Sydney Swans Can Little Afford To Lose
Ill-disciplined Swans players look frustrated out on the field. This has resulted in a number of incidents and free kicks, which have cost suspensions and goals. An injury hit side like the Sydney Swans can little afford to lose more players to suspension. A losing team like the Swans can ill afford to give away 50m penalties and free kicks which directly cost goals to the opposition. It has been a perfect storm of poor play, lack of effort, weak tackling, loss of contest and ill discipline over the last 12 weeks. This is not the red and white team that the competition has grown to respect over many years for its unstinting application to the job at hand. Swans AFL Team In Fall From Grace What I see as an observer is a group of young men with a reluctance to commit as deeply as before to the rigours of AFL football. Is this emotional scar tissue from the heavy grand final losses? It could be a manifestation of that on a subconscious level. The other thing I see from the outside is the extreme contrast between the lifestyles of pampered AFL elite footballers and the brutality demanded by the antagonistic contest during games. I have described the Peter Pan like existence of these footballers with no cost of living struggles like most young guys their age in the community. Plus, they are secluded from the bump and grind of everyday lives in a bid to keep them out of harm’s way. Keeping them away from the drugs and excessive alcohol that many young folk indulge in around Australia. Clubs keep in cotton wool their expensive cattle. Peter Pan Swans Unwilling To Fight Like Before Imagine living for the most part this buoyant lifestyle of wealth and clean living. Driving very nice cars and residing in beautiful homes, which most folk your own age would not be able to afford. It is life inside a rich bubble, where laughter and good times prevail. Yes, the physical demands of training are arduous but you can take pride in your body’s conditioning. You look and feel good, when things are going well. However, the actual price of this bountiful, if artificial lifestyle, is the extremely brutal contest on game day for those hours. The contrast must be acute! Are the Peter Pan Swans unwilling to fight like before? The Sydney Swans can little afford to lose another contest. These Aint Bloods The Sydney Swans can ill afford to lose another game in 2025. Quite apart from finals becoming out of reach, what about the rapidly expanding lack of respect from the competition? A black hole is opening up in this regard and it is sucking in decades of hard fought Blood’s sweat and tears. This current crop of players are ducking the contest and taking the easy way out when challenged. Is it selfishness out of self-preservation in a losing side? Is it a real lack of belief, down deep? Are the old timers too weak in the legs to continue to carry this team to greatness and the youngsters simply don’t measure up? I see weakness being pushed aside by opponents that want it more for longer. Has the good life away from the actual contest got too good and complacency has crept in? The Sydney Swans can little afford to lose any more respect. 2012 Premiers The Blue Collar Swans Of 2005 They used to call the Paul Roos coached Swan’s midfield a blue collar crew. Guys like Brett Kirk who looked ungainly going about it with the boot. What they lacked in class they more than made up for with guts and perspiration. Jude Bolton, Ryan O’Keefe, Luke Ablett and Amon Buchanan didn’t know much else but how to fight for every ball. James Rowbottom reminds me of them in many ways today. Maybe it is time to revive the spirit of the Bloods and get out the ritual knife to swap blood and spit like blood brothers in some ceremonial tradition. Perhaps, find something more real than social media and the digital doppelganger world. We are all being subsumed into a screen realm where the artificial copy takes over from the real. Is it any wonder that footballers might shy away from getting their faces rubbed in the dirt! “For example, Brett Kirk dived headlong into a pack to knock the ball clear and Adam Goodes was knocked to the ground after taking a mark. The Eagles attacked relentlessly as the time-clock ticked past 30 minutes, with Swans fans wondering whether the siren would ever blare. With just 10 seconds left to play, the Eagles mounted one last challenge as Dean Cox pumped the ball forward.” - (https://www.sydneyswans.com.au/club/history/premierships/2005) The Cheap Shots Encouraged In The AFL The current AFL football on-field action is replete with cheap shots in the form of hits after play has stopped. Pushes, shoves, slaps from behind when not expecting it. This kind of stuff is encouraged by line coaches to show the opposition who is boss, I suspect. Maybe it is the bitterness of the assistant coaches, who complain of not being renumerated enough since Covid? Now, it is coming out via their puppets - the playing group. The nastiness displayed by teams around the edges actually looks weak as piss, in my opinion. Drive by bumps and the like are all cheap shots. Boys do this kind of thing not real men. Anyways, this is the gladiatorial arena where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys have to fight like hell for 120 minutes. Is it any wonder that some reluctance may have creeped in? Changing gears from fun time in a world where everything is done for you to getting down and dirty and smashed from anywhere on the 360 degree circle would be tough, I reckon. Turning Pens Into Cobs How do you stoke the fires of aggressiveness without burning the place down? Riling up players without them crossing the line? I sense in the Swans a resistance in going down the gladiatorial route. The rabble like complaining about stuff on-field between them, during recent games, is a sign that they are not embracing the contest. Bring the mouth guards boys to training! Reigniting the fire for the fight amid a team that has grown soft in Neverland. Turning Pens into Cobs. We used to run up and down sand dunes until we vomited back in my junior footy days. The coach would punish us via this means after particularly poor contests. Can you crack the Utopian Neverlands of highly paid AFL players in the current era by such arcane ventures into the dark past of football lore? We will have to see, but probably not as a one off. These young fellas have a million reasons to feel like they are sitting pretty. “The Sydney Swans playing group, obviously, lack belief in what they are doing. Whatever head coach Dean Cox has been selling, they aint buying! It has been awful, as a longtime supporter, to watch the crumbling of this once great team. This rendition of the Swans AFL side has almost made it to the pinnacle twice. We all know about the disastrous grand final fails of 2022 and 2024. Now, however, the 2025 Cox coached Swans are sinking and will not even make the finals. So, what has gone so dreadfully wrong after the bright hopes at season beginning of a fresh start under longtime apprentice, the big fella, Dean Cox? Why is the team going backwards at a rate of knots?” - (https://wordsforweb.com.au/cox-coached-swans-are-sinking/) Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of The Stoic Golfer and America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump. ©WordsForWeb Read the full article
