Debunking Damo

Leading AFL journalist Damien Barrett has had the Hawks in his sights all year, and many fans are sick of it. It is time his views were challenged.

Veteran reporter and news breaker Damien Barrett hasn’t let up on the Hawks. Be it on Channel Nine, Triple M or AFL.com.au, he has been relentless in his criticism of most aspects of the club throughout 2023. Bits and pieces of his commentary are correct, but we believe that on several matters he is either misinformed or perhaps even a touch mischievous.

We at ‘Hawks Insiders’ have decided to take some of his sweeping statements this season and place them under the microscope. We have taken the emotion out of it and used logic and facts as the basis for our rebuttal.

Let us know if you agree.

They’re not in the business, this year, of trying to win as many matches as they can. If you want to put a certain lens over that, the way they’ve structured themselves… it’s a form of tanking.

My definition of tanking is using the rules that allow losing to be of benefit.

I’m not saying they’re trying to lose matches, but they don’t have a list that’s going to allow them to win as many matches as they would have had they kept those players (Mitchell and O’Meara). And they’ve done that for a reason, they want to set themselves up better for the future.

Simon Morawetz: We all know the facts, but here they are anyway: Hawthorn went all-in on its rebuild at the end of last year, offloading more than 1000 games of experience and investing heavily in the next generation. Consequently, we have been smashed on the field this year, with a median margin of 59 points in our seven losses.

To this end, Barrett is not really saying anything we don’t already know. It’s when he brings the T word into it that it crosses the line.

The decisions we made were the right ones. We are miles off a premiership, so having Gunston, Mitchell and O’Meara in the team serves no long-term benefit. And make no mistake: if they’re on our list, they’re in the team. Without them, we can get more games into more youngsters in the positions they are meant to be learning. Barrett himself acknowledges that it’s been done to set ourselves up in the long run. We’re not the first club to rebuild. We’re just the first to really test the boundaries of one.

So is a hard rebuild “a form of tanking”?

Well, first of all you could also make the argument that our midfield is actually better without Mitchell and O’Meara, but that’s another story.

Despite the self-serving definition of tanking Barrett tries to apply, it’s clear that tanking means “trying to lose”. Barrett goes out of his way to make it clear he doesn’t think we are doing that. We’re not. But it is true we have set ourselves up in such a way that makes it hard to win.

The reason is that we neither want to win nor want to lose. Winning and losing is a very narrow mindset. It exists only within the four quarters of a single match and, right now, we are playing a longer game than that. We’re more concerned about making sure our squad builds up the requisite experience and cohesion for when the time comes to launch.

It would be wonderful if we can win a stack of games on the way, and I remain confident that we will win enough to avoid the spoon. But if we do end up last this year, more power to our rebuild.

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If the Hawks have managed just 41 goals this season, then it's gonna be a very long year. But they've deliberately planned for that.

Danny Prins: 2023 was always going to be a development year for the Hawthorn Football Club, but one thing is for sure. The Hawks didn’t plan for Jack Gunston’s departure or Mitch Lewis’ knee injury in preseason. Lewis and Gunston were, along with the evergreen Luke Breust, the cornerstones of Hawthorn’s forward set up in 2022, so to suggest that the club had planned for those outs, whether short term or permanent, is misleading to the wider football public.

What is true is that the Hawks have a scoring issue. Kicking a winning score in 2023 is going to be a week to week proposition, but the recently returned Mitch Lewis looks like he’ll help, and if Dylan Moore can return to something like his 2022 form, the Hawks will look far more dangerous in attack than they have so far this season.

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If the Hawks are to be judged on their ability to rack up self-inflicted public relations disasters, then they are elite. The Kennett mess. Paying Clarko a million bucks to NOT coach. The disastrous handling of a racism probe. Paying a Brownlow Medallist to play for another club this year. Gunston walking out. And this week’s offering was a doozy. Captain James Sicily bagged the state of Tasmania, which for 15 years has pumped millions and millions of dollars into the Hawthorn Football Club and is in the final stages of a pitch for an AFL licence. Nice one.

Danny Prins: The reality is the last few years of Kennett’s tenure hurt the Hawthorn Football Club. Hawks Insiders have covered the Kennett situation from a number of angles, but whichever way you look at it, the Hawks needed a change of leadership, and that’s what they got. It’s still early, but the seas already feel much calmer under Gowers.

The Clarkson situation was unfortunate. The club identified a need to go in a different direction to what Clarkson was providing. The handover was a reasonable idea in principle, but not all reasonable ideas can be well executed, and for the Hawks, this one missed the mark. The club was open, honest, and as transparent as possible throughout the entire situation. It just didn’t work.

The misrepresentation of Hawthorn’s involvement in handling of the racism probe will be discussed at greater length later in this article, but to attempt to hang a whole club for issues that they sought to identify, and resolve is an interesting stance to take.

Hawthorn’s decision to move on from Tom Mitchell has been discussed ad nauseum and that stats don’t lie. Hawthorn, with a midfield unit lead by Mitchell and O’Meara, went from 18^th in the competition in 2022 in clearances to 5^th in the competition in 2023. The price you pay to move on a player like Mitchell, who was stopping the development of Conor Nash, Jai Newcombe and Will Day, is to contribute to his wages. It’s a win-win situation for Hawthorn and Mitchell, and these types of mature discussions and decisions should be more prevalent in the AFL.

