How one tackle in 2010 saved Hawthorn’s greatest coach Alastair Clarkson
IT almost never happened! As Alastair Clarkson prepares to coach his 300th game at Hawthorn, GLENN MCFARLANE looks back on the moment that saved his career.
Hawthorn
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IT was the dying moments of a game that threatened to be the undoing of a premiership coach.
Hawthorn’s Alastair Clarkson watched helplessly from the coaches’ box in the last minute of the Round 8, 2010, clash with Richmond. His team was clinging to a three-point lead as Tiger Shane Tuck prepared to unload a shot on the run from 50m that could have stolen the game.
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Just under 600 days earlier, Clarkson had been feted as the architect of Hawthorn’s 2008 premiership win. That flag was meant to be the start of the club’s next dynasty. But the reigning premiers had missed the finals in 2009, and after winning the Round 1 game against Melbourne in 2010, lost the next six games leading into the Tigers’ clash.
Clarkson knew he was under pressure and coaching for his future. As he watched Tuck run towards the Punt Rd end goals with less than 50 seconds left, he wondered how much time was left on his own coaching clock.
THE PRESIDENT’S PLAN
A fortnight earlier, Kennett sent an email to members with an underlying message — Clarkson was in trouble. It read: “Reputation and goodwill have been totally used up. Everyone is on notice. No excuses accepted. The coach has put the players on notice; I have done the same with the coaches, and I expect you, the members, to do the same with me.”
Kennett addressed the Hawthorn coaches after the Round 6 loss to Essendon, drawing a pyramid on the whiteboard, detailing their accountability to the members.
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When one of the coaching staff asked Clarkson if Kennett’s pyramid was a box, as detailed in the book, Playing To Win, he said:
I think it was a coffin.
Clarkson wasn’t aware Kennett had floated the extraordinary suggestion the coach should be sent back to coach the Box Hill Hawks in the VFL for a week or two.
Chief executive Stuart Fox, club great Jason Dunstall and Clarkson’s right-hand man at the time Mark Evans kept the information from Clarkson, and sought to buy the coach time in order to bring about a much-needed win.
Kennett this week joked: “I can’t remember (saying he should be sent back to the VFL), it was a long time ago.”
“One of the roles of a leader is to stir the juices when you think they need to be stirred in order to achieve positive outcomes.
“It was all for a purpose, sometimes to satisfy members and to keep them part of a vibrant team ... to stir yourself, or to stir your coach, or to stir your players.”
CLARKO’S CHANGES
As Kennett stirred the juices, Clarkson was doing something infinitely more important — he was changing game plans on the run.
Having engineered a strategy that helped win the flag in 2008, he set about dismantling parts of it in the fortnight leading into that Richmond game. Part of the change was a significant increase to the club’s interchange rotations and altering ball movement.
He knew there was plenty at stake. He had a contract for another season, but sensed it meant little to a president on the warpath if the losses kept mounting.
Clarkson instituted some of those changes in the days before the Round 7 game against West Coast, which the club lost by eight points.
They were bedded down more specifically at a team meeting leading into the Richmond game a week later. He expressed the gravity of the situation, with one source saying he told the players: “We either change now ... or they (the board) will change us”.
Campbell Brown recalled how the players had complete faith in Clarkson, but couldn’t understand why their old system wasn’t working early in 2010.
“We had been pulling our hair out about what was going wrong,” Brown said.
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“We’d had a good preseason, we didn’t have the injuries we’d had the year before yet we were still struggling.
“Clarko, David Rath, and the coaches spent a lot of time looking at the trends of the game and one of the key things they came up with was we weren’t rotating enough on the bench.”
A source said Clarkson’s determination never wavered, even with the president breathing down his neck: “The thing about Clarko is he is equal parts fierce and determination.”
THE GAME
The game marked Campbell Brown’s 150th game as a Hawthorn, He only half joked this week when he said he was prepared to do almost anything to win it.
It also marked Shaun Burgoyne’s first game with the club after joining from Port Adelaide.
Brown said: “As players we knew the pressure Clarko was under. Jeff would sit us down at the start of each year and basically say the only reason we are here is to win a premiership.”
Anything less was considered a failure.
“We didn’t know Jeff wanted to drop Clarko to the VFL until later. In a sense, Jeff probably thought, ‘What do you do when the coach is coaching badly? You send him back to the VFL’. It’s quite extraordinary really when you think about it now.”
Brad Sewell said the players saw Kennett “really putting the heat on the footy department ... I don’t know when it was that he suggested that it might not be a bad idea for Clarko going back to Box Hill. Jeff probably thought, ‘If it is good enough for the players to go back, then it is good enough for the coach.”
Leading into that match, Richmond hadn’t yet won a game under new coach Damien Hardwick (Clarkson’s former lieutenant); Hawthorn had won only one for the year.
The Tigers kicked the opening two goals and led by two points at quarter-time. Hawthorn edged ahead in the next two quarters and led by 11 points at the last change.
When Cyril Rioli kicked a goal late in the game — after Brown clashed with Daniel Jackson — it seemed as if the Hawks might be safe.
“I was nice and fired up, and I almost didn’t care whether I played the next week or not,” Brown said. “I wanted to tick off the milestone, and we desperately needed the win.”
But late goals to Matt White and Jack Riewoldt dragged the margin back to three points with four minutes remaining. A nightmare scenario loomed.
THE TACKLE
A Hawks’ kick out of defence towards Mitchell at halfback was spoiled from behind by Tuck, who gathered possession and set off towards goal. Less than a minute was left.
Tuck recalled: “I thought I had time to kick it ...”
#AFL360 This tackle by Sam Mitchell on Shane Tuck saving Clarkson's job back in 2010 when the Hawks were 1 win & 6 losses. #afl360 #AFL360 pic.twitter.com/LYdgWKMuwK
— Frank Van West (@FrankFvanwest7) April 20, 2017
Mitchell, who later called the match “a line in the sand game” where “something had to change” for the club, launched at full stretch and dragged Tuck down at the precise moment he was motioning to kick. The ball spilt free; the game was saved.
“I would have loved to have had a couple more steps, and taken a shot,” Tuck said. “But Mitch was in the right place at the right time.”
Brown watched in awe.
Mitch did the Superman ... and just brought Tuck down.
Kennett smiled this week when recalling the tackle: “I am only hoping that tackle and that game might be viewed by my (Liberal) colleagues in Canberra with the same sort of expectation that they can get their act together and go on and win the next election.”
THE LEGACY
That was the first of seven wins in a row for Hawthorn, and the season ended in a finals appearance.
A year later, the Hawks narrowly lost a preliminary final. Then Clarkson and his restructured team reeled off four successive Grand Finals appearances — a loss to Sydney in 2012, and a three-peat of premierships from 2013 to 2015.
He was elevated to coaching royalty, and tonight passes John Kennedy as Hawthorn’s longest serving coach in terms of games.
Even the man himself has conceded all that might have changed without Mitchell’s desperate lunge at Tuck.
“Now I don’t know whether he (Tuck) would have kicked it, but I’m glad Sam never gave him the chance to get his boot on the ball,” Clarkson said.
“Had that (kick) sailed through, I might not have even seen any more of season 2010.”
Brad Sewell knew it was a turning point at the time, but sees it as even more significant through the prism of history.
“I don’t think until you look at it retrospectively that you can appreciate the gravitas of that game, and that Mitch tackle,” Sewell said. “If they (Richmond) win the game, I get the impression that Jeff had a wrecking ball ... a sledgehammer ... to take that to arguably Hawthorn’s greatest coach of all-time.”
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