Whateley: Joy and despair of Round 1 was there in abundance

My goodness there’s a lot to feel passionately about this Monday.

That’s what footy will do to us - that’s what nine games will do for us.

This is how the season must start.

I imagine there’s a fair few living the sensation that you’ve craved footy for months, counting the days for its return only for it to crush you on the very first occasion.

Hello to Carlton, Fremantle, Port Adelaide, St Kilda and West Coast fans.

There’s no torture like that which afflicts the footy fan.

You’d be forgiven for wondering if it’s all worth it - which it is - even if you lose sight of the joy from time to time.

The joy that was in abundance.

The Richmond fans, Sam Lalor and Isaac Kako’s first goals, Murphy Reid’s eight-minute blitz, the returns of Bailey Smith and Christian Petracca, the persistence of Lachie Keeffe, the towering figure of Ben King, the smiles of the Ashcroft brothers.

That’s the stuff.

The other side of it - well when Carlton took the gas on Thursday night – and they did take the gas - I figured everyone else could go about their losing under the cover of navy blue darkness.

It was like being back at school and the first kid to present made such a hash of it that the pressure was off everyone else.

How could anyone else compete with the sheer horror of what had transpired?

First Fremantle and then Port said hold my beer.

St Kilda was all that we feared, North still can’t defend.

And are we really copping that from West Coast?

We crave it and then it crushes us.

But Collingwood offers us the cautionary tale.

All that was amiss last week was rectified on Saturday night.

Dan Houston was massively influential.

The retooled forward line fired.

And the Magpies didn’t look old.

So far be it for me to say beware the overreaction… but beware the overreaction.

Watching that game was to wonder if Port has killed Kenny.

A strategy designed to relive the pressure might have succeeded only in disarming the coach.

Ken’s super power is his capacity to get a team to play for him.

To galvanise and unify.

The old school motivation that can drive a group of men to achieve more they might seem capable of.

That’s the quality that has defined the Hinkley years at Port Adelaide.

It was there in the “we never give up” phase.

It’s how Port won 13 in a row when the coach’s head was on the guillotine.

It drove a team no one rated as a contender to a second place finish and a Preliminary Final last year.

But these things only work when you’re all in it together.

And once the succession plan was announced this was the risk.

The club isn’t all-in on Kenny… what would that do to a playing group.

On first glimpse it reduced them to their parts.

For all the years of adding up to more than the sum of those parts… they finally looked the mediocre collection they can appear on paper.

They finally regressed to broader expectation.

Port has stripped the coach of his super power.

The succession plan was supposed to drain the pressure… instead it might’ve disarmed the coach.

They might have killed Kenny.