Let’s be very clear, Hawthorn played no part in Jack Gunston leaving the club. Gunston had gone through a tumultuous and heartbreaking year in 2022, and he felt that the best thing for his football, and the best thing for his well-being, was to explore new opportunities. Would Hawthorn have preferred to keep Gunston? Absolutely. Does Hawthorn begrudge Gunston moving? Absolutely not.

James Sicily learnt a valuable lesson when discussing anything as a club captain. Don’t try and step outside the lines or you will be shot down for your opinion. It doesn’t matter if you were joking, it doesn’t matter if the comment is taken out of context. Just don’t step outside the lines.

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I will never back away from criticising the Hawthorn Football Club for its handling of its investigation into racism at its club in 2008-16, no matter what happens from here…

Darren Levin: OK. That’s admirable. But if you’re never backing away from criticising Hawthorn, why not be consistent and never back down from criticising Tex Walker, Eddie McGuire and the Collingwood Football Club? I’ll hold my beer.

Why that period only, and not before or after? 

Well, this is an easy one to answer. The 2008-16 period is in focus — because, and wait for it — that’s the period in which these allegations were made. Hard to grasp, I know. Why didn’t Essendon dig into its entire 150-year history when it self-reported its alleged supplements breaches? Footy or otherwise, most investigations choose to focus on a specific time period rather than try and cover everything at once. If someone robbed your house on Monday, would the police launch an investigation into every burglary that happened before, after, or since the dawn of time?

But the club actually did go beyond that window to ensure that First Nations players were culturally safe today. It’s there in plain black and white on the club’s website. Citing the findings of the independent report it says:

“The process indicated the current environment at the club is culturally safe.”

Enough? Or do we need a Royal Commission?

And mainly – why not put the allegations to those being accused in the investigation, to allow a right of reply? 

So let’s play this out. Someone accuses someone else of historical racism. Those allegations are then put to the alleged perpetrator while the investigation is continuing. The alleged perpetrator then fully cooperates with the investigation gets onto their lawyer and shuts the whole thing down in 24 hours.

And why then dump the entirety of it on the AFL, and basically walk away from a situation it created, when it all got too big?

How could Hawthorn ever be involved in a truly independent investigation of a report it had commissioned? The fact is the AFL took over after Hawthorn submitted their findings to its Integrity Unit, setting up an independent panel to thoroughly investigate those claims. Hawthorn wasn’t washing its hands clean of this, Damo. They were just following process.

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While it remains impossible from the outside to foresee the bulk of the panel's findings and suggested sanctions, I maintain that Hawthorn Football Club needs to pay a price for the manner in which it commissioned its own report. I have no doubt it acted with good intent, but not allowing a forum for the allegations to be put to Clarkson and Fagan, and others, and then off-loading the entire matter to the AFL when it became impossible to complete, should not, in my eyes, go unpunished. I believe removal of national draft selections should be considered, no matter what the independent panel concludes.

Ashley Browne: The only grounds for taking away draft picks should be if a club was trying to gain an unfair competitive on-field advantage and the Hawks were hardly doing that. If you want to go down the path of docking national draft selections every time a club is guilty of poor process, then why not St Kilda for extending Brett Ratten’s contract and then sacking him before it even started.

If after all this, there is a requirement for some sort of sanction, then it needs to be financial.

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If your club has jagged at least one flag in each of the past six decades and 13 in total in that timeframe, then Hawks supporters have every reason to gloat. But strangely, in 2023 they seemingly have no great desire for their club other than to finish bottom of ladder and secure Harley Reid in the draft. Never seen a bunch of supporters more ecstatic with losing six of the first seven games of a season.

Simon Morawetz: This is a unique critique because it focuses not on the club, but on the fans. Evidently, we are behaving in a way that Barrett doesn’t approve of. How very “2023 footy media” of him to dictate the way we should act and feel.

It should go without saying, but here it is anyway: you are allowed to be happy even if your team has just lost again. You are allowed to be excited about the prospect of getting the top pick in the next draft.

No fan enjoys their team being on the bottom of the ladder. I, for one, have not enjoyed enduring four 10-goal defeats in the first eight rounds, especially not against Essendon and Geelong. The prospect of an early draft pick is just about the only good thing about it. Can we not find a positive? Are we supposed to just mope until October?

Fans relishing the benefits of having a bad team is not new. I remember seeing a couple of Melbourne fans on a train after a defeat, jovially discussing who they would take with their first two picks in the 2009 draft. I’m sure you’ve experienced similar gallows humour from friends who support low-ranked sides.

There are two simple factors at play behind the phenomenon Barrett has experienced: realism, and pragmatism. Realistically, we know full well we are not in a position to be attacking the top four. What “great desire” could we have for our team? To finish 11th? Pragmatically, if you’re going to suck, at least come away with the number one pick to show for it.

Now, I wouldn’t expect or accept this mentality inside the club. I want the boys trying, learning, pushing themselves at every opportunity. I want the coaches punishing soft efforts. I want mouthguards at training. We still need standards.

But for the fans on the outside looking in, watching on through defeat after heavy defeat, there’s no shame in focusing on the benefits of being at the bottom.