Round 7, Opposition Player - Brett Kirk

[LostDoggy]

Thanks to Lantern and Dry Rot for asking me to review an influential opposition player for our game against the Swans this week.

When we mention the Sydney Swans instant images of forward Barry Hall and two times Brownlow Medalist Adam Goodes springs promptly to mind along with other Swans stars in O’Loughlan, and Spida Everitt. However one of the most valued players inside the inner sanctum of the Swans is their co-captain Brett Kirk. Not a darling of the media (in fact I struggled to find any articles on him on the net) he is one of those players; who leads by example, is super-courageous and plays with great passion and commitment. Often used as a run-with player, he usually wins more possessions than his opponent and is a very influential player.

http://www.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,,5777072,00.jpg

Brett Kirk, Co-captain of the 2005 premiership side. Best and fairest in 2007.

Essential Facts:

Jumper Number: 31
Height and Weight 184cm 80kg
DOB 25/10/1976
Recruited from: North Albury (NSW)
(Player Profile from Wikipedia)

Kirk set an example as one of the hardest work-horses in the AFL in 2007, ranking highly in contested possessions, tackles and clearances. He finished with at least 20 disposals in 17 of his 23 games and had a purple-patch from Rounds 10-16, averaging 27 disposals, seven tackles, 10 groundball-gets and seven clearances. He's built a reputation as one of the best in-and-under players of the competition. While starting off his career as a tagger, Kirk has turned himself into one of Sydney’s most prolific ball winners.

Kirk’s development reminds me of Boyd, he is a really solid player without being spectacular. He initially commenced on the rookie list and struggled to get a regular game. Critically he has very limited athletic ability and poor kicking skills, but makes full use of every single inch of his ability. Kirk isn’t necessarily as naturally skilled or talented as other swans players but he more than makes up for it with his commitment to the team

Kirk has extremely good hands in close and is able to complete amazingly off-the-ball stuff and tries to help out a team mate in trouble whenever possible. Also has an astute football sense and ability to read the game that allows him to shut out players with far more athletic ability than what he actually possesses. Kirk is a midfielder that can lock down on the opposition's best midfield player while winning plenty of useful possessions, and in particularly clearances, on his own. Sydney’s cramping style of play particularly suits Kirk abilities.

Kirk’s ability to dominate in the centre has been assisted through the play of the formidable rucking duo of Everitt and Jolley who rotate resting in the forward line where they are particularly damaging. Kirk is the player who will bob up with a short kick or a smart handpass to set up a goal for a team-mate and in this way is one of the most damaging and influential Sydney player. Like our own Westy you find Kirk at the bottom of every pile with his hands firmly on the ball.

In our last outing against the Swans, Kirk played on an out of form Westy who was then carrying a niggling injury. Westy, arguably the greatest Bulldog midfielder of all time was uncharacteristically shut down by Kirk. Kirk restricted Westy to only six touches in the first half when the game was still to be won and only allowing him another 10 touches in the second half when the game was already out of reach.


WOOF Analysis

I dread the dour tight contest of the Sydney games. When they are not flooding they are playing close, tough contested man on man football, restricting our run and controlling the centre bounces and the stoppages. Playing at the small SCG does not help our cause much either. Sydney historically have dictated the terms of play to us since our last win against them in round 8, 2002. Our last outing against them in 2007 we only scored 8.5 (57) against their 15.10 (100).

There is a strong possibility that ‘Spida’ Everitt will be back this game which is a blow, but with the addition of Hudson and the recent good form of Minnow his influence may be checked enough to open up opportunities to get first hands to the ball. Regardless we need to have tight skills and pinpoint accuracy to get that ball out of the middle and down to our 50. There is no room for error with a team like Sydney who play close checking football and will kill us in the rebounds.

Looking through the playing list from 2007, we had a less formidable team of Darcy, Power, Faulkner and McDougall with NO Griffin - could he be the key this week? In previous weeks we have managed to grind out two tough games coming away with a win and a draw without Westy. With Westy back I am expecting Callan to give a good game with his hardness at the ball which has been sorely missing in our game plan for a long time along with my new little favourite Addison as the other hard nut in our game.

