Swans go all soft
By Jeff Wells
March 29, 2004
SO the Swans have discovered their feminine side during the off-season.
And as a well-rounded person - ask any machinegun-toting sports feminist - I can only applaud. For two or three seconds.
That's how long I could cop Sydney's gameplan away to Brisbane on Saturday night. With Big Bad etc Barry Hall rumoured to have returned from Paris with a gorgeous new Vuitton handbag the Swans had adopted a modified form of netball.
Only not as rough.
Oh to be at Aussie Stadium where you can throw haymakers and rip up seats - no cucumber sandwiches and polite applause for 10-metre passes. It was the greatest endorsement yet for banning the backward kick.
And if the NRL can put a clock on its kickers, so can the AFL.
The Swans were standing around hugging the ball like new lord mayor Clover Moore hugging a tree. True latte-sipping eastern suburbanites.
That's Clover's platform. No hitting anybody. Everybody to wear designer boots bought on Oxford Street.
Beautiful Bazza and Adam "Gucci" Goodes both had sexy white numbers. Jared Crouch - who had to compete with the style-guru facial trim of Jason Akermanis - had a sweet little pair of duck-egg blue loafers. Memo to Sydney: no team which featured fancy boots won a game at the soccer World Cup.
It was "no moving after you get the ball". Wait for the referee's whistle. Mental note: next weekend I'll get out to the vigaro.
Yet if it hadn't been for a shank from Jason Ball, from 35m straight in front with only about a minute on the clock, Sydney would have won.
It was worse than anything you would see off the tee at Moore Park - even on ladies' day, when they really take a big cut.
A tragedy for Ball, whose loss at the end of last season was too much for the Swans to bear. Now he cost them a dream start, even as commentators continued to predict a slide.
But the supporters may slide. Bring on Super 12. Chipping the footy around like it's as precious as a Faberge egg while the opposition floods the backline is anathema to the free-running attack that won so many hearts last year - or even when Rodney Eade had them playing like berserkers.
It was like watching one of those fights when the pretender, with the tassels on his trunks and boots in Macho Camacho style, perambulates around throwing love taps and back-foot jabs and piling up the points against the power-punching champ.
And even without key forwards Alastair Lynch and Jonathan Brown this was Brisbane. Coached by Leigh Matthews, the toughest man ever to pull on a regular boot. The greatest post-war side since Melbourne won three straight in 1955-57, maybe the greatest ever.
With a salary cap and draft no team is supposed to do that. Yet they are favoured to equal Collingwood's all-time record of four straight championships set back in 1927-30, in the days when they didn't have boots but hammered studs into the soles of their feet -- and still kicked long.
Even as the tactic worked and Sydney kept their noses in front, you sensed that it would eventually come undone. That the champs would finally set themselves and land the big combinations. That class would somehow prevail - like it did in last year's preliminary final.
And that's how it happened. Brisbane 11.14 (80) d. Sydney 11.12 (78) after Nick Davis had kicked four first-half goals for Sydney, then limped off, and Brisbane trailed by 19 points.
The Swans had racked up a hallucinatory 61 marks to 30 and 167 disposals to 118.
Coach Paul Roos has long praised Brisbane as the benchmark. Early last season he wouldn't hear of anybody else winning the flag. So he denied Brisbane the ball. Denied the champ a punch.
Brisbane didn't hit the lead until near the end of the third quarter, after Keating (a big bloke who looks as if he has fallen out of a tumble dryer) and
Akermanis (whose legs move as fast as his mouth) had slammed two quick goals to open that term.
By then Matthews had solved the Handbag Hall problem by putting Mal Michael on him. Johnny Lewis may reckon that Bazza could be the next Australian heavyweight champion but Mal looks like he already holds the title.
The Swans were doing it with discipline all over the ground. That included new boys Jarrad McVeigh (who has put on some muscle) and Paul Bevan, who both had impressive debuts. But in the end old bald Martin Pike went forward to kill us off like he did last year.
And when Bazza finally threw away the handbag and decided that he wanted to rumble with Big Mal and Michael Voss and most of Queensland, and the footy was momentarily forgotten, Blake Caracella slipped away for the winning goal. Sucked in.
But how can you bag such a great effort by Sydney? Only by begging for a new gameplan against Fremantle at home next week.
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