Article on "The Australian" website by Chip LeGrand about NA23.Interesting read.Its amazing to think the confilct that must be ingrained inside Nathan.
He wants to play but he knows if he plays he will most likely cause the type of comotion that he would do anything to aviod. How many of us could honestly say that thay could grasp the full range of conflict that resides within him, he's grown up on the other side of the curtin, he has seen the sword has two edges and it cuts both ways.Just as there are numerous examples of kids following parents into a high profile arena like showbiz or sport, there would be just as many of kids going as far away as they possibly could from it. Look at Bradman's son, he even changed his surname.
I have been critical of Cook at times , questioned Costa and wondered about whether Thompson was the man, but if they manage to smooth this kid into wanting to be our player, I would say this might be the summit of of all their accomplishments
A star is torn by Ablett-mania
Chip Le Grand
September 03, 2005
NATHAN ABLETT should have been on top of the world. He had just played his second game of senior football and kicked four goals. He had played in a team that had smashed the premiership favourites by 76 points and the crowd at Skilled Stadium had chanted his name.
And sitting at the back of the Reg Hickey Stand, his reclusive father had been there to see it.
Instead, Nathan Ablett felt his world closing in. After Geelong had sung its team song, Ablett retreated to a quiet corner of the changerooms. He didn't want any part of the adulation. At that moment, he didn't want to be there at all. He had come face to face with stardom and did not like what he saw.
The next week at training, Ablett was not himself. He came to recovery and the post-match review but barely said a word to team-mates. He sat in on meetings and avoided eye contact with the coaches. He walked around the rooms with his head down.
You would have needed to watch him closely to notice the change. Ablett at his most flamboyant is a shy, intensely quiet 19-year-old, still more boy than man. But noting such things - these little giveaways as to who is up and who is not - is as much a part of being a coach as telling players where to lead or how to set up up a defence.
It quickly came to the attention of senior coach Mark Thompson that something was not right with his most delicate charge. Thompson knew it was time for coach and player to have a quiet talk.
A part of Thompson was fearful of the outcome. Could it be that Ablett's season, having just begun in extraordinary fashion, was already over?
There were signs as early as the second quarter in the West Coast game - after Ablett had kicked four goals in an explosive opening term - that he was trying to withdraw from the spotlight he had just leapt into.
He got the ball in scoring range but immediately looked to give it off. He wanted to play but didn't want to star.
Ablett had done this before, as his junior coach and team-mates told The Weekend Australian late last year. "He could have kicked 100 goals this year but he didn't want that," explained Clinton Bamford, who played under-18 football alongside Ablett for Modewarre, a tiny hamlet on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula. "Every week, he would mark in front of goal and handball it off."
Yet that was playing thirds football in second division of a minor country league. This is the AFL, where the best footballers in the country will bleed and burn to be a part of the show. And here was Ablett, not enjoying the view.
If Ablett didn't know what to make of it all, there was no hesitancy beyond the walls of the Geelong Football Club.
The Geelong Advertiser, a local paper which manages an intense, love-hate relationship with its AFL team, had offered readers a souvenir poster of Ablett, his brother, Gary, and father, Gary snr, the morning of the game.
The previous week against Melbourne, the act of Gary passing the ball to Nathan for his first mark, kick and goal had been dubbed "The Ablett Moment". According to a centre-spread editorial, "if it didn't bring a tear to your eye, it at least caused a tingle down your spine and a warmth inside too hard to describe".
The Monday after the match, Geelong awoke to an Ablett edition. Front, back, and pages in between.
Earlier in the season, Thompson and Geelong's chief executive Brian Cook had petitioned the paper's editor Peter Judd to go easy on their media-shy recruit. For the most part, the paper respected Geelong's efforts to shield Ablett, and trod carefully around an irresistible subject.
Yet once Ablett started kicking goals at Skilled Stadium, all bets were off.Ablett didn't have to read the papers but if he was to be an AFL footballer, he'd have to deal with it.
At first, he couldn't. Throughout the week, in the lead-up to Geelong's round 22 game against Richmond last Sunday, Thompson hinted that all was not well with Ablett. He was physically sore from his previous game.
When he left training early on Wednesday, an "Ablett injury scare" took over the news for a while. But at Friday morning's training session and again at the president's lunch the day of the game, Thompson made it clear that Ablett's problem was as much mind as body.
"Off the field he's still struggling to cope with a few things and that's probably more of what I was talking about than not being ready," Thompson said. "It's being able to handle everything that's happened."
To Thompson's and Geelong's relief, Ablett played against Richmond. But not before he and Thompson sat down and worked out a new agreement about what the club should expect for the rest of the season, and what Ablett was prepared to do.
When Ablett was drafted last November, Thompson gave him an assurance that he would not be expected to play senior football in his first year.
The 2005 season was set aside as a "trainee" year for Ablett, who had never been exposed to elite training and faced an enormous task adjusting to the physical and mental demands of AFL football. Until a month ago, Ablett had played the season with Geelong's reserve team in the VFL and given little indication he was ready for the jump to senior football.