Prediction: Still the one positive about playing Sydney is that they have a very predictable game-plan. Over the past 6 weeks the doggies have taken us on a fast cross country ride, but now we have turned the corner and are heading for the cliffs – let’s close our eyes and hang on as these ‘new’ dogs take us to heights we haven’t experienced for a long, long time. We have managed to beat three teams that have traditionally held the wood over us in St Kilda, Adelaide and Melbourne. The boys nearly let two slip with Essendon and Richmond but will have prepared themselves mentally for this week. If the boys bring their A grade game, and keep themselves in it by playing temp footy until the 3rd we can then crack it open. – Dogs by 6 points.

Interesting Factoid:

Kirk is known as a practicing Buddhist and wears a tattoo of a Buddhist symbol on his back

He also played for the Ovens and Murray Football league where he was known for his penchant for either blue or green hair. In this league he would have played on Swans team-mate Barry Hall when he was playing for Avenel.

[Go_Dogs]

Good choice of player. Kirk looked alright last weekend, and really was unlucky not to kick the final goal and steal a memorable win for the Swans.

It seems likely that he could get a run with role, perhaps on Cross this week as I don't think Kirk will have the speed to try and mind Cooney, perhaps an Ablett might get that role.

Either way, we need to make sure we allow whoever Kirk is on, plenty of space around the stoppages.

[Dry Rot]

Great choice dogs_r_barking. Have always admired Capt Kirk who makes the most out of some limited skills.

One of those players who you ask do we stop him or beat him?

[Bulldog Revolution]

Blood Brother
Martin Flanagan | April 4, 2008

AFL players are increasingly wary of talking to the press. To get to meet Brett Kirk, I sent some footy articles I had written to the Swans for Kirk to read.

The answer came that he had invited me to meet him at his home not far from one of Sydney’s famous beaches. The woman from the Swans handling the arrangement was surprised.

"He’s happy to talk about his football," she told me, "but he keeps the other part of his life private."

I realised later he had decided to trust me. Kirk is big on trust. It’s part of the belief by which he lives. "If you want to get to know me," he told me later, "you should see me in my home. This is who I am."

His home is only a couple of streets from cliffs beneath which a mighty ocean keeps shoulder-charging a continent. I sat there watching for half an hour before knocking on his door.

When it opened, he was more or less what I expected. Friendly grin, taut brown body, dark bristly hair only partly tamed. Behind him, I could hear two dogs barking in a benign way. The house is cool and modern and friendly.

A couple of Buddhas here and there, a photo of Kirk presenting the Dalai Lama with an autographed Swans guernsey. In the kitchen, where we sit, is a poster saying “Two Dogs Are Better Than One” and another, a 1950s photograph of an old man sitting beside a pool in a hat and his family some distance off standing around a barbecue.

The text on the poster begins, "One year my granddad decided to hold a pool party for his hat . . ."

Kirk and his wife Hayley have three kids under the age of three. "I love the chaos of kids," he said.

He has two little girls, 16-month-old identical twins, one of whom approaches me with grave knowing eyes, picks up my backpack and tries to carry it away. She has no fear but she watches me all the way. A bit like her old man with a football.

He tells me he would like to have more kids. Where does his love of footy come from?

"My father," he said. Noel Kirk lost a hand in a farming accident when he was just four. At 17, he went to play footy with a club in rural NSW and was told by the coach he would never become a footballer.

But he did. A tough half-back flanker. Brett Kirk saw the obstacles his father overcame and knew that overcoming obstacles was a big part of the game - perhaps the biggest.

Former coach Rodney Eade tells a story about Kirk when he first arrived at the Swans. Eade told the players who thought they were senior footballers to stand on one side of him. Kirk stood with them. At the time, no one else at the club thought of him in that way.

