Premiership skipper Shannon Hurn reflects on his journey in football

West Coast AFL premiership captain Shannon Hurn spends some down time on the family farm near Angaston and reflects on his journey from the Barossa to Perth and the Eagles’ 2018 flag.

West Coast premiership captain Shannon Hurn at home on the family farm at Angaston. Picture: Sarah Reed.

• Lycett leaves with Eagles’ respect: Hurn
• Gaff: Why I chose to stay at West Coast
• Buckenara: Eagles must prove flag wasn’t a fluke
• Why Lycett wanted to return to South Australia

Shannon Hurn is standing in the middle of a paddock feeding a herd of rams where the only noise around him is the bleating of a few eager sheep and the tinkering of pellets into the bottom of a silver trough on the ground.

And then as the sheep start eating, there is silence. Save for the wind that whistles through a nearby tree or across the wild grass that has just turned from green to a golden brown with the nearing summer.

This is Hurn — West Coast’s latest AFL premiership captain — in his happy place.

Wearing a blue Hard Yakka shirt, a dusty old green cap that he jokingly calls his “baggy green” and special work jeans that don’t stick to the barbed wire fences that surround the family’s property 3km south of Angaston.

Six weeks ago instead of rounding up a herd of sheep he was trying to round up Collingwood’s forwards and after 120 gut-busting minutes he could finally knock off having led his team to a thrilling five-point victory.

So which does he prefer. The chaos of playing in front of 100,022 screaming fans at the MCG or the silence of a paddock?

There is, he says, a beauty in both.

Hurn feeding the rams at the family farm. Picture: Sarah Reed.

“If you’re doing that (100,000 at the MCG) then it means you’re playing in a grand final,” Hurn says, staring into his cup of tea at the kitchen table.

“But I like coming back here with the farm, I’ve just always enjoyed it, helping dad and doing stuff.

“I’m more about enjoying a bit of peace and quiet but you’ve got to deal with all that with football.

“That’s why I try to get my fix at the end of the year, or if there are a couple of days off in a row during the season I can maybe duck off for a fish.

“I do enjoy the quietness.”

The AFL bubble can be all-consuming so when Hurn, 31, goes fishing or home to the farm, he switches off — which he finds easy to do.

He doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and doesn’t have a media deal requiring him to make regular appearances on TV or in the papers.

“I don’t have any of that,” he said.

“I just always wanted to play footy because I enjoy it and don’t see the need to spruik about stuff, but that’s just me, it seems everyone has social media to a degree these days.

“There is a lot of interest in footy now, everyone has an opinion and you’re either one of the best players going around or the worst player, and that’s a hard thing to get used to.

“You can’t let the footy bubble consume you and run your life, that’s why always coming back here I’m just doing something normal.”

This year however hasn’t been normal for Hurn.

In a normal year the season would finish without much fanfare, he’d go on a fishing trip with good mate Mark LeCras then be back home in time for shearing by the first week of October.

This year the Eagles won the flag, there was an extended period of functions and celebrations, LeCras couldn’t go fishing because he needed wrist surgery and Hurn only just made it back for the end of shearing.

“We have a shearing team come in but I usually help pen up, bale wool, chase sheep, I don’t really roustabout but help out if they’re behind,” he said.

“We do our crutching before that in late September, sometimes I’m here to help with the last bit of that, depending on how the season goes.

“I like doing it because it’s something different and you stay fit and active because you’re running around.

“Fishing is my break to switch off but then you get bored and want to actually do something.”

After a end-of-season fishing trip, Hurn, 31, returns home to switch off from footy. Picture: Sarah Reed.

HURN has been gone from Angaston for 13 years, since he was drafted to West Coast in 2005 with pick No. 13 from Central District where he won back-to-back SANFL premierships as a teenager.

But he remains very much connected to the Barossa Valley community and the Angaston Football Club — which eager to see him return one day — are quick to remind him every year: “you’re starting to look a bit slow, Bunga”.

“When you’re growing up you understand it but you don’t, and when you go away you love coming back here and seeing people I played sport with at Angaston footy and cricket club,” Hurn says, while now wearing an Angaston Panthers hoodie.

“Everyone is happy to have a chat and they enjoy their sport just as much and like seeing people do well from the local area.

“Every now and then I get asked to play a bit of cricket, but if you’re going to do it you’d like to do it well, so I go down and watch a few blokes I know play A1s.”

While he’s home for anywhere between 5-7 weeks, Hurn maintains a strict fitness routine running three times a week, doing weights at the local footy club and swimming as often as he can.

