From where Craig Drummond is sitting on a glorious Sunday in Geelong, there are Cats supporters as far he can see, yet most of them wouldn’t know his name, much less recognise his face.
“I love that,” the Geelong club president says with a smile.
“We try to appoint great people. They get on with their job and we get on with ours to make sure we keep away all that off-field noise that you hear at other organisations.”
Like most things in football, this is easier said than done. Like most things at Geelong, a club that has defied Newton’s laws of physics and the AFL’s equalisation policies to remain near the top of the competition for most of this century, it is done better here than at most rival clubs.
It is difficult to imagine now, sitting alongside Drummond and looking out across the beaming, blue and white-hooped mob that has come to Kardinia Park to celebrate the club’s first grand final win in 11 years, that it was only last year that some supporters thought their ageing team was past its peak and its coach, Chris Scott, was not up to the job.
Drummond is grateful for the passionate supporter base that sustains the club but reflects, somewhat diplomatically, that the expectations of some fans after a frustrating run of finals losses had become “pretty extraordinary.”
Geelong coach Chris Scott and captain Joel Selwood present the premiership cup to Cats fans at Kardinia Park.Credit:Scott McNaughton
He points out that since 2006, the year Joel Selwood and Tom Hawkins were drafted as teenage recruits, the club has missed only one finals series, finished top-four 13 times and played in six grand finals. Since Scott took over as senior coach at the end of 2010, Geelong has won three out of every four games it has played.
It has also won four flags in this remarkable era, but Patrick Dangerfield, while still getting used to the feeling of having a premiership medal in his keeping, wonders whether success is too narrowly measured in a competition where only one team from 18 can ever win the last game of the season.
“If that is the only way you derive enjoyment or satisfaction from the game, then most are going to be left wanting,” he says.
“It shouldn’t be that way. It’s a privilege to be involved in the industry, to play AFL footy, to be part of an AFL club. There is more to the game than just being the triumphant team on grand final day. We’ve been fortunate enough to win it this year, but there is so much we have got to be thankful for over the last 10 to 15 years.”
Patrick Dangerfield celebrates the premiership with Selwood.Credit:Eddie Jim
There is a humility to these Cats not always found in premiership teams. Geelong hasn’t lost a game since the Albanese government was elected, and its grand final against Sydney was all but over at quarter time. But as the oldest team ever fielded in a VFL or AFL grand final, the 2022 Cats have a fair big of wisdom to go with their football nous.
“We know how bloody hard it is to win, to be honest,” Dangerfield says. “We have been up for a long time and at the same time, we lost the prelim last year by 83 points. So we appreciate it for what it is and the fans for what they have done for us, but we stay grounded and stay humble.
“I think that is a real strength for us a club. We never ride the highs and we don’t kick ourselves when we don’t achieve the ultimate.”
Colin Carter served as club president from Scott’s first season as coach through to the end of last year. He described Saturday’s premiership as “humungously satisfying” and says it is a reward for the club’s patience and perseverance – two qualities not always found in abundance at football clubs.
During his earlier work as football administrator, Carter helped design the draft and salary cap measures that were intended to give every club an opportunity to play in finals and compete for premierships. He says that as a consequence of these measures, Geelong has been “swimming upstream” throughout Scott’s entire tenure as coach.
He describes the groundswell of criticism that built against the coach as an “astonishing narrative” but reflects that, in the AFL, scrutiny is greater for teams that finish second than those that finish 10th. Like Drummond, he saw part of his role on the board as providing “air cover” to allow the coach and players to do their jobs without interference.
“The great achievement of the past 10 years has been to provide stability in the club so that some very good people can continue to do their work without having to look over their back all the time,” he says. “The irony is that Hawthorn hasn’t won a final since 2015 but no one talks about them. The only reason people were criticising Geelong is because we kept making the bloody finals and getting knocked out.”
This stability has come at a time when nearly everything else in the town of Geelong is changed. In the years since Selwood and Hawkins first played, the Ford factory in Norlane and Alcoa aluminium smelter at Point Henry have closed and Shell has sold its refinery. The biggest local employers are now healthcare providers and Deakin University, and a town once derided as Sleepy Hollow is at the centre of Australia’s most vibrant and fastest growing regions.
The football club’s success is in part due to the unique lifestyle it can offer professional footballers who want to commute from coastal hamlets and hobby farms. But as Carter points out, it isn’t that long ago, when the local Pyramid Building Society went bust and Geelong plunged deep into recession, that the town was considered a rust bucket.
“Everybody talks about Geelong as a destination club. We used to wonder whether anyone would want to live there. The footy club has contributed to that change in mood. If you have got a winning institution in your community, everybody feels good about themselves.”
On this day, the mood among the blue and white-hooped mob is jubilant.
Under the shadows of the GMHBA stadium, where a new city-end grandstand is being built to increase capacity to 40,000 people, Geelong supporters are gathered on the grassy expanse of an oval where local club St Marys plays its home games. A replay of the grand final is being shown on a big screen and Geelong’s team members, the evidence of their post-match celebrations obscured by dark sunglasses and premiership caps, are waiting to go on stage.
Jack Hawkins, Fred Le Deux and Pam Le Deux, the father and grandparents of Tom Hawkins, were among the crowd at Kardinia Park.Credit:Scott McNaughton
Among the mob is “Jumpin” Jack Hawkins, a Geelong player from the 1970s and the father of Tom. He has come to the ground with Tom’s grandparents, Pam and Fred Le Deux. Fred also played with the Cats. Jack Hawkins says he remembers talking to his son at the start of the season about his plans for this year and was struck by the enthusiasm he still had for the game after so many years.
“He said, ‘I’m really keen, I want to play, I just love it, I am enjoying the new players coming through,’ ” Hawkins says. “The reward for the older guys is sweeter because they will appreciate it. When they won their other premierships they drank beer and stayed out all night. They all probably went home and got up this morning with a clear head to come here and enjoy the day.”
Pam Le Deux says she still sees in Tom the five-year-old boy whose prodigious kicking talents used to land balls and other toys beyond retrieval on their farmhouse roof.
Not far from where the Hawkins family are standing in the crowd, Brenda Ford and Jenni Miller are soaking up the late morning sun and another Cats flag. Ford is old enough to have seen the Cats win premierships in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller lives in Geelong but she used to drive three hours from Minyup, her home town in the Wimmera, to watch Geelong play.
“They have given people hope, they really have,” says Miller. “Given them something to follow.”
In football, some things are more important than the last game of the year.
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