choconmientay
13-10-2016, 12:34 PM
Slow news footy season, so enjoy what ever coming towards us :)
LINK (http://www.theroar.com.au/2016/10/13/the-exorcists-how-the-western-bulldogs-beat-history/)By Jay Croucher
There are five minutes left in the grand final. The Western Bulldogs lead by nine points. Josh Kennedy, the Bulldogs’ tormentor all day, delivers an impossibly quick no-look handball into the path of Lance Franklin, whose momentum in the game is building. Buddy wheels around onto his left – a sentence and an image that has been a preface to heartache for so many teams over the years – and looks to burst through the centre square and drive the Swans forward again. But before he can unload, Dale Morris, the man with a broken back, brings him down from behind. Holding the ball.
The ball spills, and Tom Boyd, so often a figure burdened by expectation but today impelled by it, decides not to wait but instead to win the grand final.
He booms a kick from inside the centre square and the ball bounces towards the left of the goalmouth. It’s a kick that normally continues on its trajectory left and trickles through for a behind. But, like the ball that Stephen Milne is still watching, it takes an unlikely turn right, going through the goal as if the collective will of a nation was pursing its lips and blowing it through. The Bulldogs win the premiership.
Bulldogs fans, football fans, and the neutrals caught up in the cinema of it all are left to ponder a single question: Is this real life? And the answer is no. It’s something better.
Sixty-two years of history led up to Morris’s tackle, Boyd’s kick and the Bulldogs’ bounce. Sixty-two years of misery told every Bulldogs fan that the ball was going to bounce left. For so long, failure was a desert, and hope was a series of poisoned oases.
Whether they were the Footscray Football Club or the Western Bulldogs it didn’t matter – for more than half a century the team’s lone identity was failure. After losing the 1961 grand final, from 1962 to 1996 the Dogs won as many wooden spoons and they did finals: two. The late 90s produced the most successful Bulldogs teams since the early 50s, but all that meant was seven finals – only two of them victories. Of the five losses, the two most crippling both came against Adelaide in the ’97 and ’98 preliminary finals, the former, a two-point defeat, coming to symbolise the Bulldogs’ misfortune.
That team, led by Terry Wallace and full of so many players that Bulldogs fans still hold dear to their hearts – Chris Grant, Tony Liberatore, Scott West, Scott Wynd, Rohan Smith and Brad Johnson – faded away innocuously like the half-century of Bulldogs teams before them.
And really, ‘innocuous’ is the word that came to define the Dogs. Along with the Saints, they were every Victorian’s second club, and the adoption of a second club is always the greatest insult you can heave at them. The Dogs were toothless, a punch line to most, cute puppies to nurse and tease, bearing little resemblance to the fearsome animals from which they took their moniker. A poor club with few members, the Dogs had to demean themselves to stay afloat. They played ‘home’ games that defied geography in Darwin, and most memorably against Sydney in Canberra. The Bulldogs struggled to take the field and when they did they struggled even more – they were the teenager who has to ask his parents for lunch money and then gets it stolen the moment he steps outside.
And more than anything, the Bulldogs lost. They lost games, seasons and players, they lost the competition’s respect, and more than anything, they lost hope. Losing was a terminal disease, a vicious cycle perpetuated by poor management, poor facilities and poor drafting (top ten picks at the start of the 2000s were wasted on the likes of Jordan McMahon, Sam Power, Tim Walsh and Tom Williams). Between 1963 and 2005 they produced just 13 seasons with more wins than losses. When a culture of losing runs so deep in a club it becomes more than expectation – it crosses into inevitability.
Along with the Saints, they were every Victorian’s second club, and the adoption of a second club is always the greatest insult you can heave at them.
Why did Tony Liberatore’s match-sealing goal get called a behind in the ’97 preliminary final? Why did Chris Grant poll the most votes in the Brownlow medal that same year when he was ineligible?
The same simple reason: because bad things happen to the Bulldogs.
When Rodney Eade came on board in 2005, a scent of hope came with him. Eade never won a premiership at Sydney, but he took them to a grand final, and into September in five of his seven seasons there. In a similar vein to Mick Malthouse arriving at Collingwood in 1999, Eade brought with him a credibility that the Bulldogs had long lacked.
Fortunes immediately turned. The Dogs improved by six wins in Eade’s first year at the helm. The next year they won their first final since 1998, demolishing the favoured Magpies in front of 84,000 people, and allowing Rohan Smith a chance to play a 300th game the following week, his last. They lost that game in Perth to the eventual premiers West Coast, but they’d already exceeded expectations. If they’d ever been ‘there’ in the first place, after 2006 you could have said that the Dogs were ‘back’.
