This was published 8 years ago
Eddie Betts and THAT goal: 'I just try to make stuff up'
By Greg Baum
At footy quiz nights in years to come, a freeze-frame image will be shown of Eddie Betts straddling the boundary line, 50 metres out, in a dead end with three players blocking his path, accompanied by the question: "What happens next?" And everyone will smile, and shake their head, and put themselves down for a correct answer, because who will ever forget that within two seconds of this moment, Betts had kicked the goal of 2016?
How, even Betts can't say. "Seriously, I don't really think when I'm out there," he said. "I just try to make stuff up."
Eddie Betts is the game's best small forward. Credit: Getty Images
This is what he concocted this time. The ball was bouncing innocuously towards the boundary line. Four players were closing. GWS' Nick Haynes was there first, but hesitated momentarily, worried about deliberate out of bounds. "That was going through my head the whole time," he said. Betts slid in and put his hand on the ball, simultaneously killing it and keeping it alive. "I was one second too late," said Haynes.
Meantime, Adelaide's Mitch McGovern arrived and leapt over Betts to shepherd out GWS' Adam Tomlinson. "I was just trying to block and create space," McGovern said. "As everyone knows, Eddie doesn't need much space to make things happen."
Betts can drag a crowd to its feet, as if magnetised.Credit: Getty Images
Metres away, field umpire Justin Schmidt thought to himself: "What's he going to do here?" Still it looked like a case of nothing to see here, move along. But Haynes had a new concern. "I thought, don't let him back through the middle," he said. He lunged at Betts, as both scrambled to their feet, cannoning into McGovern and Tomlinson and opening up a slit in space and time. "Haynes overstepped towards the corridor, so I thought, if there's any way out, it's going to be along the boundary," Betts said. "If it goes out, it goes out."
Possibly, Betts read Haynes' mind; defenders always guard the corridor. But Betts doesn't need a corridor; the eye of a needle is enough.
Boundary umpire Mark Thomson, an Adelaide local, was on the spot, antennae up. "If you're not tuned in before, you're definitely tuned in when Eddie's near the boundary line with the goals in sight," he said. "He gets your attention as a boundary umpire."
Betts, throughout, kept the ball in. "There was just that one last movement where he tucked the ball into his body before he ran back over the line," Thomson said. "It got extremely close. He wouldn't have wanted to take the ball out any further. He was definitely on the edge." When he got home that night, Thomson's wife said to him she was relieved he hadn't called it out. "I wouldn't have been a popular person in Adelaide town," he said.
Betts' son Lewis, right, calls his dad by his full name when he tries to recreate the miracle goal.Credit: Getty Images
Suddenly, miraculously, Betts was in the clear, 40 from goal, dragging 50,000 to their feet as if magnetised. Tomlinson sensed this twist, but had to manouevre around McGovern. "I pushed him in the side, just after he kicked it, but by then it was too late," he said.
Upstairs, Fox Footy director Jeremy Jones was fast on the draw, switching immediately to a wide shot. "You've got to be ready for anything when Eddie's got the ball," he said. In the movies, the lordly director calls out a camera number, but footy is too fast for that. "I'm calling the cameraman, letting him know I'm coming to him, and at the same time pressing the button," Jones said.
Schmidt knew what would happen next. "As soon as he kicked it, I thought, there's no way that's going to miss," he said. For Betts, this was the easy part. "To be honest, I didn't even look at the goals," he said. "I knew the goals were in that direction. It's goal sense. If you know where the goals are, sometimes you just throw it on the boot and it ends up going through."
When he looked at the footage later, he noticed that Tom Lynch was alone in the goal square. It was academic anyway. Betts is not selfish, but he is self-aware. "The forward line coach, David Teague, has given me a licence to have a crack from anywhere," he said. "He says, more than likely they go in for you." Unerringly, this one did.
