Gather Round started with Izak Rankine, who played senior SANFL football as a sixteen-year-old and who was racially abused by troglodytes a few days ago, curling a goal within the first thirty seconds. It finished in the gathering gloom of the Adelaide Oval with a mad scramble in St Kilda’s front half, and the mother of all frights for Collingwood.
In between, we saw a swaggering Adelaide and a cranky Richmond. We saw two excellent wins in the slop from Essendon and Port Adelaide. We saw the ultimate players’ coach fly the flag for his young star who had tilted the game Port’s way. And we saw a belated apology from the Collingwood Football Club to Nicky Winmar and Gilbert McAdam.
When it comes to AFL initiatives, I tend toward the cynical side. And after a day or so, the eagerness of the commentariat to spruik the all-encompassing magnificence of the Festival of Football started to grate. But there’s no point being a Negative Nellie about things. Gather Round was a triumph. The two local teams stood up in marquee games that had real weight. South Australians are football people. They turn up. They live and breathe the sport. They deserved the three-year extension.
The final game was one of the most highly anticipated. But there were none of the fireworks of the opening night. It was a clogged and confusing game. We shouldn’t have expected anything else. The Magpies were allowed to play their own way for the first three weeks. But you don’t get that free rein for long.
In this competition, there’s always a Ross Lyon waiting with a baseball bat. And for all the talk of a new Ross, a cuddlier Ross, a more attacking Ross, some things never change. This is a man who once said “it’s easier to destruct than to create”. Indeed, St Kilda’s opening month was one of the most miserly in the history of the game, conceding just 56 goals.
And so, unsurprisingly, one of the most attacking teams in the game was constantly thwarted and frustrated. They were denied the corridor. Their high balls were picked off by St Kilda’s tall defenders. They had injuries and illnesses. They had to win ugly. They had an inordinate number of smothers. And they had Nick Daicos. There’s a school of thought that Daicos is ‘stat padding’, that he gets too many cheap kicks, and that he doesn’t win his own ball. It’s a peculiar hill to die on. True, he just zips about – smooth, smart, neat. But he had 42 possessions yesterday. He’s pretty handy, as Lyon would say.
Whenever Daicos has the ball, the possibilities up the field open up. The forwards can lead to spots they’d otherwise never venture. They know he’ll find them. Jason Dunstall used to say that about leading to Darren Jarman. He was never more confident on a football field as when Jarman had the ball and was loping in his direction. Nick Daicos isn’t as good a kick as Darren Jarman. No one is. But he almost never misses. He’s now the Brownlow Medal favourite. He’s also 20 years old.
Another 20-year-old made a welcome return yesterday. I felt a bit for Jack Ginnivan in recent months. When his drug scandal broke, Channel 7 seemed to have assigned three dozen reporters to the story. They all addressed the camera like it was a giant pork chop. Jack is a smart footballer. But off the field, the frontal cortex is still forming. A cursory survey of young men at the Torquay Hotel in the middle of summer is not going to showcase a gender and a generation at the top of its game.
In the end, it was 24-hours of ‘value swaps’, a little bit of tut-tutting but mainly shoulder shrugging from a generation disinclined to let a Channel 7 journalist or a footy club play moral arbiter. Ginnivan looked a bit subdued yesterday, but still did some clever things, kicking a clutch goal early in the final term and forcing a key turnover.
And he reminded us, as Ken Hinkley did on Saturday night when he defended Jason Horne-Francis, that we’re pitiless on our young players. “Some people who put pressure on kids in this game need to take a good hard look at themselves,” he said. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of former footballers, newshounds and anonymous trolls who delight in tearing these kids to shreds.
But with apologies to the South Australian Premier, it was the kids who owned Gather Round. It was Rankine, Josh Rachele, Horne-Francis and Daicos who put on the show, who lit up the Adelaide Oval, and who will dominate this competition for years to come.
