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Opinion
Newton’s third law of motion, for anyone who didn’t study physics at high school, states that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’.
If you apply that basic rule of the universe to the sporting field, it can take on many guises. You’re never as good as you think you are, nor as bad as you fear. Form is temporary, and class is permanent.
And most relevantly given the much-discussed events immediately following Port Adelaide’s thrilling win over Hawthorn, this old cliche: if you play with fire, chances are you’ll get burned.
As has since been revealed by both players and coach Ken Hinkley, Jack Ginnivan’s infamous ‘see u in 14 days‘ Instagram drive-by on the Power did indeed play at least some role in galvanising the home side to hit a red-hot Hawks outfit with two and a half hours of sustained brutality on Friday night.
That comment, according to Ollie Wines on Triple M, went up on the whiteboard early in the week, and for a team reeling from their qualifying final humiliation of last week, gave them a target to channel their frustrations, their desperation, their fury – the team seemingly already half-planning to take on Sydney in the preliminary final.
Given all that, it should come as no surprise that Hinkley, a man whose emotions often spill over in the immediate aftermath of a close match – be it his famous hand gestures after a Power Showdown win back in 2018, to being on the verge of tears after their victory over St Kilda earlier this season – seized upon the chance to give it back to Ginnivan directly as the players lined up for 300-gamer Luke Breust’s guard of honour.
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In doing so, Hinkley made himself look, to be frank, an utter bellend – and for a number of reasons.
Number one, that the moment has, and was always going to, taken the gloss off a stirring performance from his players, relegating the heroics of Willie Rioli, Zak Butters, Jordon Sweet and co. to second billing on the news reel. For a coach whose players have so frequently bailed him out of sticky situations by rising to the occasion when the pressure on him is at its highest, he could hardly have disrespected their efforts more.
Secondly, in choosing his moment to have a go at Ginnivan and the rest of the Hawthorn players for the moment Breust, a scrupulously fair champion of the game as far removed from the brash cheek of his young teammates as it’s possible to be, he gave Hawks fans, and his many detractors, righteous reason to pot him.
A coach doesn’t always need to comport himself in a quiet, measure manner; but the manner of his tirade, which ended in a shouting match between he and James Sicily, somehow saw him sacrifice the moral high ground to the footy world’s most successful troll.
But two things can be true at the same time; every action has that equal and opposite reaction, after all. And for whatever dignity Hinkley sacrificed on Friday night, it’s hard to deny that the Hawks, and Ginnivan himself, had it coming.
Hawthorn have been spectacular to watch in the second half of 2024, with their scintillating ball movement, brilliant kicking and craftiness inside 50 making them the most watchable team in the AFL.
They’ve also been a dream for the footy media, because underpinning the superb football they’ve been playing is the spectacular arrogance with which they’ve brought to their winning streak.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a professional athlete being arrogant – really, that word is just confidence being expressed outwards. And in everything from their inventive goal celebrations – Changkuoth Jiath snapping photos of Jack Ginnivan, Nick Watson jumping into the crowd at the MCG and donning a wizard’s hat, and countless others – to the repeated taunting of opposition players throughout matches – Calsher Dear rubbing first Joel Freijah and then Caleb Daniel’s heads in glee after mistakes in their elimination final win over the Bulldogs was as surprising as if Bambi had pulled out an AK-47 and given the hunters that killed his mum what for – through to, yes, what Ginnivan said on Brodie Grundy’s Instagram last week, the Hawks have embraced becoming football’s resident antiheroes, if not quite villains just yet.
That’s all well and good – but protecting it is the shield of being a great team playing great football, and winning nearly every time. And no team, no matter how great, can win forever; so the next important step in the Hawks’ development is learning to reap what they so, and cop what they dish out.
Ken Hinkley exchanges words with Hawthorn players. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
Most of these Hawks seem to get that, too: Ginnivan, as well as several others, chuckled at Sicily’s spat with Hinkley, though Sam Mitchell certainly didn’t see the funny side after the game.
But it’s a sentiment certainly lost on Hawks greats Luke Hodge and Jordan Lewis on Channel 7 and Fox Footy‘s coverage respectively (an interesting and utterly explicable fact that these two were far and away the most vehement commentators against Hinkley’s conduct, eh?), who decried what the Power coach did despite having both suggested Ginnivan too had overstepped the mark on Instagram.
It was both amusing and deeply ironic that the three men most aggrieved by what Ken Hinkley did were the beating heart of the infamous ‘unsociable Hawks’ of yesteryear, who by word and deed did plenty worse than either what the new generation of brown and gold have done this year, or indeed by Hinkley on Friday night.
“Surely as a coach you understand where the line is – I thought it was embarrassing,” said Lewis, a man whose extensive footy rap sheet that includes trying to decapitate Todd Goldstein and leaving Patrick Cripps with a broken jaw suggests that he’s no stranger to overstepping it.
“He is a 60-year old man. Act your age,” was Hodge’s contribution, a man who literally had an article written about him in 2022 going over the way he used to sledge opponents; and criticising a coach mouthing off to the opposition rings a touch hollow from a protege of Alastair Clarkson, he who had more than a little to say to Matthew Lloyd in the aftermath of his infamous 2009 KOing of Brad Sewell.
As for Mitchell, well, for the man who taunted Essendon with that ‘jab’ gesture back in 2015, it’s a little rich to suddenly get up on the high horse when on the receiving end.
Above all, the most incorrect thing all three had to say was in their infantilising of Jack Ginnivan, with the bulk of their criticism of Hinkley, especially Mitchell, that it was directed at ‘a very young player’.
Ginnivan is 21 years old; old enough to vote, to drink, and yes, to understand that actions have consequences.
He knew exactly what he was doing when he posted that cheeky comment to Instagram, just as he knows exactly what he’s doing every time he rubs in his or his team’s success with a lesser opponent, or riles up the crowd after a moment of brilliance.
If Ginnivan, and the Hawks, are prepared to wear it coming back, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them continuing in this manner – especially if it makes them play better footy, which on the evidence of this year, it clearly does.
But spare the holier-than-thou reaction, shelve the taking of the moral high ground, please, all the Hawthorn people, from supporters to former greats behind the mic, who thought Hinkley’s response was the first and only time the line got crossed this week.
If you dish it out, then you’ve got to cop it. If you want to be a lightning rod, then you accept that you’re going to get hit.
To their immense credit, the Hawks players, especially their biggest antagonists, seem to get this. The rest of us have to get with the program too.
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