- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Luke Parker is not the footballer he once was.
It’s written in everything he’s done on the footy field this season. His decision-making is just that fraction slower, and as a result kicks that would usually find the left nipple of a teammate with perfect precision go awry, either with the onset of pressure on him or on his intended target. His ball-handling, once as slick as any inside midfielder in the game, now contains the occasional fumble that sticks out like a sore thumb for anyone who witnessed him in his peak years.
He disappears from games for lengthy stints now, pushed out of the inside midfield role that he made his own for the best part of a decade, and forced to hunt scraps in the death position that is the half-forward line in a team that, recently, has had trouble getting it down there for lengthy periods.
Most obviously, that one of the most widely respected footballers in the game has passed his best is evident in the fact that Sydney went without him for two-thirds of the season, first with a broken arm, last with a VFL suspension, and in the middle because they just couldn’t find a spot in a dominant side, and whether by correlation or causation, looked significantly better when he wasn’t required.
But there’s something incredibly compelling about a player on the wrong side of 30 winding back the clock, however briefly, and doing a job that hearkens back to their glory days. In the endless march of football eternity, time stops for no one, but occasionally someone does hit the rewind button.
History will say that the Swans defeated Essendon on Friday night handily, the margin swelling to 39 points at the end. They will probably say that Isaac Heeney won the three Brownlow votes for another slashing second half in which he overcame a dogged run-with job from Jye Caldwell to flip the game on its head as a high-marking forward.
The record books will show that the Bombers capitulated in the second half in the face of an upping of the ante from the ladder-leaders, and now all but guaranteed minor premiers, and that all the problems the naysayers foretold during their early-season run of wins which were then expanded on when the bottom fell out after the byes are going to keep this club mired in mid-table mediocrity.
In short, this was a game to confirm everything we knew already about these two clubs: the Bombers have a long summer ahead, and the Swans can only turn it on for 30 minutes at a time, but remain fearsome enough in that period that they cannot be discounted as two home finals loom, even if they’re still serving up far more slop than a ladder-leading team ever should be this deep into a season.
Well, almost everything we knew: the revelation of the night, as it turned out, was Parker, and the knowledge that, in a team that seemed to no longer need him as little as a month ago, he still has a crucial role to play.
More than any other Swan, it was the 31-year old who turned a match that, up to half time, had been dominated by Essendon in every way but on the scoreboard.
The Swans copped an absolute hiding at stoppages – 19-15 down in clearances and 7-2 from the centre, plus trailing in the contested possession count by 18, is yet another diabolical result for a team whose midfield was once as ruthless as any in the league, Chad Warner or no.
Luke Parker celebrates a goal. (Photo by Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
Heeney, held to one disposal in the first quarter, was a non-factor; Errol Gulden kicked as poorly as he ever has in his career, suffocated both by his own recent form slump and the Bombers’ unrelenting pressure on the ball-carrier. If there was a moment to sum up the first half, it was Gulden fumbling a simple handball receive at half-back, putting himself under pressure, panicking, and kicking straight to two Bombers all on their own at half-forward.
The Bombers, remarkably, had more inside 50s – 37 – to half time than points on the board – 29. The Swans’ count? Less than half that (18), and a deficit of seven points to a team whose season was just about shot that flattered them as much as any half time scoreline has flattered a team all season.
Had the Dons been able to find a single forward line winner, the Swans would – and let’s be honest, should – have been six goals down again at the main break and left with an impossible mountain to climb. But still, the transformation after the break from woeful to deadly was chalk and cheese.
And at the centre of the turnaround was Parker. From the very first centre bounce, he was in the thick of the action, winning a holding free kick against Caldwell who, having spent the entire first half blanketing Heeney in identical scenarios, simply couldn’t cope with the strength and timing of the veteran’s stoppage push-off and clung on.
Telling, too, was Parker’s presence in the guts itself: since being recalled as sub in Round 18, he’d attended in total just 29.5 per cent of the Swans’ centre bounces, having been shunted to a peripheral figure in the Swans’ on-ball brigade behind Heeney, Warner, Gulden, James Rowbottom and co. He’d been at just one of the nine first-half centre bounces.
