1) St Tony: Plugger Power

For the most part we try to stay objective and sometimes even sensible on this blog, but it’s worth noting from the outset that this entry will not be entirely rational. For many of us of a certain age, the theory that the early 90s was the peak of the AFL football is an immutable law rather than subjective opinion.

Tony Lockett was a huge part of that 90s romance. He was colossal and fallible; a spearhead and enforcer in equal measure. He hated press and feared introspection but the football world couldn’t help but be fascinated by the man and his deeds. He looked and sometimes acted like Andre the Giant but for every time he crocked himself or clocked an opponent there were another 10 occasions in which he’d stretch the limits of what we thought a full-forward was capable of.

‘Plugger’ was something of a loose cannon when things weren’t going his way, as Peter Caven, Matthew Hogg and a host of full-backs would attest, but no-one drew crowds on account of their individual brilliance like the hulking forward from Ballarat. At his peak in the early 90s he was a Pied Piper figure for the Saints, pulling what the club estimated to be an extra 7,000 attendees through the turnstiles at home games in Moorabbin. For a decade the hopes of a beleaguered bunch of supporters rested on his broad shoulders. Lockett didn’t often disappoint.

Statistics don’t tell you everything about a footballer but in Lockett’s instance they make a compelling case for his status as the game’s most prolific forward. His 1,360 goals at an average of 4.84 per game will most likely never be surpassed. He kicked the ton on six occasions but that tally doesn’t take into account the milestones lost to injury and suspensions. Reading through his AFL Tables page only gets more surreal and thrilling by the year but nothing could compare to the visceral appeal of seeing him live.

Before injuries struck in 1989 he’d booted 78 goals from 11 games and 65 came from 12 outings the next year. In both of his final two seasons at St Kilda he passed 50 goals in 10 appearances. At a conservative estimate he would have kicked 11 tons given full seasons on the park. For some of that time early on in his career, St Kilda were hopeless. Even when they were finals contenders they were pegged as being too Lockett-centric. It’s true that the Saints lost far more games than they won with Lockett standing in the goal square, but that underrates the depressing mire from which he’d retrieved the entire club and the uninspiring list they’d assembled in the first half-decade of Plugger’s career. For many supporters, he was often the reason to show up and keep the faith.

His departure from the Saints at the end of 1994 after 898 goals in 183 games was painful for supporters but arguably prolonged his career and solidified the legend. In Sydney he found a home where he was appreciated but still allowed to live the anonymous life that was impossible in Melbourne. Amid the hero-worshippers and an eager press pack he variously lashed out and went into his shell. That final chapter in Sydney rightly cemented Lockett’s position in football lore; 462 goals in 98 games lifted him above the likes of Wade and Coventry and to a position that may never be touched.

2) The physique and playing style

Though the discussion of it enraged him at times and more often than not pitted the press as Lockett’s sworn enemies, his physique was intrinsic to both the greatness and infamy of the man. Lockett felt that his ideal playing weight was in the 100-105kg range but it often ballooned beyond 113kg (and he was being kind to himself there), at which point the injuries inevitably came. Given his early travails, including season-ending knee and ankle problems and painful groin issues that necessitated pre-game shots for most of his career, it’s remarkable that he actually lasted as long as he did.

That imposing frame made him one of the most physically-intimidating players of the era but Lockett also possessed explosive pace over that first 10 metres of his surging leads. Owing to the pressure heaped upon him by himself and others, nerves would force Lockett to gag and vomit before nearly every game of his league career, and during warm-ups the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. Then he’d take off on that first lead and burn off his opponent or wrestle a pair of defenders away with one arm as he marked with the other. Two or three goals were on the board in no time.

Lockett possessed immense physical power, more than many defenders had experienced or could cope with. Headlocks were par for the course and allegations of ‘Chinese burns’ weren’t far-fetched.

Beyond the imposing physicality, Lockett also possessed skills not commonly seen in big men of his era. The most flawless of set-shot goal-kicking techniques was wedded to an extensive arsenal of more subtle talents. When he was originally brought down to St Kilda in the early 80s, recruiting staff like Ian Stewart and Graeme Gellie felt the boy from North Ballarat had the skills of a ruck-rover. He kicked well on both feet, a virtue of the coaching diligence of his father Howard, recovered quickly when the ball spilled to the ground, read the play exceptionally well, marked with an agility and leap that belied his heavy-set frame and fired off goal-assist handballs more often than is perhaps remembered. Some of the snaps he kicked early on in his career were majestic (the one at the start of this clip is rolled gold).

