'Second Division' season start for Hawks
A home game against North represents a winning opportunity for Sammy's Hawks, but standby for the usual fixture pain thereafter thanks to our 'friends' at the AFL.
We will be back on Twitter Spaces to analyse Hawthorn’s fixture when it drops some time in the next few days. Keep checking @hawksinsiders for details.
The first piece of the complex puzzle that is the 2022 AFL fixture has been unveiled and for Hawthorn, it means an MCG home game against North Melbourne.
There is some good and some bad with that.
The good is that it should present Hawthorn with some sort of home ground advantage. The Kangas haven’t knocked the Hawks off at the MCG since 2008, although there have been just three clashes there between them since.
North is also genuinely unfamiliar with the venue and the season opener against the Hawks will be just their fifth game at the MCG since 2018. North hasn’t won there since 2017, so from a footballing perspective, this really is a winnable game for Hawthorn in many respects. It is the dream start.
The 1:10pm time-slot is great for families - especially at that time of year when it doesn’t really conflict with junior sport, so the Hawks should be able to bank on around 40,000 or so at the game.
Sam Mitchell’s first game as coach, hopefully with James Sicily, Jack Gunston and Will Day back in the side should generate plenty of excitement of its own.
To corporates and broadcasters, 1:10pm Sunday is footy’s version of the graveyard slot, so the commercial team at the club won’t be passing around the celebratory cigars just yet. It will be tough sledding to fill the functions and the corporate suites.
It is also the time-slot almost always reserved for the AFL’s “second division” clubs. And to be fair, it is hard to mount the case for the Hawks to earn prime-time billing any time soon.
So what is go be expected and hoped for when the rest of the fixture..ahem, schedule is released in the next few days?
ROUND TWO
It was the smart play by the AFL not to schedule the Swans at the SCG for the season opener, with Lance Franklin needing five goals to reach the magical 1000 goal milestone. Given his career average of 3.12 goals a game, he is more likely to reach it in the second game of the season. That’s the weekend to schedule the Swans to play at home and let’s hope it is against Hawthorn. Buddy breaking the milestone, but four premiership points to the Hawks would make for the perfect result.
EASTER MONDAY
The Cats have been the home team for the last two Easter Monday games (the 2020 game didn’t go ahead) so it stands to reason that the Hawks get the nod in for the 2022 encounter, which won’t be played until round five. It also shapes as the ideal game for the Hawks to stage some sort of tribute to Alastair Clarkson and Shaun Burgoyne, given the fans couldn’t get to the final game of the last season because of COVID. The club can play highlights of the 2013 preliminary final on heavy rotation on the MCG scoreboard before the game for our friends from down the highway. “Burgoyne. To put them in front! He doesn’t miss…”
PRIME TIME
Even when they were regularly winning flags, the Hawks didn’t play in all that many prime-time games, so let’s not expect much joy in 2022. Hawthorn only featured once on a Friday night last season and that’s because it was during the bye period and there wasn’t all that much inventory to go around. At least they beat the Swans.
The AFL has 23 Friday nights and roughly eight Thursday nights to fill and I’d be staggered if the Hawks feature in more than three of them. When they’re not winning, they tend to be all but invisible to the AFL fixturing team, as the opening round fixture amply demonstrates.
Look for the AFL to back in Carlton, St Kilda and Essendon as the big improvers and more worthy of prime-time slots than Hawthorn in 2022.
TASMANIA
Hawthorn’s home away from home for at least 12 more months. Despite the narrow loss, the Essendon game last season was one of the high points for the season for Hawthorn from a commercial perspective. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes and nobody seemed to mind that ‘Hawk Park’ was mainly clad in red-and-black.
Once COVID struck Victoria late last season, the round 21 clash with Collingwood was rescheduled to Tasmania and also sold out in an instant, only for it to be moved back to the MCG when Tassie shut its borders. My prediction is that Collingwood will be scheduled in Launceston to play the Hawks in 2022, as a make good to the local Magpie fans who were dudded last season and also as a proof of concept ahead of Tassie getting its own team.
MARVEL HOME GAME
The number one gripe of all Hawthorn fans is having to play a home game at the Docklands, which in 2022 will be in the midst of a redevelopment. Collingwood and Richmond are also lumbered with Marvel home games, it should be noted, although the gripe here is that at a time when the Hawks were doing all the heavy lifting in Tasmania, they weren’t given seven MCG home games every year as a token of the AFL’s appreciation.
As long as the Marvel home game does not come against one of the tenant clubs, and we already know it won’t be North Melbourne, it is not that big a deal. Call me a contrarian, but on a frigid July night, a home game under the roof might be a good thing.
ESSENDON
Another sign of disrespect towards Hawthorn, which for many years had the largest, or close to largest membership base in the AFL, is that pretty much every away game against the Bombers is played at Marvel Stadium. Last season’s opening game being a case in point. Even Essendon fans prefer to play their home games against Hawthorn at the MCG because they know that Hawk fans will turn up in large numbers and that means more money in their club’s coffers.
The Hawthorn-Essendon rivalry remains a great one but doesn’t always get the respect it deserves from the AFL.
Ashley Browne is a Hawks Insiders contributor, the author of A Season Like No Other: AFL 2020, and a senior writer at the AFL Record and SEN. Follow him on Twitter @hashbrowne.