Mark Duffield: Geelong forward Tom Hawkins is as selfless as he is critical in the Cats’ forward line

Former Fremantle and St Kilda coach Ross Lyon used to have a saying: Forwards kick goals and see goals kicked. The first part of that saying is obvious: As the players closest to goals forwards are also most likely to kick them. The second part refers to the need for them to be selfless and to help create scores for others. If you apply the first part – there have been other, more productive forwards than Tom Hawkins over his 16 years in the AFL. If you add the second, Hawkins is better than any other forward of his time with the exception of Lance Franklin – and the margin between he and Buddy is nowhere near as big as the 300-goal gap would suggest. Hawkins at 33, sits on 698 goals heading into the weekend’s clash with West Coast, which puts him fourth on the table of current forwards behind Franklin, Jack Riewoldt and Josh Kennedy. If he keeps to his career average of better than two goals a game he will top 700 against the Eagles. But to measure his true value to Geelong you have to add the goals he “sees” kicked. He sits second in goal assists in 2022 behind only Melbourne gun Christian Petracca. Marcus Biontempelli rounds out the top three and there is no other power forward inside the top 20. He is third all-time on the goal assist list behind Eddie Betts and Gary Ablett junior. If Franklin is the outlier in the AFL for goals kicked, Hawkins is the outlier among the game’s big forwards in his ability to help teammates to kick them. You have to go all the way back to 2017 to find a season which Hawkins did not finish in the top five in the competition for score involvements. He is the complete package as a target in attack and as big a reason as any single player – including Ablett, Joel Selwood, Patrick Dangerfield etc as to why Geelong has sustained such a high level of team performance for so long. Doing a top 50 player list in the AFL in the pre-season is a daunting exercise because it is partly about performance and partly about prediction. You find yourself betting against players based on their birth certificates. In the past two years I have found myself betting against some of my favourites: Collingwood’s Scott Pendlebury, West Coast’s Kennedy and have dropped players like Nat Fyfe and Dangerfield from the top 10. But I have not yet found myself prepared to bet against Hawkins, despite the fact that he will turn 34 next month. I had him third on my list this year behind only Petracca and Bontempelli and you could argue that he is going better than either of them so far. Carlton’s Charlie Curnow, Geelong teammate Jeremy Cameron and Saint Max King had all managed more goals than Hawkins’ 33 before the start of this round but none of them can claim Hawkins all round impact on games and Cameron probably has Hawkins’ selfless approach in Geelong’s forward line for the impact he has been able to have. Hawkins remains Geelong’s most likely target when they go long forward (only Max Gawn, King, Curnow and Tom Lynch have taken more contested marks). He also remains the player the opposition is most likely to send its “big dog” defender to. Fremantle for example, one of few clubs with the defensive personnel to cover both the Tom and Jerry, sent Alex Pearce to Tom and Griffin Logue to Jerry. One of the major reasons why the Cats have been able to continue to compete with compromised ruck stocks is that they have arguably the best forward 50 stoppage ruckman in the competition: Hawkins. It is one of the reasons why his goal assist tally is so high. Even having your best ruckman go head to head against the Tomahawk at a boundary throw in in Geelong’s forward pocket is a concern. He can shunt them out of the way with his 198cm, 110kg frame. If a part-time ruckman gets caught against him it becomes a nightmare with Geelong’s smalls setting up loudspeakers on the edge of the stoppage to place orders for a drive through clearance and scoring opportunity. Time will judge Geelong on their decision to gift the trade bounty won for Tim Kelly to Greater Western Sydney for Cameron, but one of the reasons the Cats were able to be confident about the high cost high reward trade was that they knew Hawkins would fit in with, rather than try to outshine his new partner. The moment that sums him up is the 2019 moment when, charging into an open goal, he stopped and handballed back to Jordan Clark to get the new kid on the board. For Geelong, the Tomahawk is both selfless and priceless.