It’s fascinating to consider what type of player Lockett might have been on modern training and diet regimes – if he’d been able to stick to them, that is. In addition to weight issues Lockett also battled asthma for his whole career. A running gag in his early days at St Kilda was that when Lockett moved away from the acreage in Cranbourne that housed his beloved greyhounds, sales at local fast food outlets plummeted.

3) The path to greatness

Like so many of the great Australian Rules stories, Lockett’s is one of the shy country kid made good. The product of football tradition established by his father and with skills honed in front of makeshift goals in a vacant paddock by the family house, young Tony was quick to draw the attention of Saints recruiting staff while playing country league seniors for North Ballarat at the age of 16. Lockett was shy but his fuse notoriously short. When playing Teal Cup football the following year he was possibly the only youngster to tell Ray ‘Slug’ Jordan where he could jump off and live to tell the tale. If anything that attitude only impressed the Saints more, consigned as they were at that point to meek humiliation and a succession of wooden spoons. North Ballarat didn’t like losing and neither did their young full-forward. The Saints liked what they saw.

Battles with homesickness were a constant theme throughout the early years at the Saints and eventually the club ceded to his desire to travel down from home when required rather than living in the big smoke. Picked in the senior side at just 17, his notorious forward line partner Mark Jackson didn’t quite take him under his wing in the exact manner the club had hoped, encouraging the young forward pocket to play halfway down the ground and give ‘Jacko’ some space. That debut season of 1983 brought a modest 19 goals from 12 outings but Lockett wouldn’t play second fiddle again after a break-out year in 1984, in which he kicked 77 goals and contributed six or more on half a dozen occasions.

That template of individual success was followed reasonably well in ’85 and ’86 as well before Lockett launched himself in 1987, kicking his maiden ton and becoming the first full-forward to win the Brownlow Medal in a tie with Hawthorn’s John Platten. By that point Ian Stewart felt it wasn’t beyond Lockett to kick 180 goals in a season and that sense of expectation bore down on him from every angle. For the three seasons following he was cut down by an endless series of new and debilitating injuries but there was plenty more to come.

4) An unstoppable train – Plugger in 1991

If you were a seven-year-old in 1991, as I was, there surely can’t have been any individual display that captivated you and made you love football in the way that Lockett’s season of goal-kicking exploits did. Plugger’s annus mirabilis was awe-inspiring; he scored 127 goals in 17 appearances at an average of 7.47 goals per game. Fans expected him to kick a dozen every game. Sometimes he did.

All of this despite the fact that he missed the first six weeks of the season after cannoning into the back of Steve Malaxos in a Foster’s Cup game and cracking a vertebra in his lower spine. It looked like being another lost season until Lockett, returning for the round six clash against Adelaide, unleashed part one of football’s great streak of goal-kicking form in front of a packed and rabidly vocal Moorabbin crowd. He started with 12 goals against the Crows, followed by tallies of 10 and 12 against Brisbane and Sydney in the following weeks. In that first game against the Adelaide he’d managed nine by half time and Fred Fanning’s record looked in danger. All of a sudden Moorabbin was a graveyard for opposition teams.

Well, mostly it was. Having seen Lockett pour in 34 goals in three games, Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy was spooked into playing an eight-man defence against the Saints in round 10. Lockett still managed four goals but his side lost. Double and triple teaming remained the template for curbing Lockett thereafter. Still, in that year no-one could really stop him and of all the missed windows of opportunity in the game’s history, St Kilda’s failure to ride that 1991 Lockett train past an elimination final loss to Geelong that year must rank highly.

In actual fact, Lockett had a couple of three-week spells in which he kicked 34 goals that season. The same feat was also achieved between rounds 21 and 24 as the Saints geared up for a rare finals appearance, their first in almost 20 years. 13.3 came against a Steve Silvagni-less Carlton, at that point Lockett’s best haul (the following year he’d repeat the 34 in three weeks feat, including 15 against a hapless Sydney), and the ton followed the next week against Adelaide, against whom he drilled 22.12 in two games that season. Needless to that Lockett’s odds of claiming the Coleman Medal had been slashed from their early-season mark of 25-1.