By circumstance rather than design, things changed dramatically for Ablett and Geelong. The week before the Melbourne match, Thompson had 23 available players from a senior list of 40. At the very least, Ablett was required to serve as an emergency for the senior team, with the assumption he would play if more players pulled out. Ablett agreed and as fate would have it, took his place in the team.
When Thompson sat down with Ablett last week, he realised circumstances had changed again and the goal posts had shifted. Geelong's injury crisis had abated and other players were available to take Ablett's spot in the team.
Thompson's new dilemma was that Ablett was now in his best side. Brad Ottens, the other big signing of the pre-season, had ripped a groin muscle during the West Coast game and was out for the year. At 194cm, Ablett stood tall as Geelong's best replacement forward. Ablett listened to his coach and agreed to the new terms.
It had been a difficult week but he did want to play against Richmond. He didn't play well. Just six touches and one goal. For Geelong, it was enough that he took the field.
This week, it was a very different Ablett who walked into the club. On Tuesday, he took assistant coach Ken Hinkley aside and asked about his likely opponent and how the forward line would set up against Melbourne. It was a small thing, something you would expect of any footballer in any week. For Ablett and Geelong, it was another significant step forward.
Nathan Ablett would play in an AFL final. He had survived his first brush with Ablett-mania.
He didn't like the fact that he could no longer walk out of his mother's house in the coastal town of Jan Juc without well-wishers stopping him on the street, but felt that he belonged on an AFL field. Critically, he had arrived at this point on his own terms.
As Sue Ablett warned when her son agreed to play last October: "You can't push this boy at all. If you push him you will lose him."
Today at the MCG, football's reluctant hero will step on to the game's biggest stage. On the ground where Gary Ablett snr made his name with extraordinary deeds in finals matches, Nathan Ablett will join brother Gary in an elimination final against Melbourne. By 2.30pm, the time of the opening bounce, 70,000 people will have crammed into the stadium. By the end of the match, every one of them will have craned their neck to catch a glimpse of the Ablett boys in action.
How will Nathan Ablett, a teenager who famously walked off Modewarre Oval to escape the lens of a press photographer, cope with the tempo and occasion of an AFL final?
To make sure, Thompson had another quiet chat with Ablett this week. This time, Ablett left him in no doubt. He was okay with everything, he told the coach. It is just a game.
Whatever football is to an Ablett, it can never be just a game. But if Nathan Ablett can keep believing it, even for one afternoon at the MCG, then Geelong has already won. Not this finals match, but something else it had not dared to wish for. Ablett came face to face with AFL stardom and has hung around for a second look.
He wants to play but he knows if he plays he will most likely cause the type of comotion that he would do anything to aviod. How many of us could honestly say that thay could grasp the full range of conflict that resides within him, he's grown up on the other side of the curtin, he has seen the sword has two edges and it cuts both ways.Just as there are numerous examples of kids following parents into a high profile arena like showbiz or sport, there would be just as many of kids going as far away as they possibly could from it. Look at Bradman's son, he even changed his surname.
I have been critical of Cook at times , questioned Costa and wondered about whether Thompson was the man, but if they manage to smooth this kid into wanting to be our player, I would say this might be the summit of of all their accomplishments
A star is torn by Ablett-mania
Chip Le Grand
September 03, 2005
NATHAN ABLETT should have been on top of the world. He had just played his second game of senior football and kicked four goals. He had played in a team that had smashed the premiership favourites by 76 points and the crowd at Skilled Stadium had chanted his name.
And sitting at the back of the Reg Hickey Stand, his reclusive father had been there to see it.
Instead, Nathan Ablett felt his world closing in. After Geelong had sung its team song, Ablett retreated to a quiet corner of the changerooms. He didn't want any part of the adulation. At that moment, he didn't want to be there at all. He had come face to face with stardom and did not like what he saw.
The next week at training, Ablett was not himself. He came to recovery and the post-match review but barely said a word to team-mates. He sat in on meetings and avoided eye contact with the coaches. He walked around the rooms with his head down.
You would have needed to watch him closely to notice the change. Ablett at his most flamboyant is a shy, intensely quiet 19-year-old, still more boy than man. But noting such things - these little giveaways as to who is up and who is not - is as much a part of being a coach as telling players where to lead or how to set up up a defence.
It quickly came to the attention of senior coach Mark Thompson that something was not right with his most delicate charge. Thompson knew it was time for coach and player to have a quiet talk.
A part of Thompson was fearful of the outcome. Could it be that Ablett's season, having just begun in extraordinary fashion, was already over?
There were signs as early as the second quarter in the West Coast game - after Ablett had kicked four goals in an explosive opening term - that he was trying to withdraw from the spotlight he had just leapt into.
He got the ball in scoring range but immediately looked to give it off. He wanted to play but didn't want to star.
Ablett had done this before, as his junior coach and team-mates told The Weekend Australian late last year. "He could have kicked 100 goals this year but he didn't want that," explained Clinton Bamford, who played under-18 football alongside Ablett for Modewarre, a tiny hamlet on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula. "Every week, he would mark in front of goal and handball it off."
