The Gold Coast Suns is Classic Dimma

The Gold Coast Suns is Classic Dimma

GuyWhoLikesSport GuyWhoLikesSport

As a Tiger fan, watching Gold Coast beat the snot out of Melbourne looked familiar.

Painfully familiar.

Actually, painfully is overstating it.

I love Damien Hardwick for the joy he brought me with the three premierships and the general improvements to footy that his game style brought. His emphasis on territory and speed above perfection has made footy a better product.

It’s not only pain. I’m a bit happy for him.

Not for how he treated us at the end, but my love for him was so sincere that I just can’t find it within myself to hate him completely.

I feel how I assume Joe Alwyn felt when Taylor Swift was doing the Eras Tour.

They were together for a long time and loved each other I assume. Then they broke up and she became unquestionably the biggest star in the world.

Joe is fourth billing in The Brutalist.

It’s a situation where one side clearly won the breakup, but the loser is still grateful for the memories.

What exacerbated the pain this week was watching Richmond stodgily try and exit defence against last year’s worst forward half team, immediately after watching the Suns flow out of defence.

The Suns played with dash and dare.

They handballed forward and ran in waves, they took territory when it was available, their front half pressure was suffocating, they owned the geography of the game, and their defence worked on zoning and helping over the back.

It was all very Hardwick.

The classic Tiger principles have shone in Gold Coast’s stats across their two dominant wins. Gold Coast are +58 in inside 50s, +1590 in metres gained while scoring 71.5ppg from the front half and 74 from turnover.

It’s not exactly the same, though. Hardwick has iterated a bit at Gold Coast. But he premeditated his iteration at the end of his time at Punt Road.

Prior to the arrival of Hopper and Taranto, Hardwick had never prioritised clearances. Instead, he trusted structures behind the ball, pressure around the contest and an elite intercept game.

As a result, between 2017 and 2022, Richmond was last or second last in clearances four times and never better than 12th

When he brought in Hopper and Taranto, he clearly was looking for a little more out of his midfield without making wholesale game-style changes.

Obviously, that didn’t work with those two plodding mids, so he left citing a burnout which subsided after 34 days (yes I’m bitter about it. Only because I miss him).

Rowell, Anderson, and Miller provided Hardwick with the personnel to achieve the goal that he had at Tigerland when he brought in Hoper and Taranto.

When you add Bailey Humphrey who is clearly playing the Dustin Martin role and Sam Flanders who has been freed up spend more time on the ball by the instantly elite Dan Rioli, then you get the kind of varied and explosive midfield he was chasing.

Anderson particularly has been outrageous through two games this season, providing an inside out element that the Richmond midfielders never did outside of Dusty. He is averaging 13 contested possessions, 600m gained, and 8.5 score involvements.

Bailey Smith is the only other player this year who is gaining more than 600 metres, getting more than 10 contested possessions, and getting involved in at least 8 scores. No player did it last year.

But the explosiveness is midfield-wide. Even Rowell has added a Cripps-ish power to his game where he is getting ball on the outside as well as his usual inside dominance, and he’s seriously improving with his ball use.

The numbers bear it out. The Suns currently lead footy in clearances and are third in stoppage scoring without sacrificing core Hardwick principles.

Granted some of this could be that they played Melbourne and West Coast – two teams who have struggled to stem opposition scoring from stoppage – but it doesn’t feel like it.

It feels like this is a good list learning to play a legendary game style.

It’s a bit like Guy Ritchie iterating on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels when he made Snatch two years later.

They’re both have the same kind of talky, grungy, cockney Tarantino-vibe but Lock, Stock is the prototype while Snatch is a little more polished. In the same way, Hardwick’s surge game-style from Richmond is the prototype, while Gold Coast is the evolutionary version adding some bigger stars to be cogs in a similar but not the same machine.

In this analogy, Dan Rioli is either Jason Statham or Vinnie Jones.

I’m not saying it’s the same. The Suns get more disposals than Richmond ever did, for instance.

I’m also not expecting a Gold Coast dynasty.

What I’m saying is that it can simultaneously hurt to see your ex get what they wanted, and you can be happy that they’re happy.

 

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