Injuries led to a lost year in 2007, but 2008 saw the Bulldogs finally rise back into contention for the first time in a decade. They had a core that had grown ripe, a depth in quality players, names like Adam Cooney, Ryan Griffen, Matthew Boyd, Dale Morris, Shaun Higgins, Will Minson, Robert Murphy, Brad Johnson, Brian Lake and Daniel Cross. There were no superstars – as much as a medal around Cooney’s neck might have suggested otherwise – but the Dogs were deep in talent and played a free-flowing attacking style that was easy on the eye. When they were on, they were ON, blitzing teams with quick ball movement and sharp foot skills. The problem was they could never find that on switch in preliminary finals.
http://cdn0.theroar.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rod-Eade-428x292.jpg
Former Bulldogs coach Rodney Eade.
They fell short in the penultimate week of the season in ’08, ’09 and ’10, never able to clear the proverbial hump. A hump that hadn’t been cleared since 1961, and with each finals loss grew more and more imposing. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of those three consecutive preliminary final losses is that the Bulldogs had no excuses. There wasn’t some catastrophic injury they could point to or any controversial umpiring decision. There was no sign that fate was conspiring against them. They just weren’t good enough. Lament is often a warm blanket for fans to tuck themselves into, but Eade’s Dogs couldn’t even offer that. Supporters were just left out on the cold, like they had been since 1954.
As fans, often we most want a premiership not so much for catharsis, but simply for closure. We want to remember our favourite players as ones that went all the way. Bulldogs fans will think of the way Scott West threw himself into contests to extract the ball, the way Luke Darcy rose above them to grip it, and the way Brad Johnson cheekily grinned after goals, and there will be something missing. The lack of a full stop at the end of the memory. They never got to see them on the dais.
So many teams have dynasties of ‘almost’. They build and build and then rise into the finals but never go all the way. They convince you that the year before was a building block for the year after, the year that finally the breaks will go your team’s way, and as a collective the players will discover the ethereal intangible that separates the champions from the very good.
They make you believe that Nick Riewoldt’s tears of sorrow are just a preface to tears of joy, that Nat Fyfe’s yips in front of goal are only sewing the seeds for a full circle redemption story, and that the awkward of image of Nathan Buckley or Gary Ablett Sr. standing alone with a medal around their neck will soon be replaced by the more fulfilling one of them jumping up and down with 21 medal-bearing teammates.
But, of course, it so rarely goes like that. In the AFL, on the purest level, you’re 94% assured of disappointment at the end of a season. Only one team is able to look back on a year with comforting finality – everyone else is building for the year after. Building and building. After more than half a century, the Bulldogs still didn’t have a home.
The Dogs entered 2010 as a popular premiership fancy. They’d come so close in 2009, the closest they would come over that teasing three-year stretch, denied at the death by a Nick Riewoldt toe-poke at the tip of the goal square. They’d recruited Barry Hall in the off-season, their first commanding tall forward presence in years. The last weakness on the team had been addressed – there would be no more of this Mitch Hahn nonsense – and 2010 would be the year they’d finally break the drought.
The other losing preliminary finalist from the year before, though, had also shored up its key weakness with a tall Sydney recruit. Collingwood had added ruckman Darren Jolly, and Jolly was instrumental in their run to the flag in 2010. The Magpies beat the favoured Bulldogs in round one that year by six goals at Etihad, the Bulldogs’ home, to set the tone for both of their seasons. They beat them again in the qualifying final, a 62-point hammering that flattered the Bulldogs. Being at the MCG that night, it was a loss that felt like a funeral.
There was one moment in particular that painted the Bulldogs’ sad reality. With the margin already at fifty points and just minutes remaining, Alan Didak ran onto a Jarryd Blair pass in the left forward pocket, Tim Callan nipping at his heels. The ball bounced in front of Didak and he playfully tapped it to himself, turning Callan inside out and leaving him for dead the moment he gathered full control. He was in the wrong pocket for his left boot, pressed hard up against the boundary, so Didak made the token gesture of looking inboard. When there was no one on, he did what it seemed like he’d intended to do from the time he first saw the ball sail in his direction. Without ever breaking stride, he kicked a running left-footed check-side goal from close to the most impossible angle on the ground. Didak turned to the crowd with an expressionless face to smugly celebrate, using every ounce of energy in his body to try and maintain an indifferent exterior. Poor Tim Callan was left watching, his hands on his head, pondering the questions ‘how?’, ‘why?’, and ‘how?’ again.