Yet with the team in trouble, having been belted at the coalface, and in particularly out of the centre, for the first and second quarters, Longmire knew who he could turn to to turn things around. And he couldn’t have been vindicated more quickly.
Parker would be at 13 of 18 centre bounces in the second half, going from peripheral figure to a key presence at the flick of a switch. Notably, though, this was a centre-bounce tactic only, with the veteran surging forward from those bounces at every opportunity in a Dustin Martin-esque role forward of centre.
It was here where he landed the first of a series of third quarter body blows the Swans threw, his 31-year old legs easily making the distance on a kick of beyond 50 metres, a strike that I’m sure Brian Taylor would have called a ‘big boy goal’ had it been him commentating it and not James Brayshaw.
In both roles, Parker was a game-changer; suddenly able to compete against the Bombers’ previously dominant on-ball brigade, the Swans won the clearance count 9-4 to take control of the territory battle. Three of those clearances, all from the centre, came off Parker’s boot.
In attack, he’d add a second goal after a strong mark and a cool set shot: it’s the sort of thing he’s always threatened to do when he was a midfield battering ram with better skills than most battering rams, and now that he’s past his prime probably doesn’t have the leg speed to do unless the Swans really get on top around the ball and force quick entries to open forward lines.
That, as it happens, was exactly what Sydney got after half time; and the Bombers’ defence, having been sheltered from doing much in the first half, just couldn’t cope with the influx of entries, nearly all of substantially higher quality than what they themselves could produce with their 38 entries up to half time.
Parker’s influence goes beyond the pure stats, compelling as his three-goal, 11-disposal second half was. The man has presence still, an ability to walk and act taller than his bang on six-foot frame, and the steely glint in his eye that every opponent he came up against knew no quarter was to be had remains.
This is, after all, a man who would send a VFL opponent to kingdom come in a match no player with 283 senior games and 14 years of AFL experience had any right caring much about at all. As gruesome as that hit was, it told exactly what the Swans’ stoppage control after half time told: of a man whose ferocious attack on ball and man alike remains unmatched even as the skills required to do both those things well begin to diminish.
Do the Swans win this game without Luke Parker? Maybe – hell, probably. For all their recent struggles, the talent in this team remains capable of dragging them over the line even as their forward line, specifically the talls, struggles to gel and the midfield finds itself being bullied more often than not.
But there’s no way the turnaround would have been so complete, and victory in the end so comfortable, without the veteran’s steely fist punching his way through the Bombers’ defences in the third quarter and wresting the match into his beloved Swans’ control.
The lift in pressure around him in midfield, as his teammates rose to follow his example, was substantial, so substantial that it couldn’t just be a coincidence. Great players make their lessers want to be better – it’s the measure of Parker the man as well as Parker the footballer that he prompted such a lift from players now substantially ahead of him in esteem, from Heeney to Gulden and everyone in between.
In fact, the longer you saw Parker go about it in the third quarter, the more you realised that this is the exact footballer the Bombers have lacked for years untold.
Luke Parker is both a leader and a winner, and it oozes out of every pore in his body no matter how washed up his actual play appears.
He’s a competitive animal who fights for every scrap that comes his way, a crafty stoppage warrior who knows as if on instinct where the ball is going and whether his best option is to go for the footy or sweep as a last line of defence.
He’s a stand-up guy who when the responsibility was placed on his shoulder to goal from 50 metres to start the third quarter with his team in a sticky situation, took it on his shoulders and never looked like missing.
You could tell from his passionate celebration, and the score of Swans who revelled in the moment with him, that his standing among his teammates, even having relinquished the captaincy to Callum Mills in the off-season, remains influential. This is still a man to lead a team into battle; and now Longmire knows that he remains a stoppage weapon that fills a badly needed void that even the star power of Heeney, Warner, Gulden and friends can’t cover.
Finals footy is made for players like Parker. And if the Swans are going to battle their way out of their current malaise and prove themselves as worthy premiership frontrunners when September arrives, then they could do a lot worse than to follow the example of a man who, for most of this year, was on the outside looking in.
Who’s in your ultimate team? Pick the best team and compete with other fans for daily prizes on Draftstars. For the best odds on the game try out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Think. Is this a bet you really want to place? Set a deposit limit.