After an electrical storm, an electricians’ strike, a valedictory game at the MCG, a couple of bloodbaths, a Ballarat tempest, and an assault on a goal umpire, the final spot in the top eight hung on a Jack Higgins snap. He has had his demons in front of goal, but after a nerve-shredding afternoon, there was an inevitability, a gravitational force, to his kick floating through.
“Of course,” any Carlton supporter would have told you at that precise moment, “after the injuries, the set shot misses, the interesting umpiring, and the gallant comeback, what better way to prolong our agony than cheering on Port Adelaide for the next three hours.”
God knows what the previous half hour felt like for the Fremantle players. Their supporters were dancing in the aisles when the Blues were scudded. But the players were deep into their warm-up and presumably couldn’t ride every bump, miss and goal on the other side of the country.
If they were watching, and surely a few of them were, they would have been sick in the guts when Brodie Kemp lined up to seal the game for Carlton. They would have come completely unglued when Mattaes Phillipou sprayed his own set shot shortly after. And they would have been beside themselves when Higgins pounced and goaled to put St Kilda in front with 12 seconds remaining.
The Dockers had a significant task ahead of them, however. They haven’t always been a team that has run with its good fortune, nor a team that has been renowned for its reliability in such situations. They haven’t excelled in games with real weight, games that come down to the wire, games that call for cool heads and good management. They threw away the four points against Essendon, and made some critical late errors in losses to Geelong and GWS.
Conversely, Port have prevailed in nearly all their close games this year. They were in-form, loaded with talent, and playing to secure a home final. They also had an excellent recent record against the Dockers. By half-time, the Power’s midfield was dominant, the Dockers had the staggers, and the Blues were still hanging on by a thread.
All through the game, there were little distress signals from the home side – the fumbles, the slips, the missed handballs – that ultimately cost them dearly. In the third term, they allowed Jason Horne-Francis to stroll into an open goal and gifted Jed McEntee another with a silly free kick. With Caleb Serong blanketed out of the game, and Hayden Young barely able to run, they couldn’t match the speed and power of Zak Butters and Horne-Francis.
The Dockers found their dash and dare in the final quarter and crept to within a kick but a superbly weighted pass from Butters found Willie Rioli and gave the visitors a nine-point buffer. Rioli is so good at sliding into space and pinching a metre or two on his opponent. And when he judged the fall of the ball, cleanly gathered and calmly slotted his third a few minutes later, the air was sucked out of the home crowd and Port had their two home finals assured.
It is easy to forget but there was a result earlier in the day that was just as significant to the final makeup of the eight. Luke Beveridge, his hair flapping in the 50-knot wind like Lohnro, was interviewed before the game and said it would be more of a tactical battle than usual. The smartest, most composed football would win the day.
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Maybe so, but they were also conditions to get down and dirty and the Dogs were conspicuously the harder working team. All day, in howling wind and teeming rain, they stripped the ball back off the Giants, halved one-on-one contests, lowered their eyes and resisted long bombs.
Everything Marcus Bontempelli touched seemed to end in a score and Tom Liberatore spent the afternoon on his hands and knees – scrounging, snarling and scrapping. At least half a dozen of their set shots swung like Wasim Akram with an old ball. But they outworked the Giants, who desperately missed the two-way running of late withdrawals Brent Daniels and Toby Bedford
But back to Carlton, and it is funny how a result in another time-zone can tempt you back off the ledge. With a mix of the maligned, the banged-up and the L-plated, they had hung in against the quick, well-drilled, nothing-to-lose Saints. But there’s gotta be better ways to spend your Sundays.
The historian and author Manning Clark, who first went to a Carlton game in the 1920s, called the life of a football supporter “an emotional bath of agony and ecstasy”. Carlton people, from the club captain to the bawling kid Channel 7 helpfully honed in on after the siren, emerged from their six-hour bath seared and sallowed, but somehow still alive in season 2024.
