How Brad and Matt Crouch became the AFL’s boom midfield brothers
THERE’S not too much to get excited about in the tiny Victorian town of Beaufort — unless, of course, you’re talking footy and, specifically, two siblings who, this season, have taken the AFL by storm.
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NICK Franc is standing out the back of his Beaufort farmhouse, 30km off the highway to Ballarat, explaining how the Crouch brothers got to be so bloody good.
Talking backbone and bush toughness when, right on cue, another icy blast of spring rain blows in from the west.
“See, Central Highlands footy — when you’re playing in weather like this, it’s not open, free-flowing footy,” says Franc, a member of Beaufort’s 1996 and most recent senior premiership side.
“They’re heavy grounds, small grounds around here — spud fields, a lot of ’em, with that red mud you get in winter.
“So she’s hard, contested footy. There’s nowhere to hide.
“And those kids — even as 16-year-olds playing senior footy against men — they never took a backwards step.”
Which is why the Sunday Mail is here in Beaufort, a former goldfields town in Victoria’s west — and home to 800 people, two pubs and a single set of traffic lights — to discover how life chiselled out Adelaide’s boom midfield duo, brothers Matt and Brad Crouch.
Because Beaufort, folklore says, is where this young Crows pair — helping spearhead Adelaide’s push towards a first grand final appearance in 20 years — learnt their footy.
Where, from the late 1990s, two tackers aged just 15 months apart and dressed head-to-toe in the red, blue and gold of the Beaufort Crows would shadow their dad, Phil, a teacher at the town’s high school, as he coached the local footy team.
And where, barely seven years ago, each had their first taste of senior football as teenagers, playing in the same Crows colours they would carry into their AFL careers.
“But they’ve never actually lived here in Beaufort,” says Phil, currently serving as the club’s football manager.
“I teach at the school here but we’ve always lived in Ballarat, so that’s where the boys played all their junior footy.
“They grew up around the footy club with me, so they’d come along and ask me for money to buy a Coke and pie at the canteen, they’d have their footy with them, and away they went.
“We’re not really big on talking to the media so we’ve never really said otherwise. I think the boys are just happy enough to go along with the story that they’re from Beaufort.
“To them, this is their footy club.”
And for evidence, take last Saturday’s Central Highlands grand final at Ballarat’s Mars Stadium.
It was a historic day for the club, battling in both senior and reserves grand finals for the first time in 52 years.
This was an occasion neither brother could miss. So between Adelaide’s qualifying final win over Greater Western Sydney at Adelaide Oval and a three-day training camp on the Gold Coast, they won a leave pass for a flying visit to Ballarat to watch the deciders.
“They haven’t got their heads up their arses,” family friend and long-time Beaufort supporter Ross Day says.
“Phil and (mum) Debbie did a good job there. They haven’t changed. Back here, they’re just Brad and Matt.
“They enjoy their football and that’s what Phil always said: ‘As long as they’re enjoying their footy, that’s all that matters’.”
This 2017 AFL season has been a watershed year for both brothers.
For Brad, now 23, his 18 games represents a long-awaited victory over niggling injuries that had previously kept his immense potential beyond reach.
And for Matt, 22, his All-Australian selection defies doubt from an early age that he lacked the leg speed to reach the AFL level.
In a telling statistic ahead of Adelaide’s crucial preliminary final against Geelong on Friday night, the siblings have this year combined for more disposals in a season than any set of brothers for as long as the AFL has kept those numbers.
“We knew they would go places,” Day says.
“The knock on Matt was always that he wasn’t quite quick enough. And Brad, we always said he would win a Brownlow.
“You never know, it might turn out the other way around.”
Ask anyone who knew the Crouch boys before they were on an AFL list and the yarns follow a common theme.
Competitive. Combative. Determined. Football, cricket, didn’t matter.
Childhood mate Mat Begbie remembers front yard footy games involving the Crouch pair and friends including former Essendon player Nick O’Brien and Scott Spriggs, who has played SANFL with Glenelg.
“That was always a pretty competitive environment,” Begbie grins.
“It was usually Brad and Nick on to Matt and me.
“‘Nicko’ was captain of the (North Ballarat Rebels) TAC Cup side at the time, but we’re playing this game and there was a hard ball there to be won. Long story short, ‘Nicko’ ended up missing a TAC Cup game with a corky.”
The pair’s trademark physical game style was honed from an early age — usually at each others’ expense, and wherever there was room to move.
“Oh, they were always belting s**t out of each other,” Rebels talent manager Phil Partington says.
“Phil and Debbie tell the story about how the boys would put a footy in the middle of the loungeroom and then they’d go back to opposite ends.
“They’d race in to get the footy and the aim was to get a handball out before one tackled the other.
“That’s the way they were. Playing in the Ballarat league when they were young, there would’ve been a lot of contested ball. Being the competitive beasts they are, they would’ve liked to have been the person to dig the ball out of the mud and hand it back to the umpires.
“That would’ve been drilled into them by Phil.”
Phil Crouch was coaching the Beaufort Crows in 2010 when he made the decision to give eldest son Brad, then 16 and playing with North Ballarat in Victoria’s elite under-age system, a run in country senior footy.
“The first reason was, they both wanted to,” Phil says. “They felt they could handle it.
“If they weren’t up to it you could see fairly quickly and I would’ve pulled the pin on it, but they enjoyed it.
“I played my first game of senior footy at 15. It doesn’t happen a lot now but you hear about guys like (Brisbane Lions legend) Jonathan Brown who played senior footy when they were 15 or 16.
“At the end of it I had this idea that when they went back to the TAC Cup that year of playing against the bigger bodies probably wasn’t a bad thing for them later on.”
Franc, who would coach Matt Crouch during the younger brother’s first season of senior football in 2011, says it was evident early that Brad was destined for more than a country or suburban career.
“I remember one game against Daylesford, Brad was only 16,” Franc says.
“It was a wet, heavy day at Beaufort. Daylesford were the reigning premiers and Brad went head to head in the middle with the league medallist at the time.
“Brad’s gone and kicked five goals — so that’s when we knew.
“Because every town’s got a couple, haven’t they? Kids that could be anything. You know they’ve got ability, but until you’ve seen them against men you just don’t know if they’re going to go on with it.
“When you see one do what Brad did that day, that’s when you go ‘oh, s**t’.”
The reaction was the same from 246-game Collingwood great Shane O’Bree, Beaufort’s longest-serving AFL export, who lined up alongside Matt Crouch when he returned to his home town for a one-off game in 2011 following his 2010 retirement.
“I knew about the Crouch boys — their father had taught me in secondary college,” O’Bree says.
“I just remember this young bloke at the bottom of the packs, feeding me (the ball) all day.
“I was taking full advantage of it because I wasn’t going in to get hurt, that’s for sure. But Matt was right in there, handballing it out every time.
“You could see then he was a contested beast and he still is now.”
Franc says the Crouch brothers’ Beaufort connection and success on the national stage sets a beaming example for youngsters in the town.
“It gives you something to hang your hat on, that as a football club you’re setting up an environment that allows these kids to come through if they’re good enough,” he says.
“That’s the best thing — it shows the kids we’ve got at the club now that if they work hard and do the right thing, they can make it to the AFL, too.”
And while the Crouch brothers remains in the hunt for an AFL premiership that would break Adelaide’s 20-year silverware drought, there was no fairytale ending for their beloved Beaufort Crows in 2017.
Both the seniors and reserves lost their deciders, the B Grade losing by eight points to Buninyong before the A Grade fell 18 points short of Hepburn.
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