Losing Captain Ryan

At first, the news didn't exactly hit like a thunderbolt; it just seemed ludicrous. A lame, not very funny practical joke. A captain - OUR captain, Ryan Griffen -  walking out on the club, weeks after the season's end? Even more far-fetched, supposedly seeking a trade to GWS - not even, more plausibly, poached by one of the powerhouse clubs, dangling premiership success in front of him, but the vacuous, orange-clad, artificial franchise. This was a ridiculous rumour, surely, the product of over-heated minds, stirred up by the frenetic speculation that's become part of the Trade Week environment. Too outlandish, too farcical and ludicrous to be true. Even for the accident-prone Dogs, who've lost more than their fair share of champions over the years. 

Only a few moments later this complacent disbelief was followed, in true Tragician-style, by the piercing realisation that - of course - of course! -  it could be true. That it was probably, definitely, certainly true. 

And then came the disastrous, stark realisation of just what it would mean. That was the thunderbolt moment, the lurching in the stomach, the instant understanding of the ramifications. The good ole laughing stock Bulldogs were about to spectacularly implode. Ryan Griffen's departure would strike a mortal blow; it was a deliberate, screaming vote of no confidence in our club and coach. A collective, dreadful shudder went through every Bulldogs' fan, as the news was confirmed.

That it was Ryan Griffen only made the nightmare more - well, nightmarish. This was not some bumptious big-head, a despicable, arrogant, mercenary tosser whose opinion we could indignantly dismiss. This was the shy, humble country boy who Brendan McCartney affectionately described as having a 'big brother' care and solicitude for his team-mates. The kid we famously selected at number 3, before Buddy Franklin, in the 2004 draft - and every Dogs fan staunchly, proudly, vowed and declared we were glad we did. The boy with the mane of hair, who thrilled us running down the wings, bouncing the ball; we would high-five each other jubilantly as he launched those mighty kicks at goal from outside 50 metres. 'GO GRIFF!!' The carefree kid who in 2006 was one of the young turks running exuberantly round the MCG as we unexpectedly, gloriously, thrashed Collingwood in an elimination final. Footy looked like a lark to Ryan Griffen, and his mates Adam Cooney and Farren Ray, a boys' own adventure. Oblivious and indifferent to our legacy of finals failure, they were just wide-eyed kids, revelling in the magic of the game.

Griffen was a great player, an inspired, brave performer, in our later, more ambitious finals tilts: 2008. 2009. 2010. In 2009 we were desolate watching his tears, his anguish, as he lay on the MCG grass, completely spent, when the siren sounded, and we'd blown a grand final berth, again. They were emblematic, those tears, reaching back in time, connected with a gossamer thread, to Rohan Smith, pounding the turf after our gut-wrenching defeat in 1997.

He's kept playing wonderful games for us, been an all-Australian, and won a best and fairest; he's played his 200th game, and became our captain this year. But it's only as I begin to absorb the shock, and think back over the past couple of years, that I realise that it's been a while since we saw that carefree Ryan Griffen, with his explosive pace and dangerous shimmy. I can't, in fact, remember his last electrifying goal on the run. He's been hampered by a bad back, we've conjectured. Was he sacrificing his natural, attacking flair to become a contested ball animal, perhaps? Or feeling the responsibility of the captaincy? Maybe he was struggling, like most of his senior team-mates seem to have now that we're 'rebuilding', with a harsher, grey-tinged reality: adjusting to the knowledge that the premiership dream is a long-lost mirage, and a different, but no less noble, battle lies ahead. It must be hard to find the courage and determination to produce excellence, to play your best footy and set a standard, now that there are so many ho-hum, meaningless games, surrounded just by young kids and workmanlike battlers. Losing more often than not; September glories just a memory; better times only distantly, occasionally, glimpsed on the horizon.

Now Ryan Griffen, stunningly, wants out. He has blind-sided the club and fans. As the wretched news spreads like wildfire, we don't hear from him, not in person. His manager issues a bland statement, the dull business-speak words hardly a match for the gravity and emotion of this bombshell news. Our club retaliates with terse, repressed fury, effectively accusing Griffen of betrayal. The footy universe turns on its head, as an awful mix of truths, mistruths and wild rumours form a potent, disastrous brew. 'The players don't get on with the coach'. 'Griffen didn't want to be captain'. 'He's been sitting on this deal, meeting with GWS for six months behind our backs'. An ugly seething mess pours out of the club. A mess I just don't want to see or know about.

For unsuccessful clubs like ours, latching onto individual players' journeys and believing in their stories, their loyalty, has served as our measure of consolation; we don't want the mirage of their single-minded commitment to our club shattered. In the absence of ultimate success, we place them on pedestals and succumb to the illusion, that as fans, we know and understand them. We infer their personalities, their dreams, their characters from their deeds on the field. We delude ourselves we're close to them, marching as one, that their love for the club is infinite and immutable, just because ours is. 

Even as footy becomes corporatised and moves far away from its tribal origins, we think we're part of their motivation, that they're playing for 'us'; we imagine that our barracking, our presence even, can lift them over the line. We like to hear, as the poetic Bob Murphy described, that when the team has a great win: 'you can actually feel the pride of your own supporters beaming back at you, like the warmth of the springtime sun.' 

