Bulldogs need to lock down Marcus Bontempelli's future above all else

The Guardian

2 days ago

It was a familiar story for Marcus Bontempelli and his team on the weekend. To mine the stats sheet, no player on the ground had more possessions, tackles, clearances, inside 50s and metres gained. It still wasn't enough. The Bulldogs lost to a good side, but remain a decidedly lopsided, occasionally exhilarating and increasingly bewildering team.
Leading his team off, the captain had the same look he often gets after losses like that – the wrung-out look of a man asking: 'How much more do I have to do here?'
Helen Garner, like half of Melbourne, is currently writing a book about the mushroom killer. Before that, in The Season, it wasn't barristers, jurors and murderers she was jotting notes about, but footballers – her grandson's football team and the Western Bulldogs, specifically.
Here she is on Lance Franklin being booed: 'It's a wounded face, with the wiped look of someone who's copped a ringing slap across the cheek – all his expression lines gone.' Or on Rory Lobb: 'I have a soft spot for him because he reminds me of a long-ago boyfriend, a rangy great bunch of bones with a dramatic head and a rare, sweet smile.' Or on Toby Greene: 'Something about the shape of his head, like a tilted olive, and his vain little walk undermines my admiration for him.' On Bontempelli, four words suffice: 'His quiet, faithful brilliance.'
The Bulldogs recently uploaded footage of their captain playing footy as a boy and you can see the etchings of the athlete he would become – the swivel and spin, the authoritative left boot, the half-second longer than all the other kids. His first possession at the professional level was something we've seen thousands of times since – scrapping on his knees, stripping the ball off his opponent and handballing to create.
Since that moment, there's been no significant fluctuations from week to week, from season to season, even from quarter to quarter. There are exceptions, of course: he was bullied by GWS in the elimination final in 2019 and was strangely subdued in last year's final against Hawthorn. But that's about it. You can be pretty sure he's going to be somewhere near brilliant, every week, every season. What a luxury it must be to coach someone like that. And what a joy it is to support a team with a player of that calibre.
Physically, he's perfect for the modern game. He's strong enough through the hips and core to absorb contact, to chop his way out of tackles and to still get his handballs away. The champion midfielders of previous generations were shorter and stockier and distributed lower to the ground. A recurring image of this taller generation of midfielders – of Patrick Cripps, of Tom Green and certainly of Bomtempelli – is of them handballing out of trouble from an upright position.
But his size doesn't compromise his ability to run all day and to sprint forward. He's quicker than his gait suggests. He's almost never run down. He's an outstanding endurance athlete and regularly finishes in the Top 3 in their time trials. At stoppages, he's always on his toes, always alert, like a tennis player returning serve. He's never more dangerous than at a stoppage, about 25 metres out, with a bit of space carved out on his left side. He slams the ball on his boot with relish and he almost never misses. His goal in the third quarter of the 2021 grand final, just as he was playing himself into September folklore, is the exemplar – but he does it nearly every week.
At just 29, his record is incredible: six-time All-Australian, six-time club champion, and three-time league MVP. The Bont does the lot. He bores in and lopes out. He carries the Dogs when they're no good, he fronts the media when they've pissed away another season and he's the cherry on top when they're on a blitz.
Bontempelli and the club are now thrashing out the terms of a new contract: it's impossible to imagine him playing anywhere else. It's hard to think of an individual player who means more to a club and its supporters. The Bulldogs need a lot of things: they need a functional backline. They need to start beating good teams. They need to make the most of a soft draw to secure a double chance. But most of all, they need Bontempelli's signature. He has given them everything. A simple squiggle of the pen would mean the world to this club, and would go a long way to ensuring he's the greatest player to ever pull on the jumper.
The Dogs have a perfect record in nine matches against sides in the bottom half of the ladder, but are still to prove their premiership credentials ahead of facing the Lions on Friday night.
Bontempelli was 18 and the game was in the balance when he kicked one of the goals of the decade against Melbourne. It showcased everything that would make him great in subsequent years – scrambling on his hands and knees, stripping the ball back one-handed, spinning out of trouble and thrashing the ball on to his non-preferred boot. The situational and spatial awareness belied his 10 games to that point.
'The special ones move differently,' teammate Rob Murphy later wrote about that moment. 'Something in the nuances of their game sets them apart from the rest of us. Playing alongside him, I could hear the appreciation from our own supporters. It was even better from a few feet away. With the ball in his hands, he'd lope away in slow motion, like he was wading through waist-deep water, the sea of stragglers falling away in his wake.'
Ahead of his 200th AFL game on Sunday against the Crows, Gold Coast's Daniel Rioli says the team is confident. 'We've built momentum throughout the year. We're mature. I'm just looking forward to where we're going to head in the future.'
'The AFL will need to take a step forward in helping to manage these issues with players, but I'm not forecasting the specific way of dealing with it. It gets tiring for the people who are involved, who are receiving this regularly.'
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