How these blue-collar Hawks outshone big-money Charlie
Sam Mitchell’s Hollywood Hawks have a blue-collar edge.
This Hawthorn team arrived on the scene amid much glitz and glamour but under the MCG’s Thursday night lights they rolled their sleeves up to disarm Sydney’s run-and-gun, box-office game and win by 17 points – 14.15 (99) to 13.4 (82).
The most telling difference came at opposite ends of the ground, the product of the Hawks’ appetite for the contest when the ball was in between these zones.
Jack Gunston, Mabior Chol and Mitch Lewis, whose combined pay packet only just matches Charlie Curnow’s, all played key roles, while the Swans’ high-priced prized recruit had zero impact after two goals in the first term. He touched the ball just once in the second half.
Gunston, a central figure in the Hawthorn teams that broke Sydney hearts in the 2010s, exacted more pain on a new breed of Swans. His fourth goal was the sealer to a win that seemed unlikely early in the third quarter when the Swans broke away to a 20-point lead.
This was a good night for Mitchell and his coaching team. Their job was undoubtedly made easier by the absence of Isaac Heeney and Errol Gulden, but it’s questionable what impact the Swans superstars would have had in the arm wrestle Mitchell created.
After a frenetic first term when 11 goals were scored, the match changed when he threw an extra player behind the ball.
The slower ball movement better suited the Hawks, who had more ways to score because of their dominance of the contested ball. A contested possession count that was in Sydney’s favour by two at half-time blew out to 26 the other way by game’s end, which Swans coach Dean Cox said was a major factor in his team’s defeat.
Through inaccuracy, Hawthorn could not convert their repeat entries inside 50 in the second term but cashed in late as the Swans tired coming off a five-day break.
“If you looked at our GWS game and the Sydney game, and you looked at just intensity around the ball and the speed of the bodies and the pressure that we were able to put on tonight … the difference between those two games was quite significant in how we behaved,” Mitchell said.
“And if we can sustain the type of pressure and intensity that we got tonight, we’ll be a really hard side to beat. But if we drop off, we don’t have to look too far in our rearview mirror to realise how vulnerable we can be.”
The spare player behind the ball was a bold ploy by Mitchell as it risked allowing the Swans to create an overlap from defence through their extra player, usually the damaging Nick Blakey or Callum Mills.
But the pressure exerted by small forwards Connor Macdonald and Nick Watson, and the unlikely Chol, forced the Swans into long, high balls to an outnumbered Curnow, who was unable to bring the ball to ground often enough to allow his team to force a stoppage on the wing.
“There was an intensity about the whole game right to the last five seconds,” Mitchell said. “My son actually texted me, and he said, ‘I wasn’t sure we’d won until eight seconds to go’, and it felt like that in the game.
“And so for our players to put together 120 minutes of really high, intense footy, I thought that was a good sign.”
The Hawks’ control of the contested ball left the Swans with a narrow path to victory – running the ball at high speed from defence.
Their dependence on speed has brought dizzying highs this season. Against Carlton, they slammed 18 goals in a half. Last week, they piled on seven in the first term. Here, six came in opening 22 minutes and another four in eight minutes in the third quarter – but this style is difficult to sustain, particularly against high-quality opposition.
“We don’t want to be so reliant on one method to score, and that’s you can’t do that from your back half,” Cox said.
Curnow was a handful for Josh Battle in the first quarter when the game was open and he was on the move, but he was impotent when locked in a wrestle with the bigger Tom Barrass.
Though he was expected to thrive with the silky-skilled Swans, Curnow’s return of five goals from his first three games is more in line with his output from his unhappy and injury-hit final year at Carlton than that of his back-to-back Coleman Medal campaigns.
His ineffectiveness after quarter-time was a repeat of his previous game at this venue last July when he was also smothered by the Hawks’ key backs. With a full pre-season under his belt, Curnow’s only alibi is his unfamiliarity with a new system, though Cox noted he was unable to halve aerial contests as he had in the first two games.
“The ability for Charlie to perform consistently, he’s still working his way through at our football club,” Cox said.
“One thing we try and say is, at all times, compete as hard as you possibly can, and try and read the cues up the ground when we are bringing the ball through.
“There’s some inconsistencies throughout that at times, and it’ll be a work in progress. We’re going to put time into [it].”
Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.