They beat them again in the qualifying final, a 62-point hammering that flattered the Bulldogs. Being at the MCG that night, it was a loss that felt like a funeral.
The Bulldogs were always left watching, just like Callan. They were always a part of another team’s story, the unwitting subject to another team’s brilliance. The competition, the narrative, was never their own.
The Dogs limped into another preliminary final that year and then fell to the Saints again, in a 24-point defeat that was never that close. The Bulldogs were tired, they were growing old, and their final six weeks of the season, which included comprehensive defeats at the hands of the three other teams they’d shared the top four with in 2009 and 2010 (the 101-point loss to Geelong especially galling), felt like a prelude to heavier pain to come. And come it did. But this time, for the first time, the rebuild would be different.
The bottom fell out for the Bulldogs in 2011 and Eade was sacked mid-season. Brendan McCartney replaced him in 2012, spending three years at the helm and never finishing higher than 14th. Under McCartney, the Dogs commenced an old-fashioned tear it down and start again from scratch rebuild. There would be no Jason Akermanis shortcuts this time.
The old guard was slowly phased out. Brad Johnson, who could barely walk by the end of it all, retired at the end of 2010, and Nathan Eagleton and Mitch Hahn followed suit. Barry Hall, Lindsay Gilbee, Ryan Hargrave and Daniels Cross and Giansiracusa all played their last games under McCartney.
But these old stalwarts were quietly being replaced by young, future heroes. After the 2010 defeat to the Saints, for all intents and purposes the real end of the Rodney Eade era, the Dogs, for so long victims of poor choices and bad luck in the draft, started to reverse their fortunes.
http://cdn0.theroar.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Tom-Boyd-428x292.jpg
Tom Boyd chases a rogue footy
n the 2010 off-season they used father/son picks on Mitch Wallis and Tom Liberatore, two hard, in-and-under midfielders. They also went to the rookie draft and put two unheralded players with pace to burn on their list – their names were Luke Dahlhaus and Jason Johannisen.
The following year they used their first round pick on goal-sneak Clay Smith, took a chance on mature-aged VFL player Tory Dickson in the third round, and picked up Lin Jong, Tom Campbell and Jack Redpath in the rookie draft.
LINK (http://www.theroar.com.au/2016/10/13/the-exorcists-how-the-western-bulldogs-beat-history/)By Jay Croucher
There are five minutes left in the grand final. The Western Bulldogs lead by nine points. Josh Kennedy, the Bulldogs’ tormentor all day, delivers an impossibly quick no-look handball into the path of Lance Franklin, whose momentum in the game is building. Buddy wheels around onto his left – a sentence and an image that has been a preface to heartache for so many teams over the years – and looks to burst through the centre square and drive the Swans forward again. But before he can unload, Dale Morris, the man with a broken back, brings him down from behind. Holding the ball.
The ball spills, and Tom Boyd, so often a figure burdened by expectation but today impelled by it, decides not to wait but instead to win the grand final.
He booms a kick from inside the centre square and the ball bounces towards the left of the goalmouth. It’s a kick that normally continues on its trajectory left and trickles through for a behind. But, like the ball that Stephen Milne is still watching, it takes an unlikely turn right, going through the goal as if the collective will of a nation was pursing its lips and blowing it through. The Bulldogs win the premiership.
Bulldogs fans, football fans, and the neutrals caught up in the cinema of it all are left to ponder a single question: Is this real life? And the answer is no. It’s something better.
Sixty-two years of history led up to Morris’s tackle, Boyd’s kick and the Bulldogs’ bounce. Sixty-two years of misery told every Bulldogs fan that the ball was going to bounce left. For so long, failure was a desert, and hope was a series of poisoned oases.
Whether they were the Footscray Football Club or the Western Bulldogs it didn’t matter – for more than half a century the team’s lone identity was failure. After losing the 1961 grand final, from 1962 to 1996 the Dogs won as many wooden spoons and they did finals: two. The late 90s produced the most successful Bulldogs teams since the early 50s, but all that meant was seven finals – only two of them victories. Of the five losses, the two most crippling both came against Adelaide in the ’97 and ’98 preliminary finals, the former, a two-point defeat, coming to symbolise the Bulldogs’ misfortune.
That team, led by Terry Wallace and full of so many players that Bulldogs fans still hold dear to their hearts – Chris Grant, Tony Liberatore, Scott West, Scott Wynd, Rohan Smith and Brad Johnson – faded away innocuously like the half-century of Bulldogs teams before them.
