Some superstars had the most inauspicious start to their football careers. Tony Lockett was a stick-thin asthmatic who used callipers to walk. Gary Ablett turned up to Geelong in an unregistered HT Holden with a lot of baggage. Jason Dunstall, who turns 60 today, was perhaps the most unlikely champion of them all.
Dunstall wasn’t particularly tall and came last in all the running drills. At first, they played him in a back pocket in the reserves. “We were thinking – this bloke can’t play at all,” Peter Schwab told Tony Wilson in his book, 1989 – The Great Grand Final.
But Dunstall’s unique strengths were identified and nurtured and he ended up being the 32nd man inducted as a Legend into the Australian Football Hall of Fame. There were so many cyclonic personalities who burst on to the scene during his career – Capper, Modra, Wheildon, Adrian McAdam, Allen Jakovich. But Dunstall outlasted them all. Dunstall was the one you could bank on. Dunstall was the one you could build a team around.
Gerard Whateley and Shannon Gill do a wonderful historical segment on SEN every Thursday, and they recently devoted an hour to the Hawthorn champion. What sometimes gets lost is that Dunstall had a lot of bad luck along the way, and could easily have kicked 100 goals eight years in a row.
What’s more, a lot of Dunstall’s best football came after the premierships – when Hawthorn was broke, when the talent had drained and when the club was close to merging. The hairline receded, the knee brace appeared and the fast twitch fibres deserted him. But if anything, his forward craft improved. He was so strong in the glutes and chest. A nudge of the backside and he could still hold his ground. And he was such an unselfish footballer. He chased, tackled and dished off certain goals. That was almost unheard of from full forwards of the era.
Gideon Haigh once wrote of Glenn McGrath that “he brought to fast bowling the philosophy of the Model T – mass deliveries just short of a length”. And it’s tempting to view Dunstall the same way – the lead, the chest mark, the uncomplicated run-up, the muted celebration. But he was more than a metronome. There was a guile to his game. He could gather a bobbling ball, turn a full-back inside out and curl goals from all angles. His last-quarter efforts in the 1991 grand final personify that, as does his goal of the year at the Western Oval.
You can’t examine his career and not mention the people further up the field. Darrin Pritchard and John Platten covered so many miles and their flat, low passes were made for full forwards. But Darren Jarman was something else altogether. His ball drop alone warrants its own column. He’d lope through the middle of the MCG looking like Zinedine Zidane. Without breaking stride, on either side of his body, he’d check and weigh his right-angled kicks. Dunstall would point to a spot, he’d take off, he’d laugh and Jarman would post it on his chest.
It’s also impossible to talk about Dunstall, and any forward of that era, and not talk about space. Dunstall had acres to operate in. He played every second week at Waverley, which was so vast, and almost impossible to defend. Not that opposition coaches were overly concerned with floods, or zones and extra numbers back. Indeed, as Dermott Brereton was writhing in agony early in the 1989 grand final, Geelong had a full four and half minutes to push players back. But Malcolm Blight, sucking on a dart and enquiring like Tony Soprano as to how his premeditated hit had gone down, was not one to entertain such options. And so, in a neat snapshot of 80s and 90s football, a green-gilled Brereton staggered to his feet, Hawthorn drove the ball forward, Dunstall marked in a one-on-one and the Hawks were up and away.
Brereton, who also turns 60 later this week, is as good a man as any to summarise the career of his former teammate, a man he has a strange and not exactly warm relationship with, but the utmost respect for. “If you wanted to play in a team and look back over your head and just applaud, you’d have Gary Ablett,” he told Mike Sheahan in 2012. “If everyone’s playing at their best, and you wanted a bloke one-off, to win one game, you go for Lockett. But if you want a man to play for your season, to rely on, to actually get to where you wanted to go, and to professionally do the job, it has to be Dunstall.”
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