We devour the clichés about players 'bleeding for the club', never really thinking about what that means, only having the vaguest understanding of monotonous pre-season training, boring stints in rehab, concussions, shattered bones and joints that ache for days. We don't like to think they're a mundane workplace with petty squabbles and jealousies, tedious meetings and personality clashes; we see them run out onto the 'battlefield' together, huddling closely, shoulders pressed together, in a determined band, and choose to believe what they often tell us, that they're all brothers, best mates playing for each other, bound to the club by loyalty and tradition, not contracts and money. 

As I've written this blog, I've been trying to disentangle what makes fans of perennially unsuccessful clubs keep going. I've developed a narrative, of sorts, to explain what's often frankly inexplicable. It's a complex mix of family history, childhood memories, pride in the western suburbs, and maybe the romance of the underdog, the Leunig-style poignancy of our absurdly long wait. But it's been as though I can't acknowledge that I, like every other Bulldogs' fan, want and need to see a premiership, and will accept the brutal steps that need to be taken to get there in the current footy landscape. Instead, without flags and silverware, I've clung to the memories of Chris Grant, Brad Johnson, Scott West, Bob Murphy, the one-club players who've shown loyalty and passion, and deliberately averted my eyes from the horse-trading of modern footy, the players being hawked around at trade time, our own actions in offloading beloved, selfless players when they are no longer needed. 

But somehow it's the defection of Ryan Griffen, and its domino effect, the sacking of Brendan McCartney, that rips the stars out of my eyes. It's like the death of innocence, a mocking end to my rosy efforts to romanticise the experience of being a Bulldogs' fan and graft nostalgic, old-time sentiment onto 2014 reality. I feel conned. My imagined, tear-jerker daydreams of a 2017 flag, complete with Ryan Griffen and Bob Murphy linking arms as the national anthem sounds, now seem like a naive and childish fantasy. I've been stuck in some sort of ridiculous time-warp, inventing a future where nice guys win and good triumphs over evil, convincing myself that there's room for romance, loyalty, sheer goodness in the footy landscape. When it was lost long, long ago.

As the facts emerge I feel towards Ryan Griffen the same cold-hearted fury and sense of betrayal as the most ferocious foul-mouthed ranters on the internet. It's almost shocking, how quickly it can happen, how ruthlessly we all shut down our feelings for this guy we said we loved; we harden our broken hearts. We don't care about Ryan Griffen any more. He's torn apart and stripped naked our Bulldog family. That family, however dysfunctional, will always, always come first. The clichéd phrase: 'The club is bigger than the individual' suddenly has a powerful, dangerous reverberation as we reel against the hammer-blows of Griffen's departure, the callous sacking of an honourable man, our coach, and the contempt and derision of the footy world labelling our club a joke. When further news breaks, that Tom Boyd wants to come to our club, our former captain just becomes a chess piece, one we want the club to wield to maximum effect to secure hope, to strike back, to do something bold and audacious and definitely un-Bulldogs like, and openly show our desperate, ferocious desire for success. The only thing that can't be tolerated is the nauseating idea that Griffen might somehow be forced to stay at the Bulldogs; the only time in my life that I have truly thought I could not keep going as a fan would be the prospect of attending matches with our former captain, who's openly wanted out, running around for in our colours -  a stark statement that footy is a business, a shattering of our ideals of a player-fan bond.

When I saw the news that Tom Boyd would become a Bulldog, I felt a fierce sense of triumph.. It was as though our battered club had somehow staggered off the canvas and, punching and flailing blindly, had still landed a killer blow. I didn't care if we'd 'paid too much'. I didn't care about the minutiae of the deal or the scorn of the media commentators at the impertinence of the Dogs for daring to dream. I felt like we did in 1989, that we'd delivered another 'up yours' to the footy world. Still here, guys. Still here.

There'll be time enough to worry about whether this crazy-brave deal was right, time to feel unease about whether any kid who's only played nine games can be worth so much.

Time to worry about whether Tom (The Tank) Boyd can possibly withstand the crushing weight of being anointed a messiah at our under-achieving club. Time to fear the day that rapacious clubs will come hunting our Bonti, Macrae or Stringer, and we get reminded again of how easily we can be preyed upon, in this new era when contracts are worth nothing. An era we've been complicit in by raiding the GWS riches, courting and landing Tom Boyd.

There'll be time to be sickened by this awful October of 2014 and what it says about modern day loyalty and ethics, the commodification of players, the emptiness of endless speculation as young men's names are bandied around like shares in the stockmarket, the sight of Ryan Griffen, Callan Ward and Leon Cameron now in those wretched orange colours.

Time to absorb the knowledge that our Brownlow medallist Adam Cooney has also been offloaded/jumped ship to the dreaded Bombres; and to realise that, Tom the Tank Hysteria notwithstanding, next year will most likely again be a barren one as we face a Ground Zero, an unrecognisable Whitten Oval landscape. As of now, no captain, no coach, our best, most dynamic player gone. The lost 'golden generation' - Cooney, Ray, Griffen, Higgins- all elsewhere, leaving us with virtually no middle tier, a couple of veterans - Murphy and Morris - and kids.

Time to dread our match against GWS when fans will undoubtedly boo their former hero Griffen, who wore our Number 16 guernsey 202 times. To wonder whether he'll regret his decision and the way he left our club, to remember that we cried with him in 09. Time to feel the full sorrow of what has transpired and wish for more than this sordid, bitter departure. Time to wonder what happened to the carefree long-haired kid bouncing the ball along the MCG turf, and to grieve. Just to grieve that we have lost Ryan Griffen.