Bob Murphy likes to talk about the suit of metaphorical armour footballers have to pull on each week. For Joel Selwood, it was more a cloak of invincibility.
“You have to take into account what time of the game it was,” he said in 2012. “Two minutes to go, game in the balance. You do anything to help your side win. That’s the way I play. That’s the way I will always play.”
Joel Selwood announces his retirement.Credit:Getty Images
Which is fine, except that this was his defence at the tribunal against a charge of striking Hawthorn’s Brent Guerra. He got four matches!
But you get the idea. On Wednesday, Selwood stated only the bleeding obvious when he said he played every game as if it was his last.
He could have further refined it and said he played every last quarter as if it was the only one he would ever play. In the mind’s eye, he is the best last quarter player the game has seen. Also in the mind’s eye, there is blood streaming down his face from another cut to the head.
The last time Geelong was seriously challenged this season was the last quarter of their qualifying final against Collingwood. Selwood was as instrumental as any other player in saving it. Eight touches might not sound like so many, but they were Selwood touches. When the need was greatest, Selwood wanted – and got – it most. Where the game was fiercest, Selwood was his most precise.
Joel Selwood with the 2022 premiership cup.Credit:Scott Barbour
But it wasn’t just final quarters. In the first quarter of the grand final, Selwood got it 12 times, Geelong swept to a six-goal lead and the rest was a procession. Perhaps it’s more true to say that he was one of the best when the stakes were highest.
Will to win is an ethereal concept, but Selwood embodied it. The manner of his pursuit, in particular penchant for drawing free kicks for head-high tackles, divided fans, but beneath the division lay admiration and envy that by the end of his career had transmuted into awe.
Literally and figuratively, Selwood’s head was always in the game. “I was all in,” he said on Wednesday. In his time, so were Geelong. Of Selwood’s 355 games, only one was a dead rubber, without prospect of making finals or proceeding further in them. In his career, he only once endured three successive losses.
Only once did his Cats not play finals. Selwood carried them and they buoyed him, for 16 superlative years.
Joel Selwood leaves the field under the blood rule back in 2017.Credit:AFL Photos
Football folk sometimes talk of the deleterious effect when playing finals one season shortens the off-season before the next. All Selwood’s off-seasons were short, and always, he and the Cats backed up.
Selwood’s football reconciled contradictions, desperation and composure. So did his personality. The word you were most likely to hear about Selwood was “care”. Care for teammates, care for the club, care for the least person in it.
In grand final week, the stories of his warmth and empathy were legion. At the president’s dinner preceding his 350th game in July, Selwood arranged for jumper presentations to the family of Vic Fuller, the Cats’ VFL team manager who died suddenly earlier this year, and for the club chef.
Before playing Fremantle earlier this year, he had a coffee with Jordan Clark, the former Cat and Selwood mentee. It didn’t matter that they would soon be midfield opponents; until they buckled up for battle, they were people. It won’t surprise anyone that Selwood urged restraint on teammates on Saturday night, so that they would remember their premiership. He drove home.
Joel Selwood on the burst against Collingwood in the qualifying final.Credit:AFL Photos
Murphy’s armour analogy suggests footballers have to hide their true selves. But which was Selwood’s true self? You couldn’t fake his way of playing football and it would have been impossible to live his other life as a lie. In him, they were uniquely synthesised.
Coach Chris Scott said he couldn’t deconstruct it, but only bear witness to its every minute truth. The cloak was on, the cloak was off. This made him in the estimation of Scott “the best player I’ve ever seen”. It also made him “irreplaceable” as a leader.
Selwood somehow never lost sense of the privilege of his gift and opportunity. He battled knee injuries as a teenager and saw two older brothers spirited away to opposite extremities of the league to play, yet here he was at 18, playing for the team he loved, and as it happened, on the threshold of an unprecedented era.
The AFL career of Joel Selwood.Credit:The Age
His third game was at breathlessly short notice. Nathan Ablett withdrew minutes before the bounce, and Selwood was summoned from the grandstand. He had just gulped down a Mars Bar. His game was worth another, and 350 more after that. “I’ve been waiting a long time,” he said after that game. “I don’t know how long it’s going to last, so I’m going to enjoy every game.”
Not only did he play each as it was his last, he played them all as if for premierships.
