Western Bulldogs get down to serious business after emotional preliminary final win

THE tears have dried, the hugging has stopped and now it’s down to the serious business for the Western Bulldogs, writes Mark Robinson.

Bob Murphy hugs Easton Wood after the preliminary final.

THE tears have dried, the hugging has stopped and now it’s down to the serious business.

It’s been serious throughout September, but nothing quite like what’s going to unravel this week and, more importantly, what’s going to unfold at the MCG on Saturday afternoon.

First it was West Coast on the road, then the Hawks at the ‘G and penultimately Greater Western Sydney on its own turf.

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That’s serious football from the Western Bulldogs.

And serious emotion.

How can anyone not be enveloped by the warmth and excitement of an underdog? Not a Johnny-come-lately underdog, but an underdog for most of its existence.

Bob Murphy celebrates the preliminary final win with Easton Wood.

The battlers from the west won the flag in 1954 and played in the 1961 Grand Final. What has followed has been 55 years in the wilderness.

Carlton’s Jack Elliott once called them tragic. He was half right and wholly disrespectful. But now the tables have turned. The Blues have been despairing since the turn of the century and the tragics are playing off for the premiership.

The scenes after the Bulldogs and Giants match on Saturday night is what sport is all about.

The scenes after the Bulldogs and Giants match on Saturday night is what sport is all about. Yes, it’s about winning and losing, but it’s mainly about people.

Hawthorn fans would look at the Bulldogs and wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s only a prelim, they’d say.

But it’s more than that.

Go ask a Bulldog fan how they feel.

For them it’s everything and, well, everything. Most of all it’s about loyalty and love. It’s about all those days in the outer and in the cold, wondering, hoping that one day, they too would get to experience what so many others have before them — Grand Final week.

The scenes on Saturday night gave you tingles.

Bulldogs celebrate after beating the Giants on Saturday night.

Players and officials crying and hugging is not the norm in the second last week of September and watching former Bulldogs great Tony Liberatore wrapping the club’s vice-president Susan Alberti in his arms in the grandstands was akin to watching a mother and son reunited after 30 years.

President Peter Gordon was front and centre. He hugged the coach, Bob Murphy, the players and the fence post at the top of the race before breaking down in tears inside the rooms. He is Bulldog through and through.

Then there was Bob Murphy. He stopped crying and cheering about 10pm on Saturday night, we’re told, and could barely lift his arms he was so sore. Mass hugging does that.

Of course this can’t be about Bob, but this journey from the Bulldogs, overcoming challenge after challenge, has Bob as its poster boy.

He is the spirit of Luke Beveridge’s message.

And the players? It’s difficult not to think everything is coming together for them.

All of them had dreamt of playing AFL, but none of them would have imagined they would be the ones representing the Western Bulldogs, representing all of its history, on a Grand Final day.

But, to dream it and achieve it is something else.

Clay Smith kicked four goals.

Marcus Bontempelli starred in the midfield.

The emotion will be carried with them this week and you wonder how Beveridge will deal with it. Use it? Park it? It is there and it’s real, so surely he embraces it.

You also wonder how Sydney coach John Longmire will approach it.

He’s coaching a team against a fairytale which has millions of followers.

The Swans are Sydney’s team, but the Bulldogs will be Australia’s team.

Pride only scratches at the surface.
Our team... Our club!
Brothers and sisters of Footscray, pick up your dancing shoes!

— Bob Murphy (@BobMurphy02) September 24, 2016

You little beauty!!!!!! 🐶🐶

— Lachlan Hunter (@lachhunter) September 24, 2016

But does it really matter? Will have any effect on mindset? Will it mean the Dogs run and tackle and pressure better than the Swans just because they are everyone’s darlings?

Longmire will be asked about it at his press conference today and you can expect him to offer the cliche’s favourite cliche: We can only control what we can control.

It’s all business for Longmire and the Swans as opposed to it being all adventure for the Bulldogs.

Sport is at its best when it throws up this kind of theatre.

Sydney players celebrate the win over Geelong. Picture. Phil Hillyard

Leicester City won the Premier League last season against the rich big boys, and who can forget the Boston Red Sox breaking the Curse of the Bambino when they won the World Series of baseball in 2004 for the first time in 86 years.

They are the life moments that are good for the soul, as Murphy would say.

The game itself promises plenty.

Both teams are relentless with their approach, so a highly contested affair is a given.

The Swans, however, are a touch brow-beaten. Aliir Aliir is in doubt with a knee injury, which poses a severe problem at the back, Callum Mills still has hamstring complaint, but the expectation is Jarrad McVeigh will get to the line.

Maybe Ted Richards, who will replace Aliir if he doesn’t get up, will forge a fairy tale of his own in what would be his final game of football.

The Swans will start strong favourites.

Buddy Franklin, Dan Hannebery, Josh Kennedy, Luke Parker Isaac Heeney, Tom Mitchell, Kieren Jack and Heath Grundy lead the all-Star cast.

They’ll go up against the likes Zaine Cordy (10 games), Josh Dunkley (16), Toby McLean (18), Joel Hamling (22), Tom Boyd (28), Caleb Daniel (33), Fletcher Roberts (36), Shane Biggs (41) and Clay Smith (46), just pups in the whole scheme of things.

And the Swans have a bunch of kids of their own; Xavier Richards (11 games), Sam Naismith (12), Aliir (13), Tom Papley (19), George Hewitt (23), Zak Jones (30) and Heeney (37).

It makes you think the excuse from some coaches, that they have so many players under 50 games, is nothing but hot air.

These kids are doing it, fairytale or not.