From the time he was a kid, he loved everything that went with the game. Climbing the fence to get into the ground, running onto the field at half - and three-quarter - times for a kick, the sheds after the game, the feeling among the men, the smell of the liniment.

After the game, it was straight to the pub. Parents went inside for a beer. The kids played hide-and-seek and chasey. In a similar way, he always enjoyed family get-togethers. Lots of people, lots of connections.

Hayley returns while we’re talking with their three-year-old son. The boy sleeps with a footy like his dad did at the same age but he is also doing dancing, which is where he has just been.

Hayley has a quiet grace about her. She speaks only once during the interview, when Kirk is saying he got his persistence from his Dad.

"Your Mum’s a pretty tough chick," she said. You sense she probably is, too. Kirk describes his wife as "the stone in my life".

They met at university where they were both studying to be teachers. If he wasn’t going to be a teacher, he was going to be a nurse. He wanted a job where he could help people.

Each Tuesday morning for the past three or four years, he has worked as a volunteer at the Sydney Children’s Hospital, conducting fitness sessions.

He’s got other Swans players involved. "I think they get more out of it than the kids."

As he tells his life story, a big turning point occurred in his late teens when a former teammate at the North Albury Football Club, Jay McNeil, died of cancer.

He had been the footballer Kirk describes as his "mentor", the one he "sat up with talking about everything".

The loss made him go a lot deeper in himself. He studied yoga and saw the extent to which people’s destinies are determined by their thinking. He has a tattoo on his shoulder, three Celtic circles within a larger circle. That’s him, his wife, his children.

He also has a tattoo on his back, a Buddhist mantra about a lotus flower emerging out of mud. It’s the idea that strength/power/beauty - whatever you want to call it - can come out of dark places.

When Paul Roos took over as coach wanting to change the culture of the club, he found, in Kirk, someone open to such ideas.

The players were encouraged to look at the history of the club. "We’d lost our connection with their struggle," Kirk said.

He identified with one of the names used by the old South Melbourne - the Bloods.

On the podium, after receiving his premiership medal in 2005, he grabbed his jumper and cried: "This is for the Bloods!"

He meant his teammates as well as the players of the past. "I wanted people to know how passionate we are about our footy club."

His uncles once asked him why he played AFL footy, in view of the concussion and injuries he has received. His reply was he plays for his teammates.

Kirk uses language you don’t normally hear in football. He calls those he plays with at the Swans his brothers. He says it’s "so important that players care about each other".

I have spoken to only one Swans player about Kirk and that’s Lewis Roberts-Thomson.

Roberts-Thomson says Kirk has "a special energy" and has deep regard for him.

"He’s just so fair," Roberts-Thomson said, "so understanding of each person."

Ask Roberts-Thomson to describe Kirk as a footballer and he recalls the moment when Kirk left the field during the 2005 preliminary final with a gash in his head.

"It was the most blood I’d ever seen," Roberts-Thomson said. He is a minimalist. He means the most blood he has ever seen on the footy field.

Kirk was bandaged and came straight back on. "It was so inspirational," Roberts- Thomson said. The following week, when the Swans won their first grand final in 72 years, Roberts-Thomson, the young kid who started as a rugby union player, showed what a fine Australian footballer he was, holding the Eagles at bay in the early stages of the game when they threatened to dazzle their less brilliant opponents.

Kirk is an unfashionable footballer. He was originally cut from the Swans’ list and no other club saw enough in him to even give him a try.

But since Roos’ arrival as the Sydney coach, Kirk has won two club best-and-fairests and been an All-Australian. The performance he most deserves to be remembered for, in my opinion, is his second half against West Coast in the 2006 grand final, the one the Swans lost.

At half-time, West Coast looked to have the match won. "Walking into the rooms at half-time, I saw the blokes’ heads were down," he said.

"The feeling of defeat was already there. I thought I just have to try to show the players we can do this.

"I knew I’d put my body anywhere and do anything to generate something in the other players. I’d try to empower them with my actions."

