As far as I am concerned, too much sport is never enough. Things like politics and business are better off viewed through the lens of sport, and military conflicts would be better for all concerned if armies abandoned killing each other and the spectators, and instead fought a contest on the sporting field. Contrary to the quite frankly ridiculous assertion that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, this would have been better for all concerned if they had kept the fight on the sporting fields of Eton and someone instead had put a bullet in Napoleon and Wellington. "They wrapped themselves in the glory" says the statue. Yeah right, I am not convinced. "They wrapped themselves in the glory... that other people fought for" more like. 53,000 dads never came home. They'd have all been better off if they'd gone to the footy... including Napoleon and Wellington.
Too much sport is clearly the more glorious option. The glint of silverware, after people wait and wonder until their team scores and then scream at the sky above, is brighter and bigger and better than so-called grown-up things like love and war. Victory whose daughters are Honour and Glory, is obviously better War whose sons are Fear, Terror, Chaos, and Confusion.
As the title suggests, this is what I think that the greatest comeback in all of sport was. Comebacks are better than lay down triumphs for the simple reason that sport is a contest and when there is no contest... there is no contest. As much as everyone loves and is soon tired of seeing a maestro at work, the idea that a clear an obvious champion should beat down on everyone gets pretty old pretty quickly. Max Verstappen could very well be the greatest Formula One driver of all time, but my favourite Formula One Grand Prix of all time was when Jean Alesi won in Canada in 1995. This was a victory which proved to be his only Grand Prix win, which might have made it all the more special, but the manner in which the mercurial Frenchman who looked like he was going nowhere in the race managed to hold on while everyone else fell away was a joy to watch.
Arguably the best stories in sporting contests are when someone comes back after being way behind. I personally think that the 2005 European Champions League Final between Liverpool and AC Milan was amazing but at the time it was heartbreaking to watch. Liverpool were 3-nil down at half time, came back to 3-3 at full time, held on for extra time and then managed to win on penalties which was unheard of for an English team to do.
When Australia II beat Liberty to win the 1983 America's Cup, after being 3-nil down a series of match races they then won the next four of seven to win 4-3. What makes that all the more remarkable is that the New York Yacht Club had held what was originally known as the 100 Guineas Cup since 1851 which meant that they had held it for 132 years and nobody had pushed them to a tie-break race.
Very likely the biggest statistical comeback is something like that, where the team that comes back has scored no points and then wins enough to win the match. However I think that that greatest comeback in all of sport actually happened in an Australian Rules football match because the statistical outlay of being so far behind, is far more unlikely. 3-nil down to 3-4 up happens uncommonly but still often enough to provide reasonable data on. The Australian Rules football match which I think had the greatest comeback in all of sport, had a margin which has only been overcome twice at professional level since 1859.
In 1999, on a cold day in Melbourne in June, my team Hawthorn played St Kilda at Waverley Park, in a match which would ultimately prove nothing as neither team made the playoffs. Waverley Park, aka VFL Park, was a very big football ground which was built by Kerry Packer so that he could have a place to put on and show his new World Series Cricket without having to annoy the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the Victorian and Australian Cricket Associations (or pay them). The ground was so massive that cricket was played with ropes well inside the ground, and even Australian Rules football which uses a cricket field as its field of play, moved the boundary lines well inside the fences.
St Kilda in 1999 were a disappointingly average side who should have done much better. They certainly had the thug power in both Big Bad Mad Bad Barry Hall and Spida Everett to if not win footy games, then to win fistfights. After climbing as high 3rd they dribbled down the ladder and would not be playing in the finals that season. Facing up against them in that match was a Hawthorn which that season was mildly awful. In any given week that season, the question was not if Hawthorn would win or lose but by how much they would lose? There was no hope at all of finals footy for Hawthorn and the season vacillated between terrible and dire.
This match started badly for Hawthorn and proceeded to get worse. Hawthorn scored an initial behind but the score very quickly blew out to Hawthorn 0.1.1 to St.Kilda 6.3.39. When Hawthorn did finally score an opening goal, they very quickly remembered that they were an awful team and upon a passage of play which saw a forward completely spew the ball into the terraces while inside St Kilda's goal square, play moved back up the field and never seemed to return for a long time.
Remember how I said that Waverley Park was massively massive? For most of the first quarter, we spent a lot of our time running all over the empty wooden terraces fishing out balls that had been used score goals and returning them to the goal umpire. For most of the second quarter, we spent a lot of our time standing by the fence trying to see very small brown and yellow clad players fail in their ineptitude to even get the ball away from equally small black, white and red players up the other end of the field; which may as well have been in another suburb and practically was.
Late in the first quarter, this was looking like a humiliation: "7 plays 57, well I suppose the game's already over..." said the commentary and if a 50 point deficit looks bad, it got worse. Part way through the second quarter, the slaughter was so terrible that St.Kilda were on 11.4.70 while Hawthorn had still not even made it within the 50 metre ring at our end of the field; much less moved the numbers on the aging 'digital' scoreboard made up of thousands of sometimes broken light bulbs, from 1.1.7.
For everyone in the world who is in that general kind of region which we call "Not Australia", which means that you are devoid of the most insane game ever devised by mankind that somehow became both professional and raised up quasi-semi-hemi-demigods (Praise Dipper!), a three goal lead in an Australian Rules football match is generally a decent enough buffer that a team can afford to relax a bit and still waltz away with the win and four points. However, in this match, St.Kilda had their boot standing so heavily on the head of Hawthorn that the widest margin that this match blew out to was 10 goals, 3 behinds. 10.3.63 is itself a score which might have been expected on a cold and increasingly nasty night in Victoria. As temperatures plunged into single digits, so did the hopes of Hawthorn fans.
In the second half weak sunshine shone on the ground and with it, the weak rays of hope floodlit the match. Somehow, in a defiance of logic and common sense, Hawthorn would turn around a 63 point deficit and by the end of the match had scored 12 unanswered goals. When the siren blared out its final whinge of contempt for the weather, for the evening and for even the existence of Waverley Park itself, at the end of the 4th Quarter the score was: St Kilda 14.12.96 - Hawthorn 17.7.109.
How?
To this day I have no idea how you turn around a ten goal deficit. Where do you dig down inside yourself to find the mental strength? To this day I do not understand what could have motivated the Hawthorn team to rise up in a match which in the grand scheme of the season meant absolutely nothing of value at all, since neither St.Kilda nor Hawthorn had any hope of playing finals footy that year. In the quarter century which has followed, there has been exactly one Australian Rules Football Match in which a bigger deficit has been turned around but the context of that match was that both sides were playing with the incentive of winning a better place on the ladder and hopefully picking up a bye in the finals series. How do you as a coach convince 22 tired men to step up to the occasion, when there is no occasion to step up to? There would be no big dance in September.
This is why in my not very well paid opinion, this is the greatest comeback in all of sport. To come back to win a trophy is one thing but to come back to win a normal regular league match where there was no incentive, no carrot, no piece of pie, no hope of finals footy, nothing, is quite another. I don't even remember who won the flag in 1999. What I do remember is this match; which still shines brighter than silverware.
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