Lockett set higher standards of himself than anyone, especially when it came to St Kilda’s finals failure in ‘91. Despite the fact that he kicked nine goals in the game to make it 43 in the space of the month, the chapter regarding that Geelong final from his first book is entitled, ‘How could I have missed?’ in reference to a couple of misfires in the opening term. The Saints went down by seven points after multiple lead changes.

If there is one video series Plugger fans should watch, it’s the eight-part epic, “Tour de Lockett” (part three is below) by YouTube’s unsung hero ‘Riewoldt12’. It’s honestly better than anything Peter Jackson could come up with, I swear.

5) Big Bad Plugger

Plugger could be bad, that’s for certain. To follow St Kilda in the late 80s and early 90s was a high-wire exercise in managing your expectations according to the whims of Lockett’s fragile body and quick temper. Entire scrapbooks could be filled with tales of visits to tribunals and hospital wards. The sight of defenders screwing their faces into distorted scowls as Lockett bore down on them with wild eyes was a common one.

Trevor Barker once spoke of the way Lockett’s steamrolling of Bulldogs skipper Rick Kennedy (“I threw punches like bloody windmills” was how Lockett described it. Laurie Serafini would also receive similar treatment) early in one 1988 game set a tone for the once-timid Saints to play without fear or hesitation. Intimidation was just as big a part of his weaponry as his natural ability.

The ugliest and least edifying of Plugger’s reports came after the infamous Peter Caven shirt-front, when Lockett’s fearsome elbow to the face of the courageously back-tracking defender led to a chorus of public outrage and landed him an eight-week suspension. Again, Lockett and St Kilda’s season had been derailed. Craven would later take revenge on a Lockett voodoo doll at the suggestion of TV host Andrew Denton, but a year later the two players were the unlikeliest of team-mates.

That ‘Caven’ game was probably the single most appropriate artifact with which to describe the entire allure of Plugger. It was brilliant and frightening and outrageous and spiteful and captivating. He kicked 11 of his side’s 17 goals as St Kilda stormed back from an eight-goal deficit to snatch a win in the final 22 seconds. Lockett kicked the game-winner, of course. Earlier he’d run into an open goal and drilled it low and hard in the general direction of a group of elderly fans who’d been sledging him from over the fence.

Neither party knew it then but just a year later those same fans would be cheering him on to a century in Swans colours. The ‘up yours’ gesture he gave the Sydney cheer squad with flexed arms pumping and crazy eyes zeroing in wasn’t just for show; Plugger was in town and he’d come to burn the place to the ground.

The Caven incident wasn’t the only scrape with the Tribunal (the Matthew Hogg bump was brutal – see it at 0:35 below, and the Guy McKenna elbow fairly blatant) and his contretemps with the media were many, but Plugger landed one of his most amusing blows when he infamously speared a pair of crutches at Eddie McGuire outside the Mercy hospital in 1988 (1:50 below), where he was receiving treatment for a broken ankle. “I did my cruet,” Lockett later explained with typical understatement.

6) Lockett in Sydney

What also can’t be underestimated about Tony Lockett’s career is the way in which he gave a flagging and directionless expansion team in Sydney some attitude and an identity. Lockett put Sydney on the map within the context of the league itself but it’s also fair to say he converted a lot of locals in a state not previously given to displays of affection for Aussie Rules.

In his first two seasons in 1995 and 1996 he was a phenomenon, kicking the ton in both years and vaulting the Swans into their first grand final since shifting to the Sydney. Sometime we forget what a joke the Swans were between 1992 and 1994; worse than the early Brisbane Bears. Lockett knew well because he’d given them a fearful hiding himself. In another century-year in 1992 he’d kicked 15 against them. Though others might have been tempted to tail off or slacken as they collected a contract as lucrative as Lockett’s, his achievements for the Swans were significant. That goals-per-game average remained steady throughout his second football life in Sydney at 4.7 per game. His deed even inspired some to song.

The Sydney move relaxed Lockett and rewarded him financially, but the Swans got something even more valuable; a bankable household name that could drive their brand both on and off the field at a time in which the dominant local football code was riven with in-fighting and being torn apart by Super League. Not many other AFL players could have filled the bill so memorably and with such lasting impact.