There’s a chapter in Tony Wilson’s book about the 1989 Grand Final that focuses on Scott Maginness, Hawthorn’s young chiropractic student slated to play on Geelong’s Gary Ablett. The Cats star was in murderous touch, fresh from a preposterous eight-goal performance in the Preliminary Final. “You’re wanting to not make a fool of yourself,” Maginness tells Wilson. “You want all those things you’ve always dreamed about, but know at any point it could all go horribly pear-shaped.”
He arrives home and tells his two brothers who he’s playing on. “Oh shit,” they say in unison.
The task confronting his son on Saturday was far less daunting. But it was the kind of role we rarely see in modern football – a hard tag, a complete blanket job. Finn Maginness is one of a handful of genuine taggers in the competition. For a few years, particularly through the Covid period and the turbulent final months of former coach Alastair Clarkson, he was struggling to make it. But Sam Mitchell loves him. The Hawks boss has sent him to many of the best midfielders in the competition.
Maginness was a superb 400m and 800m runner as a junior, and he ran Nick Daicos ragged on Saturday. He had two hands on him all afternoon. The longtime Brownlow Medal favourite (though Marcus Bontempelli is now primed to finish over the top of him) was restricted to five touches, two of which came from free kicks and one from a kick in. This is a young man averaging 33 touches a game and who hasn’t dipped below 25 this year. But Mitchell issued a word of caution. “I’d love to tell you that it was easy, but it’s an absolute nightmare,” he said. About 40% of their preparation was focused on Daicos. By applying a hard tag, Mitchell said, they immediately compromised other areas of the ground.
Hawthorn has been off the radar for most of this season. They’d won five games heading into Saturday. They’ve had all the lousy time slots. The racism scandal won’t go away. And their new training facility, located on a former rubbish tip, is bedevilled by concerns over methane gas levels and budget blow outs.
Some think they’re tanking. But the Hawks brought a frightening intensity to Saturday’s contest. They slaughtered Collingwood out of the middle. James Sicily conducted the game on his terms. And to witness Jai Newcombe’s tackle on Oleg Markov, or Jack Scrimshaw’s on Jordan De Goey makes a mockery of the suggestion they’re more interested in draft spots than big scalps.
Mitchell has the perfect temperament for his job. “When I was 20, I wanted to be an engineer,” he told his former teammate Tim Boyle. “When I was 23, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I was 26, I wanted to be a CEO.” Being an AFL coach these days demands a bit of all three. If you’re a rebuild coach, you can’t be someone who rides the rollercoaster. You can’t be someone who’s picking fights with journalists, or apologising to members, or adjusting the strategy, or having mini breakdowns.
Mitchell seems like the least likely coach in the AFL to succumb to any of that. His former high-performance manager said he’s the calmest footballer he’s ever seen before big games. Mitchell knows that success is not linear – that there will be periods where everything clicks and long stretches where nothing goes right. He says the hardest thing about coaching is pumping his players up after a bad loss and keeping a lid on it after big wins. As a player, he waited, watched, pounced and executed with Swiss precision. And he’s the same as a coach. He plotted and steeled Hawthorn for this game, and successfully exposed Collingwood’s flaws.
What to make of the Pies? Assessing Port Adelaide’s run of losses isn’t too hard – they’ve been cruelled by injury and illness. But Collingwood is a bit more complicated. They’ll be without Nick Daicos for at least six weeks now. But even when he was running hot, Brisbane, Melbourne, Carlton all revealed Collingwood’s chinks to various degrees: choke and squeeze them, don’t give them easy exits out of half back, clog the corridor with traffic cones if you have to, and have diversionary plans for Darcy Moore.
The 16th-placed Hawks nailed it. They left Collingwood in tatters. They left Daicos’s knee in ice. And they left a blueprint for the rest of the competition. It was a win worth its weight in gold, a win worth infinitely more to Hawthorn than any high draft pick.
