. Underdogs, chasing their tails in pursuit of glory.

 

Hump that coffin up round one more bend.

If your head needs a bandage, try a roadhouse open sandwich.

Dodge the waitress and hit the road again.

 

Hit the road. Conservative estimates suggested they travelled 6,000 kilometres on route to the Grand Final. Those prone to hyperbole said it was around 10,000 kilometres.

 

Regardless of the distance and travails, they arrived in Perth for another period of quarantine. Never questioning. Barely complaining. Confined like a junkyard dog and stalking for a fight.

 

I got dog’s disease and asphalt on my shoes

 

Melbourne had their own much shorter path – Melbourne to Adelaide to Perth, and they endured the same lockup. Hotel to hotel they went, technically free but also enchained by quarantine. Like a prison gang clearing trees or collecting rubbish, they were herded around under the watchful eye of authorities ready to pull the trigger for any infraction.

 

Not since 1954 has a Grand Final featured Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs, formerly and infinitely better known as Footscray. Unusually, the Grand Final had no villains. No team for the neutral fan to hate. Just two teams who no one would begrudge a premiership.

 

Sentiment said Melbourne would add to their 12 premierships. The romantics hoped the Bulldogs would claim their third premiership. By disregarding the sentiment and premiership drought – 57 years for Melbourne – the romantics were baying for that insatiable glory, but the hard money and hard-headed realists said Melbourne would win.

 

The first quarter proved the layoff for Melbourne, with one game in a month, was no issue. A comfortable lead, 21 points, could’ve been more. But the Bulldogs pounced in the second term, the proverbial pack mentality, with six goals to one.

 

Midway through the third quarter, it was all there for the Western Bulldogs. They’d wrested the momentum back from a wretched first quarter, and kicked out to a 19-point lead. The underdogs were snarling into an upset Grand Final win.

 

For a quarter and a half, speculative handballs hit the target. Tackles, like a dog going for the throat, stuck. Marks in packs were clunked and half-chances in front of goal went through. The Bulldogs were putting on a show befitting their hulking, menacing mascot.

 

Melbourne, the blue-chip favourites, were perhaps a goal away from wilting at serious scoreboard pressure. The Bulldogs needed one more goal from a scrag up forward to capitalise on their momentum.

 

Melbourne needed something demonic to turn the margin backwards. Then it happened. Just like a click of the fingers, Melbourne flicked the switch. Burswood Stadium, suddenly, was shrouded in a devilish force that propelled the players into contests, and saw them emerge unscathed, as if they were playing the game in their minds.

 

But none of the players would’ve dreamed of the outcome. Victory, certainly, but not like that. Not like it’d never been done before. Not like flicking the switch and expecting it to work.

 

It worked.

 

And in the end

It’s the motion is its own reward

It’s just the motion

 

In the frantic minutes before the last change, Melbourne killed the contest with a bevy of goals, including three in the last minute.

 

Halt the motion for a couple of minutes and the Bulldogs might’ve gone in at the last change a goal behind, maybe two. With half a chance. But 24 points down at the last change, the game was over. The motion was against them, history too. Since 1984, only Essendon and Geelong (2009) have trailed at three-quarter time and won a Grand Final.

 

Melbourne couldn’t lose. One more quarter, and they were bringing the premiership cup home.

 

Fifty miles to go and I’ll be home

I’ll be home

 

The motion was breath-taking. Sixteen goals to one in 45 minutes of football, or 100 points to seven. A 19 point deficit to a 74 point win. Melbourne hit the Bulldogs like an avalanche. A tsunami. A bomb. It was an assassination of a football team, just like pulling the trigger.

 

Undoubtedly, the Bulldogs players and supporters will never watch a replay of the game. It’s understandable, but they will never relive the sheer brilliance, the scintillating display of football. That motion was jaw-dropping, compelling football never seen before in a Grand Final.

 

Twelve unanswered goals either side of three quarter time, and sixteen goals to one when the siren mercifully killed what had once been a contest.

 

It had been there for the Bulldogs midway through the third quarter.

 

It seemed that, in a breath, it was gone.

 

This wasn’t those one-sided Grand Finals of 1994 or 1995, or 2000. The closest resemblance takes us back to 2007, when Geelong humiliated Port Adelaide by 119 points. That game, however, was done as a contest at quarter time.

 

This Grand Final wasn’t. The Bulldogs had the motion, a 19 point lead and gave it up. They became ghosts, players who once were there in a contest, but were now like smoke to be wafted away by the mechanical breeze blowing from the lungs of Melbourne’s manic machine.

 

Pushed aside. Disregarded and beaten up. Conceding nine goals in the last quarter.

 

At game’s end, amid the celebration of rabid Melbourne players, the Bulldogs lurked in the background like props for the glory of the stars. 57 years of agony for long-suffering Melbourne supporters had been wiped away like a town at the base of an erupting volcano.

 

Football legend Graham Cornes once told me you get what you deserve in footy. That statement cannot be argued with but, as Marcus Bontempelli stepped onto the dais to deliver his vanquished speech, I wondered what the Bulldogs had done to deserve a 74 point loss.

