Growing up, I'd often wonder why musicians seemed unable to create amazing music throughout their whole life. I could never see a logical reason that a musician shouldn't be able to continue to improve their song-writing acumen well into retirement age. While there are always exceptions to the rule, it seems that even the best musicians have a period of hyper creativity where their best songs are made before spending the following years performing their hits and occasionally coming up with songs that are constructed as opposed to created.

I suspect that at a certain age the musician begins to realise that they're not as special as they thought they were, and once they're thinking like this, their ability to create a hit is greatly diminished. The increase in musical knowledge they acquire as they mature probably makes them realise that the hit they once thought was unique was actually pretty similar to a song that came before, which in turn was similar to a song that came before that. Eventually the musician gets a mortgage, school fees and superannuation – all things sure to hinder the creative juices.

Ageing is a great leveller, a reminder to everyone, that no matter how special you think you are, you're just as human as the person next to you. For a footballer, there's the problem this causes with the belief that you're special enough to have premiership success, but there's also the undeniable fact that as you get older your body degenerates, you get sorer, and you get slower. That's not to say that players well into their 30s can't still be great players - there's plenty of examples that they can - but I get nervous when they're relied upon to do the heavy lifting. By heavy lifting, I mean, when they're the players who respond first when the team gets challenged. It's amazing how regularly this response comes from the same players within a team.

At Hawthorn I think of Hodge, Burgoyne, Mitchell, Gibson, Rioli, Gunston and Lewis as the core group most likely to lift when a response is required. The only problem for the Hawks is that other than Rioli and Gunston, the rest are at the stage of their careers where they're slowly starting to look human.