And really, ‘innocuous’ is the word that came to define the Dogs. Along with the Saints, they were every Victorian’s second club, and the adoption of a second club is always the greatest insult you can heave at them. The Dogs were toothless, a punch line to most, cute puppies to nurse and tease, bearing little resemblance to the fearsome animals from which they took their moniker. A poor club with few members, the Dogs had to demean themselves to stay afloat. They played ‘home’ games that defied geography in Darwin, and most memorably against Sydney in Canberra. The Bulldogs struggled to take the field and when they did they struggled even more – they were the teenager who has to ask his parents for lunch money and then gets it stolen the moment he steps outside.
And more than anything, the Bulldogs lost. They lost games, seasons and players, they lost the competition’s respect, and more than anything, they lost hope. Losing was a terminal disease, a vicious cycle perpetuated by poor management, poor facilities and poor drafting (top ten picks at the start of the 2000s were wasted on the likes of Jordan McMahon, Sam Power, Tim Walsh and Tom Williams). Between 1963 and 2005 they produced just 13 seasons with more wins than losses. When a culture of losing runs so deep in a club it becomes more than expectation – it crosses into inevitability.
Along with the Saints, they were every Victorian’s second club, and the adoption of a second club is always the greatest insult you can heave at them.
Why did Tony Liberatore’s match-sealing goal get called a behind in the ’97 preliminary final? Why did Chris Grant poll the most votes in the Brownlow medal that same year when he was ineligible?
The same simple reason: because bad things happen to the Bulldogs.
When Rodney Eade came on board in 2005, a scent of hope came with him. Eade never won a premiership at Sydney, but he took them to a grand final, and into September in five of his seven seasons there. In a similar vein to Mick Malthouse arriving at Collingwood in 1999, Eade brought with him a credibility that the Bulldogs had long lacked.
Fortunes immediately turned. The Dogs improved by six wins in Eade’s first year at the helm. The next year they won their first final since 1998, demolishing the favoured Magpies in front of 84,000 people, and allowing Rohan Smith a chance to play a 300th game the following week, his last. They lost that game in Perth to the eventual premiers West Coast, but they’d already exceeded expectations. If they’d ever been ‘there’ in the first place, after 2006 you could have said that the Dogs were ‘back’.
Injuries led to a lost year in 2007, but 2008 saw the Bulldogs finally rise back into contention for the first time in a decade. They had a core that had grown ripe, a depth in quality players, names like Adam Cooney, Ryan Griffen, Matthew Boyd, Dale Morris, Shaun Higgins, Will Minson, Robert Murphy, Brad Johnson, Brian Lake and Daniel Cross. There were no superstars – as much as a medal around Cooney’s neck might have suggested otherwise – but the Dogs were deep in talent and played a free-flowing attacking style that was easy on the eye. When they were on, they were ON, blitzing teams with quick ball movement and sharp foot skills. The problem was they could never find that on switch in preliminary finals.
http://cdn0.theroar.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rod-Eade-428x292.jpg
Former Bulldogs coach Rodney Eade.
They fell short in the penultimate week of the season in ’08, ’09 and ’10, never able to clear the proverbial hump. A hump that hadn’t been cleared since 1961, and with each finals loss grew more and more imposing. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of those three consecutive preliminary final losses is that the Bulldogs had no excuses. There wasn’t some catastrophic injury they could point to or any controversial umpiring decision. There was no sign that fate was conspiring against them. They just weren’t good enough. Lament is often a warm blanket for fans to tuck themselves into, but Eade’s Dogs couldn’t even offer that. Supporters were just left out on the cold, like they had been since 1954.
As fans, often we most want a premiership not so much for catharsis, but simply for closure. We want to remember our favourite players as ones that went all the way. Bulldogs fans will think of the way Scott West threw himself into contests to extract the ball, the way Luke Darcy rose above them to grip it, and the way Brad Johnson cheekily grinned after goals, and there will be something missing. The lack of a full stop at the end of the memory. They never got to see them on the dais.
So many teams have dynasties of ‘almost’. They build and build and then rise into the finals but never go all the way. They convince you that the year before was a building block for the year after, the year that finally the breaks will go your team’s way, and as a collective the players will discover the ethereal intangible that separates the champions from the very good.