 

They were expected to lose. Not by 74 points, mind you. Not like that. Not like destruction.

 

Not sixteen goals in a quarter and a half of football.

 

At the end of any Grand Final, regardless of the result, it is impossible not to feel immense sympathy for the vanquished. The immediate question, how can they rebound, is impossible to answer.

 

The sport psychologists will need to nurture the players. Not to forget, but to recover. Don’t be defined by defeat. Be defined by your response. Figure out how it happened.

 

How…

 

Back in 2015, I interviewed Rachael Jones, a sport psychologist from Mental Notes Consulting. We discussed a sudden decrease in output, and the mental scars that linger after a shattering loss. Jones explained how the mind rules the body, regardless of the situation. Imagination, good or otherwise, can interfere with the game plan.

 

‘Sometimes elite athletes focus on the expected outcome rather than actions required to get there,’ Jones said.

 

With a 19 point lead, the Bulldogs players may have started fantasising about victory, rather than the next contest. And when things went awry, they started fearing defeat.

 

‘Your body follows your mind and will go wherever your mind is focused,’ she said. ‘When you see mistakes creep in, there’s that dread, don’t pass it to me. You don’t want the ball because you don’t want to let down your teammates.’

 

That is exactly what happened when Melbourne flicked the switch. In half a quarter, the turnaround was 43 points. And Melbourne rolled on, half a second ahead of the Bulldogs, proactive rather than reactive. And the Bulldogs couldn’t react.

 

‘They couldn’t achieve what we call the state of flow,’ Jones said of the pressure.  ‘When everything is automatic you don’t have to think and you feel calm, relaxed and in control.’

 

‘When experienced players struggle under pressure it puts pressure on inexperienced players who don’t handle pressure as well.’

 

A debrief, she said, with the players leading the conversation, is more important.  Luke Beveridge and his coaches can listen to what the players need to talk about, rather than what the coaches want to talk about.

 

‘It will give everyone a sense of closure,’ Jones said.  ‘Then you’re able to move forward.’

 

Find the meaning. Learn from it. Figure out how one of the best teams in the competition fell apart.

 

How it happened can’t be explained beyond the cliché – the better team won. But the how can barely be understood. The scoreboard, the most neutral indicator, tells the story. But the how is the unknown. I still can’t understand it.

 

In the aftermath of the Grand Final, when the disbelief eroded, staunch fans attempted to disassemble the result. Many neutral fans complained about the one-sided nature of the Grand Final, that it wasn’t a classic befitting a Grand Final with a narrower margin.

 

Those complaints are disrespectful to Melbourne, and how they played. This wasn’t a 20 point lead turning in a 74 point win. It was a mid-quarter comeback, from 19 points down.

 

Sixteen goals to one, in a quarter and a half. Twelve consecutive goals in a Grand Final, for the first time in VFL/AFL history.

 

Stunning, compelling and complete football.

 

Making the Grand Final from outside the top four is always difficult. Winning more so. Since the inception of the final eight, only Adelaide (1997-98) and the Bulldogs (2016) have done it. This year, the week off before the Grand Final was meant to remove any bias the Bulldogs would’ve suffered from their travels and travails.

 

It didn’t.

 

Can the Bulldogs bounce back? The mental scars will be vivid. Next year will highlight their response.

 

History suggests it will be difficult. Not many clubs respond well to Grand Final defeat. Since 2000, only West Coast in 2006 and 2018, Geelong in 2009 and Hawthorn in 2013 have won Grand Finals after losing one. West Coast, in 2018, took three years to rebound from the 2015 premiership defeat.

 

The Western Bulldogs need to bury the 2021 Grand Final. But as Don Walker wrote in Houndog, they’re in the middle of nowhere, as they were during the finals.

 

I coulda flown East-West

But the ticket was outta my range

I coulda gone rail

But they said I looked a little strange

The Budget girl’s just got the sack

The interstate bus just breaks my back

I’m sick of getting home

Counting my remaining change

 

If they’re sick of being home, recounting those final 45 minutes, they need to hump that coffin up round one more bend and truly bury it…

 

Postscript:

 

I’ve used excerpts of a song called Houndog by Cold Chisel. It’s a bluesy, ballsy, guttural song about life on the road in the early days of the band. Driven by a foreboding bass beat and Ian Moss’s piercing solos and siren-like riffs, it features Jim Barnes at his jagged, belligerent best. The song is all about lament, and when I saw a coffin on the back of a ute in Banyo, the opening line of Houndog grew apparent. It suited the Bulldogs lament, and their empty trip home.

 

Hump that coffin up round one more bend…

 

 

We’ll do our best to publish two books in the lead-up to Christmas 2021. The Tigers (Covid) Almanac 2020  and the 2021 edition to celebrate the Dees’ magnificent premiership season(title is up for discussion at the moment!). These books will have all the usual features – a game by game account of the Tigers and Demons season – and will also include some of the best Almanac writing from these two Covid winters. Enquiries HERE

 

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