Yet that was playing thirds football in second division of a minor country league. This is the AFL, where the best footballers in the country will bleed and burn to be a part of the show. And here was Ablett, not enjoying the view.
If Ablett didn't know what to make of it all, there was no hesitancy beyond the walls of the Geelong Football Club.
The Geelong Advertiser, a local paper which manages an intense, love-hate relationship with its AFL team, had offered readers a souvenir poster of Ablett, his brother, Gary, and father, Gary snr, the morning of the game.
The previous week against Melbourne, the act of Gary passing the ball to Nathan for his first mark, kick and goal had been dubbed "The Ablett Moment". According to a centre-spread editorial, "if it didn't bring a tear to your eye, it at least caused a tingle down your spine and a warmth inside too hard to describe".
The Monday after the match, Geelong awoke to an Ablett edition. Front, back, and pages in between.
Earlier in the season, Thompson and Geelong's chief executive Brian Cook had petitioned the paper's editor Peter Judd to go easy on their media-shy recruit. For the most part, the paper respected Geelong's efforts to shield Ablett, and trod carefully around an irresistible subject.
Yet once Ablett started kicking goals at Skilled Stadium, all bets were off.Ablett didn't have to read the papers but if he was to be an AFL footballer, he'd have to deal with it.
At first, he couldn't. Throughout the week, in the lead-up to Geelong's round 22 game against Richmond last Sunday, Thompson hinted that all was not well with Ablett. He was physically sore from his previous game.
When he left training early on Wednesday, an "Ablett injury scare" took over the news for a while. But at Friday morning's training session and again at the president's lunch the day of the game, Thompson made it clear that Ablett's problem was as much mind as body.
"Off the field he's still struggling to cope with a few things and that's probably more of what I was talking about than not being ready," Thompson said. "It's being able to handle everything that's happened."
To Thompson's and Geelong's relief, Ablett played against Richmond. But not before he and Thompson sat down and worked out a new agreement about what the club should expect for the rest of the season, and what Ablett was prepared to do.
When Ablett was drafted last November, Thompson gave him an assurance that he would not be expected to play senior football in his first year.
The 2005 season was set aside as a "trainee" year for Ablett, who had never been exposed to elite training and faced an enormous task adjusting to the physical and mental demands of AFL football. Until a month ago, Ablett had played the season with Geelong's reserve team in the VFL and given little indication he was ready for the jump to senior football.
By circumstance rather than design, things changed dramatically for Ablett and Geelong. The week before the Melbourne match, Thompson had 23 available players from a senior list of 40. At the very least, Ablett was required to serve as an emergency for the senior team, with the assumption he would play if more players pulled out. Ablett agreed and as fate would have it, took his place in the team.
When Thompson sat down with Ablett last week, he realised circumstances had changed again and the goal posts had shifted. Geelong's injury crisis had abated and other players were available to take Ablett's spot in the team.
Thompson's new dilemma was that Ablett was now in his best side. Brad Ottens, the other big signing of the pre-season, had ripped a groin muscle during the West Coast game and was out for the year. At 194cm, Ablett stood tall as Geelong's best replacement forward. Ablett listened to his coach and agreed to the new terms.
It had been a difficult week but he did want to play against Richmond. He didn't play well. Just six touches and one goal. For Geelong, it was enough that he took the field.
This week, it was a very different Ablett who walked into the club. On Tuesday, he took assistant coach Ken Hinkley aside and asked about his likely opponent and how the forward line would set up against Melbourne. It was a small thing, something you would expect of any footballer in any week. For Ablett and Geelong, it was another significant step forward.
Nathan Ablett would play in an AFL final. He had survived his first brush with Ablett-mania.
He didn't like the fact that he could no longer walk out of his mother's house in the coastal town of Jan Juc without well-wishers stopping him on the street, but felt that he belonged on an AFL field. Critically, he had arrived at this point on his own terms.
As Sue Ablett warned when her son agreed to play last October: "You can't push this boy at all. If you push him you will lose him."
Today at the MCG, football's reluctant hero will step on to the game's biggest stage. On the ground where Gary Ablett snr made his name with extraordinary deeds in finals matches, Nathan Ablett will join brother Gary in an elimination final against Melbourne. By 2.30pm, the time of the opening bounce, 70,000 people will have crammed into the stadium. By the end of the match, every one of them will have craned their neck to catch a glimpse of the Ablett boys in action.
How will Nathan Ablett, a teenager who famously walked off Modewarre Oval to escape the lens of a press photographer, cope with the tempo and occasion of an AFL final?
To make sure, Thompson had another quiet chat with Ablett this week. This time, Ablett left him in no doubt. He was okay with everything, he told the coach. It is just a game.
Whatever football is to an Ablett, it can never be just a game. But if Nathan Ablett can keep believing it, even for one afternoon at the MCG, then Geelong has already won. Not this finals match, but something else it had not dared to wish for. Ablett came face to face with AFL stardom and has hung around for a second look.