For Betts, this was goal No.428 in league football, but it had in its DNA all the knowing and know-how of the previous 427, including two other goals-of-the-year. It was the sort of goal that laughs in the face of the complex systems developed to impose order on this inherently chaotic game. Suddenly, all the mumbo jumbo was redundant. This year's pet is "field position". Field position now meant standing where you were, chortling.
Adelaide Oval erupted. None of the umpires had heard a roar quite like it. Schmidt and fellow umpire Ray Chamberlain looked at one another and shook their heads. On his way back to the centre, Schmidt and Crows veteran Scott Thompson exchanged winks, code for "how about that?" The Crows players who mobbed Betts all asked the same question: "Can I have the car?" "I told them, they don't give cars any more," Betts said. "I won it last year and I didn't get a car."
In the moment, the magic was lost on the Giants players. "With 55,000 cheering, it was pretty deflating," said Tomlinson. "I was on my hands-and-knees; I couldn't believe he got away." Haynes was flagellating himself for not taking it out. "It wasn't 'til after the game when I saw the footage that I knew how good a goal it was," he said. "But I still think I should have done better. That was in my head, not his brilliance." Tomlinson consoled him. "I said, mate, don't worry about it. Keep going, get him next time. The backline's one place where you can't dwell."
Betts raised his arms, half-playing to the crowd, half-sheepishly. "I don't like to be pumped up on the ground," he said. "When I kick 'em, I feel embarrassed, to be honest." Oh to be so red-faced!
Watching from afar, Peter Daicos said: "It was one out of the box." Daicos should know; it used to be his box. By one, he means unique. "The thing about Betts," continued Daicos, "is that he's not one-dimensional in the way he wins the ball and how he kicks his goals. A lot of players have just got a forward and a reverse and that's the end of things. What usually happens is lead, mark, kick a goal. How many goals are kicked like that? Probably 70 per cent.
"The thing that makes guys like Eddie and Rioli unique is that no two goals are the same."
There it is, in a nutshell. Just when you thought you'd seen every possible way to kick a goal, here was a new one. This did not dawn immediately on Betts himself. "That's the thing," he said. "I don't think that it was a good goal. Everyone's telling me it's amazing. To me, it doesn't feel like a good goal." But he sees that what marks this goal out from all others is its construction. It comes with its own patent. If it was a code, and he was a spy, he would now have to swallow it.
Or maybe not. Daicos suspects Betts had kicked this goal many times before, at training and in his mind. "He's been in that place before," he said. Betts affirms it. "Since I was a little kid, I've been trying to kick the impossible goal," he said. For he and indigenous teammates Charlie Cameron and Cam Ellis-Yolmen, it is a quest without end. "You want to go for the angles," he said. "You want to make it hard for yourself. You want to see what you can do. I practise a lot. But I have innate goal sense as well."
The sum of it all is one of the most compelling figures in the game today. Pocket-sized, dumpy by the standard of AFL bodies, wearing shorts that hang off him, he is the unlikely kicker of unlikelier goals. Since Patty Dangerfield decamped, he has become the Crows' foremost darling. In their shop, not only have all the No.18 guernseys sold out, but also all the 1s and 8s, too.
Last year, he kicked goal-of-the-year, an on-the-run left-foot torpedo from the boundary. Now lightning has struck twice: same round – indigenous, no less – same ground, same pocket, different kick, same result. Perhaps they should put his name on the pocket? "I've already got the other pocket named after me," Betts said. He has, too, complete with sign on the old scoreboard.
Betts mania was inescapable in Adelaide last week, and didn't stop at Betts' front door. At home on Sunday morning, Betts' three-year-old son Lewis bumbled around in front of the TV, trying to re-enact the goal. "'Eddie Betts, Eddie Betts'," said dad, rat-a-tat. "He doesn't call me Dad. It's 'Eddie Betts'."
The same staccato catchcry echoed all around town, and across the country. If the high-flying 2016 Crows have a call sign, this is it.