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A painful loss, icy waters and two bricks

”In the hour of greatest slaughter, the great avenger is being born.” – Paul Kelly, Bradman

The siren goes and everything stops. For a few moments anyway. There’s an energy in the stadium that rises and falls like a wave, but you have none.

You look up at the scoreboard and it doesn’t seem real. Hell, the last two hours don’t feel real. Walking off the ground to the boos of your own and cheers of theirs, you get the feeling deep inside your soul that things are about to feel very real indeed.

Round 9, 2011. West Coast 26.19 (175) d Western Bulldogs 8.4 (52).

You can imagine the flight home. It felt like we’d gone via Denmark.

Anyone who has played footy for a while at any level has been in a side that’s been belted. It’s just one of those unpleasant certainties of a football life. But there are a few games in a player’s career that can leave you shell-shocked.

The 2011 debacle in Perth had the added stink of an ageing playing list and a coach under pressure to keep his job. A footy club is incredible at keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length to create a world inside itself, but when defeats break the 100-point barrier, those tensions and attacks from the outside can seep through.

The most uncomfortable thing in the aftermath of our trip to Perth was the silence. The coaching staff, led by ”Rocket” Eade, had decided on a tough love approach that was pretty lean on the ”love”.

Our instructions after the game were very clear: ”Come prepared to work, come prepared to hurt.”
Where normally the day after catching the ”red eye” is about treatment, a paddle in the salt water, a long walk, a massage and hopefully some sleep, we headed to Victoria University for a searching swim session, in the vicinity of two kilometres. The mood set by our fitness boss Bill Davoren – and with not a single coach at the pool – added to the growing unease.

We were then sent home with a kicker: be at Port Melbourne beach the next morning, 5 o’clock, and bring two bricks. The dank smell in the air told me we weren’t getting an early start to build a fence. I’m sure all of us closed our eyes that night for a while, but you couldn’t call it sleep. My two bricks sat neatly next to my bedroom door, but I felt like I had a dozen in my stomach. That’s what shame feels like. Pre-dawn, the full roster plunged into the icy water off the pier and swam for shore. Cold and shaking, we then stood in a circle with bricks outstretched, and said hello to Mr Pain.

For a moment you fight the pain on your own until the penny drops as to why you’re there in the first place. It’s about you holding up your bricks to make life easier for the bloke next to you, and him doing the same for you. A footy team at its most basic point.

Though tinged with anger, the voices of our coaches returned to our world and ”encouraged” us not to be the first to let our arms fall. This went on for quite a while.

Our next set of instructions were laid out: meet back at the club in a few hours, and be ready for a football session. The players who didn’t go back to bed for an emergency kip gathered for breakfast in a cafe near the pier. It’s only toast, coffee and company, but the redemption had begun. As players we were already leaning on each other, because you only had each other.

Back at the club, guys readied themselves for training as if they were going to war and might not come home. Training was mapped out by a still-seething Rocket.

Just before we took to the track, Rocket read out six or seven names and told us they were the blokes who competed. I wasn’t one of them. Telling a footballer he’s not competitive is to disembowel him. Daniel Cross was in the group of competitors.

The footy session was as brutal as it gets in the modern era of sports science and individually managed training loads. A thumb and a shoulder were dislocated in the ”search” for competitors, but the standout in each of the drills was a little fella with dreadlocks called Luke Dahlhaus.

His competitive spirit shone, and though he was about to make himself known to the rest of the footy world in a few days, on this day he put himself on the internal map. When I see Luke today, I’m reminded of that line from Paul Kelly’s tribute to ”The Don”. The physical purge complete, the next phase was the mechanics. Footy is played with the head and the heart – we’d dealt with the heart, now it was time for the duality of why we do the things we do when the pressure comes. How your actions affect your teammates around you.

Watching the game tape wasn’t pretty, but with Rocket in full swing something rather strange happened. The fire alarm went off, a heaving siren with the warning, ”THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”

Rocket tried to yell over the alarm, but it got louder and louder. Even in the depths of a 100-point depression I thought to myself, ”This will be funny one day.”

The rest of the week was a build. There was still steel in the eyes, but where there had been silence some warmth re-entered our world. Win together, lose together. Us against the world is not just a catchy line but an accurate description of how you feel in times like these.

We lost to the Saints that week too, but every now and then it’s not just about the four points. We were all elevated into the group that included Daniel Cross. Competitors. For 200 games he has been a ruthless competitor. We couldn’t be prouder of him.

The article originally appeared in The Age.