It wasn’t meant to happen this quick.
A strong second half to 2023 which wielded seven wins, including victories over eventual grand finalists in Collingwood and Brisbane led to cautious belief amongst Hawthorn supporters that they could potentially push for a spot towards the upper echelons of the bottom 10 – if everything went to plan.
The first sign of trouble was the announcement in January that the 2023 Best and Fairest winner Will Day had a stress fracture in his foot.
Then there was the ‘Intra-Club from Hell’ that saw starting 22 defender James Blanck do his ACL, previous top-six draft pick Denver Grainger-Barras suffer a 12-week turf toe injury and defender Changkuoth Jiath cop an eight-week hamstring tear.
Fast forward to the end of Round 7, and Hawthorn falls to a lowly one win and six losses, having been pulverised to the tune of 76 points by the competition benchmark, Sydney.
The bar of rising preseason optimism was now sitting at the bottom of Port Phillip Bay.
Questions were being asked over the list build – and was Sam Mitchell really the right man for the job?
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The midfield looked all at sea, the forward line was statistically the worst in the AFL, and the expected improvement of the younger players wasn’t occurring.
What started as relief the next week following a stirring win against the Bulldogs, turned to a murmur as they went to the bye following successive wins over Brisbane, Adelaide, GWS and West Coast.
It got to a shout following a 10-goal win over reigning premiers Collingwood in Round 19 and reached its crescendo on Friday night at the MCG with a 37-point Elimination Final win over the Western Bulldogs – the club’s first finals win since the 2015 Grand Final.
What has happened since Round 7 has been nothing short of remarkable. A record of 14 wins and just three losses.
Jai Newcombe, a mid-season draft pick, is now banging on the top echelon of competition midfielders.
Lloyd Meek, seen as steak knives in the high-profile Jaeger O’Meara trade has been colossal in the ruck.
Calsher Dear, a pick 56 Father-Son selection who wasn’t invited to the draft combine last year due to lack of exposure, has been a revelation.
Sam Mitchell. (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
Diminutive first-year forward Nick ‘Wizard’ Watson, standing at just 170cm, has overcome his early jitters in front of goal and has kicked 10.4 in the last three weeks, including 4.1 in his first final.
Dylan Moore, a man who was delisted by the club in 2020 before being re-rookied, is on track to win the best and fairest to go alongside his maiden All-Australian blazer.
Jack Ginnivan has been reinvented from a deep goal sneak at Collingwood to a hard-running high half forward, Mabior Chol at his third club has been the club’s leading goalkicker, and bargain trade pickup Massimo D’Ambrosio made the All-Australian squad of 44.
They now sit three wins away from what would be the most extraordinary of premierships.
It’s still more unlikely than likely, as historically it’s nigh on impossible to win four finals in a row to win the flag from outside the top four.
The next test is Port Adelaide at the Adelaide Oval on Friday night.
The rise of the Hawks has seen their style of play dubbed ‘HokBall’.
‘Hok’ started as a slang name for the club from younger fans in around 2021, but has been pushed along by the club’s elite social media team, who deserve a lot of praise for their contribution to the momentum the club is experiencing at present.
Nick Watson celebrates a goal. (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
The brief from the club to appeal to the younger demographic by making fun, quirky and non-traditional football content has worked.
Hawthorn has gained 62,000 Instagram followers and 79,400 TikTok followers since October 2023.
This group are in essence the first Gen-Z football team.
Just as the traditionalists in the mid-2000s were pearl-clutching at the new wave of millennial players running around with fluro boots, blonde tips, side fringes and starting their own fashion labels.
This group of selfie-taking, goal-celebrating, merchandise-selling kids in their early 20s are changing perspectives on the way footballers should go about their business.
They are happy to talk up their chances and leave no one in any doubt of their ambitions.
It has been said many times that the 2024 Hawks play with a youthful exuberance that is infectious.
Whilst it is true that they move the ball at a frightening pace when they get it and love revelling in their own and their teammates’ successes, this underlies the true reason for their consistency in the back two-thirds of 2024.
For all their showmanship, Hawthorn’s success is built on doing the simple things well, time after time.
Sam Mitchell has created an environment that allows the players to express themselves and be true to their personalities, but the tradeoff is an underlying fanaticism in putting blue-collar work first.
They are clean below their knees, put relentless tackle pressure on the opposition and they run their backsides off to defend.
Heading into Friday night their opponents, the Western Bulldogs were ranked number one in the competition for percentage of defensive 50 chains that resulted in an inside 50, at 28%.
In the first half of Friday night, the Bulldogs launched 21 chains from D50 and did not go inside 50 once.
They only had 39 entries for the game. Hawthorn is statistically the best backline in the AFL since Round 17.
Their lightning ball movement is also set up by a desire to spread – and spread hard.
They make the ground as wide as possible to launch attacking chains. This requires a lot of unrewarded, unselfish running across the full width of the ground to allow space to develop.
The washup has been a fanbase re-energised to a degree not seen in the last decade. The biggest elimination final crowd ever.
A roaring social media following. HokBall is now part of the football vernacular.
On Friday night, a bay of the MCG was dubbed ‘platform 9 and ¾’, complete with wizard hats as a nod to their number 34.
There isn’t a group of fans having more fun right now, and that is something that is to be savoured, no matter the end result of this year.
There will be a cavalcade of brown and gold heading across the South Australian border this Friday night hoping this team gives them at least one more week of this wild ride.
Even if they don’t win it all, this side has given their fanbase a season they will never forget.
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