Kirk lifted them after half-time like men lift heavy weights. He forced himself upon the contest, won mad balls, skied it forward, to no one in particular to begin with, but what he did was tilt the balance of the game from where it lay so much in West Coast’s favour until it was the Swans who were flying and the Eagles who were being grounded.

The fact he will be remembered less for this than the stars of the previous year’s win appears to bother him not one whit.

Kirk has a vigorous and original sense of humour. Nathan Buckley once told me with wry amusement about a night he was in a nightclub and a shadow appeared that stood in front of him, rose with him when he went to the bar, pulled money from his own pocket and slapped it on the bar before Buckley could pay for his drinks.

It was Kirk. He tagged Buckley all night. Kirk tells me he doesn’t celebrate quite as hard as he once did.

As he says it, he props his kids up in feeding chairs in front of a television. He says kids teach him patience and indicates it’s not something he’s always had.

And so our talk continues, with Kirk’s three-year boy watching a nature program and shouting like a lookout in a crows’ nest each time he sees an animal. "Dad," he cried out, chubby finger pointing at the screen. "A whale! A whale!"

Our interview breaks for a whale, a tiger and a rhino.

Kirk actually introduced the Dalai Lama when he spoke in Sydney. People were allowed to publicly ask one question of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the man recently accused by the Chinese government of leading a rebellion.

Kirk asked him what was the most important thing he could give his children and the Dalai Lama answered: "Affection."

I ask Kirk if he wants to coach. He doesn’t think too much about the future, nor indeed the past. He tries to be "present" — for his kids, his teammates, his wife.

He knows he wants to keep living somewhere near the coast with trees around him. I ask him his best footy memories.

He has two. The first, predictably, is winning the grand final. Looking into the eyes of his teammates and knowing they had done it. They had lived the dream, if you want to call it that. The shared belief that made the group endeavour possible.

The second was playing in the game when Michael O’Loughlin broke the Swans’ club record for most games played. "The care and passion I have for Michael is so much," he said.

"I loved playing in that game."

His worst memory from footy? He doesn’t have one. Footy’s proved to him you can do what you want if you put your mind to it.

We part with a grin. As I’m coming back through Melbourne Airport, I get a text from him. "Hey Martin," it said. "I really enjoyed sharing with you. When I voice the important things in my life, it makes me even more passionate about them."

[hujsh]

Blood Brother
Martin Flanagan | April 4, 2008 In the kitchen, where we sit, is a poster saying “Two Dogs Are Better Than One” and another, a 1950s photograph of an old man sitting beside a pool in a hat and his family some distance off standing around a barbecue.

The text on the poster begins, "One year my granddad decided to hold a pool party for his hat . . ."

Does this make sense to anyone?

Sounds like the beginning of one of FDOTM's cartoons

[GVGjr]

Great write up DAB. Kirk is one of those very consistent hard at it footballers that thrives in the Sydney game plan and environment. He is as tough as it comes and can win his own football. I wonder which assignment he will get this weekend. My guess is that he will mainly play on Griffen.

[Raw Toast]

Thanks for the write up as well. Kirk is such an important player for them, and goes pretty well against us as a rule.


Great write up DAB. Kirk is one of those very consistent hard at it
footballers that thrives in the Sydney game plan and environment. He is as tough as it comes and can win his own football. I wonder which assignment he will get this weekend. My guess is that he will mainly play on Griffen.

West might be pretty thankful if this happens. Sydney is one of the few teams he regularly struggles against, mainly because Kirk puts him out of the game. With West coming back from his knee, it'll be very interesting to see if the Swans rate him enough to put Kirk on him. I wouldn't mind Westy playing a defensive type role on Kirk, even if Kirk tries to go to someone like Griffen (West might also be an option on Jude Bolton).

[hujsh]

If West and Kirk took eachother out of the game, who would this benefit most?

[Sedat]

Kirk is my most admired non-Bulldog footballer. So committed to the team in every aspect.

