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Losing in the AFL is somehow at its most tolerable when Lance Franklin is the one wielding the knife.
When your team loses through underperforming or through an unfavourable whistle, defeat can be unbearable. Regret and a sense of injustice cloud the cruel days that follow.
But losing to greatness can be endured. Because even if it’s heartbreaking, there is respite in knowing that you lost to a higher power.
In the AFL, Lance Franklin is that higher power.
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When Franklin sunk the Crows in the 2007 elimination final from the left flank, Adelaide fans could find at least some solace in the fact that darkness descended on their season as the game’s brightest young star was born.
Four years later, this time in the MCG’s right pocket, Franklin set the same darkness upon Collingwood fans in the preliminary final.
Sitting in the crowd that Friday night, with a season and an era on the line, no rational Collingwood fan could have felt bitter or aggrieved with Franklin’s brilliance. A strange sense of calm passed over everyone wearing black and white, an almost beautiful resignation setting in.
There was no remorse or anger: only clarity. I imagine the feeling was similar to how Utah Jazz fans felt after Michael Jordan kept kissing them good night in the late ’90s.
The Hawks went on to lose a week after Franklin’s star ascended against Adelaide, and they lost four minutes after he inflicted existential confusion on Collingwood fans. Both times, Franklin’s talent, while incandescent, was drowned out by the quirk of Australian football being a team game, and both times Hawthorn had lesser teams.
Franklin also spent his first two seasons in red and white on lesser teams. In 2014, we didn’t realise that until the season’s final day, and last year it was only made definitive when Franklin’s season ended prematurely. This year, however, the Swans are not a lesser team. That’s not necessarily a reflection of their quality: it’s a reflection of a league that lacks a singular great team.
The Swans are a flawed side, but they’re in a league where having flaws is the trendiest fashion in 2016.
Sydney are elite at contested ball (second in the competition), inside 50 differential (third) and clearances (fifth). They play with force, speed and grit. You don’t have to look hard to see 2012 in this team.
A key difference between the 2012 and 2016 Swans, though, is that Mitch Morton’s role as the livewire, dynamic forward is now being filled by Lance Franklin. It’s also the key difference between these Swans and the rest of the league.
Last Friday night’s blockbuster between Sydney and Hawthorn was ugly and devoid of fluidity. As has been the case for much of the season, the cadences of Hawthorn’s ball movement were a few beats off, with forays forward that once took place with magnetic precision falling apart with uncharacteristic errors. Bradley Hill foolishly kicked to Isaac Smith when a handball would have sufficed, Sam Mitchell dropped a regulation mark, and so it went for the Hawks.
The Swans lacked the clinical demolition skills they needed to knock out Hawthorn. They let them hang around, and in the middle stages of the fourth quarter it was anyone’s game.
It was oddly fitting, and perhaps inevitable, that a game lacking any form of rhythm, played entirely in the mud, was decided by a jazz musician who skates on ice.
In the game’s early stages, where neither team could string together a few passes let alone trouble the goal-front, Franklin produced the first moment of brilliance, with a marvellous sidestep on the wing.
In the second quarter, he delivered one of the most perfect passes you’ll ever see, a delicately weighted bomb that sat perfectly for Gary Rohan to stream into goal. It was a kick that The Roar‘s Ryan Buckland astutely compared to Taylor Walker’s similarly majestic pass in last year’s elimination final against the Bulldogs.
After drifting out of the game during Hawthorn’s comeback, Franklin returned to the scene carrying daggers. With the Swans’ lead reduced to nine points and Hawthorn owning all the momentum midway through the final term, Sydney created a fast break from an errant Jonathon Ceglar handball. The ball found itself in Franklin’s hands, 80 metres from goal, with men in front of him but no clear option to take.
The greatest athletes succeed by making choices that never seemed to be even on the table. A Lionel Messi weave through five awestruck defenders. A swished Stephen Curry three from 35 feet that surprises even the rim. A Lance Franklin goal from 80 metres out.
As a Collingwood fan, it’s become custom to process the situation that presented itself to Franklin through the lens of Scott Pendlebury. Watch him artfully draw men towards him, misdirect defenders into specific running lanes with pump fakes like Tom Brady, and clear the space for the perfect pass. Franklin has never been about such meticulous process, though. Just eat the world, Lance.
Five minutes later, Franklin and Dan Hannebery ran a pick and roll that would have made Steve Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire proud, setting Franklin free to fire the nail in Hawthorn’s coffin from outside 50.
In a game that never really made sense, Franklin was the clarity that separated the two teams. In a season that hasn’t even begun to make sense, he may well prove to be the league’s clearest, most decisive presence, and be the force that separates Sydney from all comers.