Making Their Mark: raw emotion in touching footage

The 2020 football season is captured in a fly-on-the-wall series that gives viewers an unfiltered look at this unforgettable time.

A scene from Amazon Prime’s sports docu-series, Making their Mark.

I’ve just caught the first episode of the compelling seven-part sports docu-series from JAMTV, Making Their Mark — a kind of reality-based workplace drama that follows iconic AFL identities from six Australian teams throughout one of the most challenging and bizarre seasons in the code’s history. That terrible time when COVID-19 tried so hard to lock us all down into existential despair. It’s beguiling, fascinating TV not just for those obsessed by sport but for anyone still trying to come to terms with what COVID has done to our lives.

Inspired by popular sports programs such as ESPN’s 30 for 3 and Amazon’s All Or Nothing, there are also elements of the HBO series Hard Knocks, which documents the daily routines of American NFL teams during the pre-season.

In preparation since early in 2019, it’s somewhat miraculously produced by Luke Tunnecliffe and directed by Gil Marsden, who previously co-produced and directed the Emmy-nominated doco series The Gymkhana Files, the automotive reality series described as “tire-shredding drift videos”, also for Amazon. (Motorsports fans will get the reference.)

The new show, eventually shot under awesome COVID restrictions, is not so much an encyclopaedic look at a sporting code but more of “a heroes’ narrative than your standard headline-based footy journalism,” Marsden told website Ministry of Sport, “a snapshot from an unforgettable period of time”. And Marsden and his many collaborators – especially his industrious five editors who cut more than 2500 hours of material – both document and rather artfully capture and edit the season’s most dramatic narratives, in a style far removed from the usual corporate marketing.

As Marden points out too, it’s a show that “speaks to a sea change in the role of media in sport”, a kind of alternative to its usual “polished and dialled-in” presentation.

“A young audience today is looking on Snapchat, Instagram, and they’re looking at unfiltered footage of their favourite athletes,” he says. “Something like this is an extension of that – it’s not polished, and it hasn’t been managed by the media departments.”

Champion players, cultural heroes to millions, become extremely relatable when they have to receive a looming nasal swab up those delicate nostrils and when the diligence and discipline of everyone in the game is required to ensure that contests can even take place.

Immersed in all this it’s easy to be reminded of the famous quote from Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films which changed the way Americans saw football by covering it as a kind of high cinematic art in the late 1960s, “Facts are fleeting; feelings are forever.” (He was the first to produce video content with orchestral music, ground-level slow motion, montage editing and narrators with big, echoing voices.)

Six teams with six different story lines and a cast of dozens of fascinating people, players, their families, coaches and officials, described by director Marsden as “character archetypes”, are followed by six film crews each with a dedicated story producer, all worried about how the game might continue when so many lives were being lost. And how they can come to terms with the radical reinvention of the game, so compromised by its severe health protocols and the limited movement and inconvenience of the teams.

The series follows six clubs through the 2020 season, Carlton, Adelaide, West Coast, Richmond and Greater Western Sydney. And intimately showcases a number of leading players including Carlton’s Eddie Betts, GWS captain Stephen Coniglio, Rory Sloane captain of Adelaide, along with Gold Coast coach Stuart Dew and Richmond leaders Damien Hardwick, Peggy O’Neal and Brendan Gale as they cope with and adapt to a season they could never have expected. Hubs in resort hotels in Queensland (one player describes them as “a paradise jail”), separation from young families, social distancing and seemingly endless health tests.

Carlton’s Eddie Betts is a compelling study from the start, back at the club where he became such a star with big things expected of him, now in his early thirties.

He’s a livewire prankster, highly articulate and sometimes quite properly intense when it comes to the racism he’s experienced as a player and as an Indigenous person. Sloane is interesting too, intelligent and rather gentle, now the sole captain of the Adelaide Crows, rebuilding after a controversial mass-exodus of players following a disastrous exercise in shambolic psychological team bonding. And there’s Stephen Coniglio from Greater Western Sydney who made it to the Grand Final in 2019 but lost to Richmond in a shocker and must help his club find new confidence. He looks like a block of testosterone on the field but is charming, intense and compassionate.

And the Richmond cohort provide a fascinating insight into how a club works to win another premiership after last year’s victory (the coach, Damian Hardwick, finally over what he calls “winner’s ache”) and maintain a winning football culture.

The series provides a visceral, (Marsden calls it “raw”) glimpse into game play, the team structure, the training, the psychology, the motivation, the discipline, the administration, media and the pastoral care that all fall under the umbrella of the coaches.

You get the impression that they are like the director of a play for the theatre or a film, a kind of group artist guiding but never dominating their materials. It’s all changed since the days of coaches like Alan Jeans, noted for sayings like: “players are just eggs; you can have them fried, boiled or poached, you can do anything with them, but they’re still eggs”.

It opens at the start of the 2020 season, and as it unfolds features not only triumphs and victorious jubilation but months of missed opportunities, near misses and relinquished last quarter leads, and the psychological effect on players and coaches. Thirty-three games will be played in 20 days; there will be tumult everywhere. Supported by the AFL, players will express support for the worldwide cause against systemic racism, the Black Lives Matter movement making a profound impression on the players, given the number of Indigenous players at most clubs, though the extensive commentary teams will remain steadfastly white.

And Brisbane will somehow in the midst of COVID’s worst months purloin the Grand Final from its traditional home in Melbourne and play it at night, despite unfounded fears the dewy turf at the Gabba would turn the ball into “a cake of soap”.

The first episode “Like No Other” economically establishes the main characters as they start to prepare for the new season, with the words of Richmond coach Hardwick cutting through ominously as he talks to his players, “The truth is it’s our story to write, the story you want it to be is determined by the man in that f...ing jumper.”

At that stage no-one knows how momentous that story will be. Then, amid talk from the government of “uncharted and unprecedented steps”, the virus arrives, though chirpy Richmond President Peggy O’Neill is so far unconcerned. “It’s like the common cold for most people,” she says. But the Carlton players are warned that without a strong immune system they won’t be able to tell the virus, “f... off, I’ll fight you.” And a prescient warning comes from their fitness guru Andrew Russell, “It might be that the team with the best immune system is going to win this year.”

At the end of the first episode, it’s as if we have entered a slow burn Stephen King epidemiology thriller, the imagery darker and creepier, as West Coast players wander into the underground corridors of a darkened, deserted stadium like scattered survivors with no idea what the future holds.

Surprisingly Making A Mark is from Amazon Prime, which has launched this fly-on-the-wall series into over 240 countries and territories around the world. And Amazon’s local executives are to be congratulated on their adherence to an old industry adage: to be successful globally you need to be successful locally.

But it’s hard to know just what all those international viewers will make of a game that legendary coach Kevin Sheedy once called “a ferocious court that can turn you upside down very quickly, mentally and even spiritually at times”. And played in a year with few other sports available to TV viewers anywhere in the world, when there will be no, or eventually a limited number of spectators who are so integral to the game. In the cocksure, irrefutable tones of loyalists they truly believe that, in some magical way, they are actual instruments of the teams’ success and failure.

Watching, I was reminded of something the great coach and player Malcolm Blight once said. “I would carry a note in my left pocket that I would discreetly look at during emotional times in the box.” The note said, simply, “Remember how hard it was to play the game.”

As this fascinating series reveals, 2020 sure was one like no other.

Making their Mark, Streaming on Amazon Prime.