He has about 5 younger midfield clones of him in the side - Ablett, Bolton, Bird, Moore and Jack. They are so tight and disciplined across every line, but their real strangulation strength is in their midfield. These half a dozen hard nuts repeatedly feed the ball out to the skilful outside runners, Kennelly and Goodes (and Malceski before his injury). Factor in a strong ruck division to ensure first use of the ball more often than not, and it is a bloody hard game plan to overcome, and proven far too difficult for us to do so in the last 5 years.

However, this year we have one Ben Hudson in the ruck. He is a Sydney style player who excels in the hard contests. If the Swans had a similar forum and had to choose an influential opposition player, I suspect it would be Hudson. His work at the ruck contests and more importantly when it hits the ground will be crucial to who wins the all-important midfield battle. No wonder Sydney are seriously contemplating rushing back Spida Everett this week - Hudson can compete as hard aginst Jolly in the ruck but will beat him around the ground. Everett coming in will change the dynamic because he can obviously make a difficult match-up in their forward line, but he will be underdone.

One thing is certain - I don't think we will kick 19+ goals this week.

[LostDoggy]

Like you, Sedat, and others on the board, Kirky is my most admired player in the game (apart from our Dogs). If he played for the Dogs we would be an infinitely better team, which is a strange thing to say about a player with relatively limited ability. I have the utmost respect for him as a person and as a footballer.

Logic says that we should struggle to kick many goals this weekend, but I have a feeling that there will be a period in the game where we get a chance to break it wide open. If we take the chance I think an avalanche is possible. We have shown an ability to compete in close this season, but we also have the kind of running power that Sydney don't have and may find difficult to counter if we really get it going. It hasn't really been all that tight the last few times we've played them -- they've just run all over the top of us, but I don't think it will be the same this weekend. Without Hall, we are also one running defender up on their forward-line -- Gilbee's run and delivery will be crucial this weekend.

[Dry Rot]

I admire Kirk a lot too - as BR's article says, he was terrific in the second half of the 'o6 grand final.

What a story about his old man - playing footy with one hand.

[LostDoggy]

The thing I don't like about Kirk is he allowed to man handle opposition stars weekly and get away with it. In the past his treatment of West has been poor and the umps have let him get away with it.
It upsets me even more when you hear Boyd's game on Kerr has been completed blown out of proportion.

[BulldogBelle]

Excellent analysis DRB - thoroughly enjoyed reading it - Kirk is one of my favourite non bulldogs.

[bornadog]

The thing I don't like about Kirk is he allowed to man handle opposition stars weekly and get away with it. In the past his treatment of West has been poor and the umps have let him get away with it.
It upsets me even more when you hear Boyd's game on Kerr has been completed blown out of proportion.

I am with you ES, I think he gets away with alot. We should play games with Sydney and counter tag Kirk with Boyd. Now that would be funny.

[Mantis]

I am with you ES, I think he gets away with alot. We should play games with Sydney and counter tag Kirk with Boyd. Now that would be funny.

Why would it be funny?

I have Kirk in a couple of my supercoach teams, why you ask? Because he wins contested possessions and clearances meaning he is a pretty good scorer. Why don't we call there bluff and put our best run with player on one of there best hard ball winners?

[bornadog]

Why would it be funny?

I have Kirk in a couple of my supercoach teams, why you ask? Because he wins contested possessions and clearances meaning he is a pretty good scorer. Why don't we call there bluff and put our best run with player on one of there best hard ball winners?

Tactics this time round will be interesting, given we are down on hard ball gets.

[Sockeye Salmon]

Whilst researching Ryan O'Keefe I noticed that Brett Kirk has had 91 clangers this year.

That's gotta be some kind of record.

[bornadog]

Whilst researching Ryan O'Keefe I noticed that Brett Kirk has had 91 clangers this year.

That's gotta be some kind of record.

Maybe he isnot having as good a season as in previous years and its making a bit of a difference to Sydney's results.