“I swim at Nuriootpa but the pool only opens if it’s above 27 degrees, so otherwise I go into the Tanunda Rec Centre,” Hurn said.

“I try to change it up with my running, there’s a back road that goes into town about 7km from home then I get to the oval and do some weights and have a kick.

“I run into a few people and it works out well because my sister (Ashton) lives in town (Adelaide) now and she used to be my kicking partner, so now there are a couple of young guys here training with Central District and I jump in with them.”

Hurn, who was named in the All-Australian team this year, hasn’t watched a replay of the grand final when Dom Sheed put the Eagles in front with a set shot from the boundary, and probably won’t until he retires.

Adam Simpson and Shannon Hurn with the premiership cup on the MCG in September. Picture: Michael Dodge (Getty).

“At functions afterwards they’d have it playing and you’d look at it or see the last five minutes,” he said.

“I don’t know if I’ll watch it, not until footy finishes, you’ve got to move on a little bit.

“I like watching football during the year but not the back stuff, games we played or whatever, we do plenty of reviews during the week.”

He doesn’t need to watch the replay because his memory of grand final day remains crystal clear.

Collingwood was five goals up in the first quarter but the Eagles didn’t panic, which is what Hurn is most proud of.

“The thing we got better at in the last year-and-a-half was doing the best you can in that moment,” he said.

“In that (losing) 2015 grand final Hawthorn started well, we still had the same amount of shots, but there was a bit of panic like ‘we have to win the game now’ and you do a couple of things that you don’t normally do.

“All the messaging this time was ‘just keep going, we’re going alright, of course it’s five goals to nothing but don’t panic’ and we just had to keep chipping away.

“It takes ages to learn that because at five goals down you could go ‘this is all I played for, we’re five goals down and going to lose’ … then all of a sudden another quarter has gone and the game probably is over.”

That’s when Hurn’s dad William chimes in. Like his son, William was a tough half-back who played 130-odd league games for Central District in the 1980s.

“It’s like cricket. and playing and missing five times, all you can do is play the next ball,” William says.

Then Hurn replies.

“Yeah but it’s easier said than done. When I was younger I’d go ‘I don’t want to lose, what do they think of me playing that bad shot? Or what do they think of us if we can’t play at the MCG?’

“It’s about trying to forget about that and just play, and that’s something Simo (Adam Simpson) and the coaches have done well but especially the playing group from 2015 and it really helped.”

Hurn was coming back from the interchange bench after copping a cut to his head when Dom Sheed kicked the winning goal in the grand final against Collingwood. Picture: Darrian Traynor (Getty).

When Sheed was having his set shot for goal in the dying minutes, Hurn was being taped up on the bench for a cut to his head.

“I didn’t get an angle or a look at it, I was more thinking ‘if we kick the goal this is what we’re doing’ and if we missed then we’d still be behind but had to keep our structure,” he said.

“Dom is actually a pretty good set shot, especially from that distance. We kicked 1.5 after they kicked the first two goals (in the last quarter) and sometimes that’s how it goes in footy — you miss the ones in close then kick the ones from the boundary.”

When the siren went, Hurn tried his best to soak up every second before finding William and mum Sandy in the rooms.

“We get on really well in the backline and tried to seek each other out, then I tried to enjoy the presentations,” he said.

“Even as we were doing the lap of honour I tried to be slow, some players wanted to keep racing around and I was like ‘just relax and take it easy’.”

Some say you have to lose a grand final to fully appreciate winning one and Hurn says the 2015 loss to Hawthorn did make him savour the moment.

“I think so, yeah,” he said.

Hurn and Matt Priddis after the 2015 losing grand final which he says made him appreciate this year more.

Because prior to that, winning premierships just seemed to happen for Hurn. There was an under-19 flag at Centrals in 2003, back to back league flags in 2004 and 2005.

“I got lucky, I won two flags in 16 games or something like that,” he said.

There was also a district cricket flag with Northern Districts in 2004-2005.

“So I thought ‘oh well, that’s how they are, keep playing and they keep coming around’,” he said.

“I think you appreciate it a bit more when you get older because you understand how hard they are to get there and then win one.”

While he won’t watch a replay, moments from the day still flash through his mind when he’s running across a dusty paddock with no one else around.

“A week will go by and I think it’s normal and move on, then I see people down the street and they’re excited because they saw it and have their story to tell so you think about it again,” Hurn said.

“Every year when you first get back going again you do think ‘this is why I’m running’.

“So this year we know we’ve won it and are really excited about it, but until next year if someone else wins it or we win it again, there will be even more appreciation of what we did.”

Originally published as Premiership skipper Shannon Hurn reflects on his journey in football