Luke Beveridge’s side were lopsided, occasionally astonishing and frequently bewildering – and now rue another lost year
. They finally got their win in Geelong. They may well have the Brownlow medallist and All Australian captain. They’ll almost certainly have the All Australian ruckman. But it was another lost year. As always, they were determined to make things as difficult as possible for themselves. As always, they were a lopsided, occasionally astonishing and frequently bewildering team. They lost so many close games. They’ve coughed up so many leads. They left the Sydney and Geelong games on the table.
“You reap what you sow,” Luke Beveridge said on Saturday night. Of all the senior coaches, and of all the prominent people in football over the last 10 years, he’s the hardest to get a proper read on. Assessing someone like Damien Hardwick is easy. There’s a trajectory. There’s the clean out, the build, the heartbreak, the rock bottom, the sudden rise, the sustained dominance and the petering out.
But there’s no clear pattern and narrative to the Luke Beveridge story. In amateur footy, it couldn’t have been simpler – C Grade Flag, into B Grade flag, into A Grade flag. No one had done that before. In the big league, it’s more complicated. This is a club that’s played in grand finals four times in 100 years. Beveridge has coached them to two of those. But he can also send his supporter base spare.
But just when you’re about to give up on them, there is magic. Everything just flows. Sometimes it’s a half. Sometimes it’s a month. It buys the coach lot of time, a lot of influence and a lot of rope. Luke Darcy, a board member, Beveridge backer, broadcaster and father of a listed player, backed him in with a statement that, by his standards, was light on for the word “extraordinary”.
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