[Originally written for The Roar, May 1, 2017 - Australian Football magazine section]
One of my
children’s favorite things to tease me about, as an American with a footy
addiction, is that because of the time zone difference, I enjoy my Saturday
afternoon games on Friday night, for example. Therefore, I’m listening to news from the future! (“The world can’t end
tonight – Dad’s already listening to tomorrow.”)
So, understand that when I tell you
I was listening to the end of two dynasties simultaneously on Friday night,
I’m referring to the events at the University of Tasmania and the MCG on Saturday
afternoon, local time.
To witness the end of a dynasty is a
rare thing, because by definition dynasties themselves are rare. Having two clubs
that you could consider simultaneous dynasties requires not only that
the teams be unusually dominant over a period of five or ten years, but that they
both win multiple titles despite the other team’s similar success.
Hawthorn won three consecutive
titles in 2013-15, a fourth back in 2007, and made finals in nine of the last
ten years, including being top three the last six years straight. Sydney made
finals in 13 of the last 14 years, although they won just two titles in that
time. They’ve also been top four with a double chance each of the last five
years, and made grand finals in three of those five years. Throw Geelong in
there, whose record over the last ten years is similar, and there are arguably three
semi-dynasties in the 2010s in the AFL.
And
on Friday night, two of those dynasties came crashing down at the same time, on
competing channels.
Both teams started the season 0-4,
to everyone’s surprise, but there was still hope. The Hawks rose from the dead
in Round 5, wiping out finalist West Coast by fifty points while featuring most
of the premiership stars, and the obituaries were put on hold for a few days.
Meanwhile, fixture watchers looked at rounds 6-10 for the Swans, projected five
easy wins, and reminded us that the one team with a track record of rising from
the dead to reach finals was Sydney. So as late as Friday (morning, for me),
there was still life in those two cadavers. “They’ll get better! They may not
make it to the top 8, but they’re still decent!”
And then, Round Six happened.
The Hawthorn/St. Kilda game began at
9:45 pm Friday night in my Idaho time zone in the US. As usual, I put my kids
to bed, settled in at my computer, and pulled up the broadcast on one screen,
knowing the Sydney rout of Carlton would be available a half hour later. Cyril
Rioli was out, but c’mon: the Hawks never
lose in Launceston! The Saints started out well, but they weren’t putting the
Hawks away when they had their chances: even leading 15-5 in the inside 50
count, they were only up 3.5 to 2.1. Then the Josh Bruce goal at the halftime
siren put them up double, 44-22, and the CrownBet odds started creeping higher
and higher.
Meanwhile, Sydney was struggling to impart
their obvious superiority over the youngsters of Carlton, even losing the lead
briefly in the second, before taking a slim eight-point lead into the long
break. It was easy to blame the wet conditions, the kind that allows underdogs
to stay close and the conditions that allowed the Blues their only win in round
three.
As the final hour of Friday came and
went, so did the chances of the two old powerhouses. First, we watched Hawthorn
do something unbelievable against St. Kilda in the third: they gave up. The phrase “scored at will” was invented for St.
Kilda’s third quarter. With just 18 inside-50s, they scored 8.5.53, to the
one-goal-one by the Hawks, and yet, they also doubled the Hawks’
tackle count, 16-8. The poor announcers struggled mightily to find some
parallel for the total surrender Hawthorn displayed on their happy hunting
grounds in Tasmania.
Had
they had the Swans broadcast on in the booth, they would have found their
parallel: Sydney surrendered five straight goals to a team they’d been
favored to beat by 37 points…to a team Port had just defeated by ninety…to a
team which would set a new high score for the season by the end of the night.
They closed the lead to nine with a quarter to go, and we foolishly thought
they would still reel in the ‘obviously inferior’ Carlton team.
Back on the island, the last death
spasms ran through the muscles of the Hawks: Jarryd Roughhead and Luke Breust
put fourteen points on the board to start the fourth, at the same moment Sydney
was closing to nine.
Let the record show
that at approximately 15:30 local time on Saturday afternoon, April 29th,
2017, both franchise dynasties breathed their last.
Because after that, Hawthorn gave up
five more goals, every one easier than the last, and lost by an astonishing 75
points to a team they were favored to beat. Meanwhile, Sydney allowed the Blues
to rip off the first three goals to start the fourth, and the Swans never
really threatened after that – unless you count the ghosts of Bloods Past that
the announcers and Sydney fans kept trying to invoke to make us feel that this
team was in some way related to those championship clubs.
But
they’re not. They have some of the same players, but the page has turned. Carlton,
a six-to-seven goal underdog who hadn’t beaten Sydney since 2011, won by 19.
All
dynasties die eventually.
The UCLA men’s college basketball dynasty ended when their coach retired. The
Soviet hockey team and the American basketball team stopped winning every gold
medal when their own internal systems changed, and the rest of the world caught
up. The New York Yankees stopped winning every other World Series after 1964.
And someday, the University of
Connecticut will stop being the bellcow of women’s basketball teams, the New
England Patriots will lose both coach Bill Belechick and quarterback Tom Brady
and return to being ordinary, and the Perth Wildcats will not make the
NBL finals.
What was so amazing
was to watch both obituaries write themselves simultaneously. The only two examples I could come
up with of something close to “simultaneous dynasty death” were both much more
predictable than this one, and neither were all that “together”.
In
1991, in our stateside National Basketball Association, the Los Angeles Lakers
and Boston Celtics had dominated the NBA for a decade behind three or four star
players, but in particular the Lakers’ Magic Johnson and the Celtics’ Larry
Bird, rivals since the famous 1979 NCAA college basketball title game they
first met in. But Bird retired that year, his team having drifted from the top
rung and not made finals for a couple of years, and Magic’s sudden retirement
because of his HIV-positive status left the Lakers in a lurch, and they didn’t
return to the finals until the days of Kobe and Shaq, once Michael Jordan
retired. The two teams didn’t collapse at the same time, or even the same year.
The
other possibility might be in Major League Baseball, where the “Big Red Machine”
of the Cincinnati Reds dominated the National League while the eccentric
Oakland A’s dominated the American League during the same time period:
1970-1976. In that run, the Reds won five division titles, including four
league championships and consecutive World Series titles in 1975-76. The A’s
won five straight division titles, from 1971-75, and three straight World
Series titles from 1972-74. But after their division title and failure to
advance beyond the league championship series (not to mention because their
owner at the time was a notorious skinflint), they traded away significant
talent and fell from the ranks of the great teams, pre-empting the demise of
the Reds by a couple of years.
So what we witnessed
this weekend was unprecedented.
The only way to “top” it? If Geelong’s
loss to Collingwood ends up being the first of, say, a seventeen game losing
streak to end the season…
While on these Weekly
Wanderings, it was
hard not to notice the common thread between the two teams: complete collapses
on defense. By the second half of each game, Hawthorn and Sydney were both
engaged in the finger-pointing and the saving-energy for offense attitude that
engulfs losing teams. Neither club’s defense will improve until the players get
out of their current “me first” mode and return to the “we” attitudes
that were evident in the classic Giants/Bulldogs game the night before. (Or, in my case, at 4 a.m. on Friday
morning. And worth every moment of lost sleep!)
No comments:
Post a Comment