They make you believe that Nick Riewoldt’s tears of sorrow are just a preface to tears of joy, that Nat Fyfe’s yips in front of goal are only sewing the seeds for a full circle redemption story, and that the awkward of image of Nathan Buckley or Gary Ablett Sr. standing alone with a medal around their neck will soon be replaced by the more fulfilling one of them jumping up and down with 21 medal-bearing teammates.
But, of course, it so rarely goes like that. In the AFL, on the purest level, you’re 94% assured of disappointment at the end of a season. Only one team is able to look back on a year with comforting finality – everyone else is building for the year after. Building and building. After more than half a century, the Bulldogs still didn’t have a home.
The Dogs entered 2010 as a popular premiership fancy. They’d come so close in 2009, the closest they would come over that teasing three-year stretch, denied at the death by a Nick Riewoldt toe-poke at the tip of the goal square. They’d recruited Barry Hall in the off-season, their first commanding tall forward presence in years. The last weakness on the team had been addressed – there would be no more of this Mitch Hahn nonsense – and 2010 would be the year they’d finally break the drought.
The other losing preliminary finalist from the year before, though, had also shored up its key weakness with a tall Sydney recruit. Collingwood had added ruckman Darren Jolly, and Jolly was instrumental in their run to the flag in 2010. The Magpies beat the favoured Bulldogs in round one that year by six goals at Etihad, the Bulldogs’ home, to set the tone for both of their seasons. They beat them again in the qualifying final, a 62-point hammering that flattered the Bulldogs. Being at the MCG that night, it was a loss that felt like a funeral.
There was one moment in particular that painted the Bulldogs’ sad reality. With the margin already at fifty points and just minutes remaining, Alan Didak ran onto a Jarryd Blair pass in the left forward pocket, Tim Callan nipping at his heels. The ball bounced in front of Didak and he playfully tapped it to himself, turning Callan inside out and leaving him for dead the moment he gathered full control. He was in the wrong pocket for his left boot, pressed hard up against the boundary, so Didak made the token gesture of looking inboard. When there was no one on, he did what it seemed like he’d intended to do from the time he first saw the ball sail in his direction. Without ever breaking stride, he kicked a running left-footed check-side goal from close to the most impossible angle on the ground. Didak turned to the crowd with an expressionless face to smugly celebrate, using every ounce of energy in his body to try and maintain an indifferent exterior. Poor Tim Callan was left watching, his hands on his head, pondering the questions ‘how?’, ‘why?’, and ‘how?’ again.
They beat them again in the qualifying final, a 62-point hammering that flattered the Bulldogs. Being at the MCG that night, it was a loss that felt like a funeral.
The Bulldogs were always left watching, just like Callan. They were always a part of another team’s story, the unwitting subject to another team’s brilliance. The competition, the narrative, was never their own.
The Dogs limped into another preliminary final that year and then fell to the Saints again, in a 24-point defeat that was never that close. The Bulldogs were tired, they were growing old, and their final six weeks of the season, which included comprehensive defeats at the hands of the three other teams they’d shared the top four with in 2009 and 2010 (the 101-point loss to Geelong especially galling), felt like a prelude to heavier pain to come. And come it did. But this time, for the first time, the rebuild would be different.
The bottom fell out for the Bulldogs in 2011 and Eade was sacked mid-season. Brendan McCartney replaced him in 2012, spending three years at the helm and never finishing higher than 14th. Under McCartney, the Dogs commenced an old-fashioned tear it down and start again from scratch rebuild. There would be no Jason Akermanis shortcuts this time.
The old guard was slowly phased out. Brad Johnson, who could barely walk by the end of it all, retired at the end of 2010, and Nathan Eagleton and Mitch Hahn followed suit. Barry Hall, Lindsay Gilbee, Ryan Hargrave and Daniels Cross and Giansiracusa all played their last games under McCartney.
But these old stalwarts were quietly being replaced by young, future heroes. After the 2010 defeat to the Saints, for all intents and purposes the real end of the Rodney Eade era, the Dogs, for so long victims of poor choices and bad luck in the draft, started to reverse their fortunes.
http://cdn0.theroar.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Tom-Boyd-428x292.jpg
Tom Boyd chases a rogue footy
n the 2010 off-season they used father/son picks on Mitch Wallis and Tom Liberatore, two hard, in-and-under midfielders. They also went to the rookie draft and put two unheralded players with pace to burn on their list – their names were Luke Dahlhaus and Jason Johannisen.
The following year they used their first round pick on goal-sneak Clay Smith, took a chance on mature-aged VFL player Tory Dickson in the third round, and picked up Lin Jong, Tom Campbell and Jack Redpath in the rookie draft.