Family Club in Tacklefest | Thebigtip

6:30am, no one else awake in the house. No one to tackle me.

What to do? Anything I want!

Beers? Tad early...Turn the music up full bore!?! Something a little more special.

Geelong and Hawthorn on the telly with ads for toilet and snack stops (beers? mmmmm?) (Can't get it out of my head, na na na na na na na na).

It's the replay for busy dads, like the crying session at the cinema for mums with bubs.

Its on Channel One. And this game really is the One for the AFL. A guaranteed blockbuster. Might not be the 80 or 90 thousand crowd of Carlton v Collingwood, but you know the game is gonna be a beauty. That's why they put us at the 'G.
 
Doesn't matter who actually gets on the field. No Sammy. No matter, someone'll step up. Chance Bateman came good after being quiet for a few weeks.
No Stevie J.' in the hoops. Who is Simon Hogan? Matthew Stokes kicking them out of his left cheek at one end. Brad Sewell off the outside of his foot at the other. It must be one of those games.

If the Hawks could play that footy every weekend they'd be like the Harlem Globetrotters against lesser teams than Geelong. (Crikey, almost need a wiki link for that reference. What happened to the globetrotters? Even the concept died. Surely there was more to milk from it. I'd like to see the trotters play a modified game against a team of socceristas a la Muhammad Ali v Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki in '76 - aaaah the theatre of it, and more wiki checks).

The 'G is your theatre. Almost 70,000 filled the stadium. Smokers outside give the look of dry ice feel as if the whole arena had just landed in the hills of Richmond for the biggest show of the season. Inside an orgy of tackling, taps and precision passing was about to unfold. Unsociable, the Hawks? Au contraire, we just hadn't found our perfect partners till this game. Geelong are just as uh sociable, and what a pleasure it is to watch these two friends go at it.

The game was a perfect combination of fierce tackling and deft passages of play unfolding one upon the other, like a thriller reaching another and another crescendo. Everyone at the game would have thought at some stage that they were going to win, right to the very end. Everyone would have been on their feet. Wanting more than just to stand. Shake your neighbour, 'Did you see that?', as if the unfolding play was a revelation so blinding only the chosen could see it.
Now we've got it. The Hawks had the last two scoring shots of the game, from taps and split-second handballs that ended up on the failsafe foot of Clinton Young. Fill your lungs its Clinton Young!  He was on the fifty, just where he likes to be.  Two shots, two behinds told one story, but the ability to get those shots on goal in a forward line containing 34 players, that's the take home story. My only resevation is its hard to bounce back after these games. Hard for Hawthorn; not seemingly for Geelong.

Maybe the tap 'n' tackle and precision passing only works against hard-running teams that are making the play and susceptible to quick changes of direction.

Unsociable?