Tom McDonald dissects the game like no other on his team save perhaps for the coach. Maybe even the coach.
He watches three games a night on his computer. He pores over statistics and searches out analytical websites and consumes their dissection until the early hours of the morning. He is a student of the game. He devours it.
But the game he studies is basketball, not the game he plays. Tom McDonald is into NBA. No, into is plainly insufficient. You can be into a new song; his interest is a little more obsessive than that. Even the words interest or hobby seem inadequate.
He has something of a kindred spirit in his coach Paul Roos.
“We talk a lot of basketball. We probably talk more about NBA than footy. I really love how in-depth the statistics can go and how it can explain things that can’t be explained by the eye at times,” McDonald said.
“AFL doesn’t correlate the same way. It is such a random game and a lot of things cannot be measured at this stage. It does interest me. Post-footy I would love to go into a sport role, whatever sport it would be, analysing the game, or a general manager position where you are talking about strategy and tactics.
“I see football as a who-wants-it-more sort of sport. I started as a forward and you learn coming down back that you are accountable in terms of when the opposition kicks a goal it goes against your name and everyone can see they kicked a goal against you, so you have to develop that attitude that you hate it when someone kicks a goal on you or you get beaten because it is a bad reflection on you. You have to develop that or you won’t make it as a defender.”
McDonald is studying commerce at Melbourne University so perhaps a career in analysis awaits.
When Roos decided to send James Frawley forward recently, the analyst in him could understand the logic. But still he had a question of his own for the coach.
“I asked if I was considered for going forward because I haven’t kicked a goal yet and I wouldn’t mind kicking a goal,” he said smiling. “They said my name was thrown up but they decided on Frawley. That was fine. Nothing else changed for me. I got Jeremy Cameron [a former teammate at North Ballarat in the TAC] and Jeremy Howe came back to the defenders.”
It rained that week. Frawley, so long a defender who prays for rain (the silent seventh man in the back line) suddenly got his first chance forward against GWS in the wet.
“Frawley said every single weekend he prays for rain and this is the one week he hopes it doesn’t happen, and it did,” McDonald said.
Frawley went OK the first week in the wet but in the dry - and with Chris Dawes alongside him - he helped make Melbourne look a different outfit. It was not coincidental that, straightened up, they were more direct, more dangerous - and won.
Partly that was possible because the young McDonald was able to hold down the back line.
Responsibility is something he embraces. Having grown up on a sheep and crop farm near the small border town of Edenhope, he left home for boarding school in year 12 and has not lived in the family home since. It doubtless built his self-reliance and a confidence that has allowed the young key defender - third in the best and fairest in his second year in 2012 - to shelve contract talks for now (a worrying decision for Melbourne given free agent Frawley has also put off talks).
“We have still got 'Grimesy' down there, who’s a captain, but there’s definitely a bit more responsibility with Frawley gone forward having to play on the number-one key forward now no matter what,” he said.
It was the latest in the small changes in the team this year. Much remained the same when Roos arrived - McDonald’s fifth coach in his short career - but the calming confidence, assuredness and sense of hope that attended his arrival remains. The round two game was thus the blip that still rankles with McDonald.
“I thought we were past that,” he said. “There was a little bit of a feeling of last year about that. It felt like we were back to square one, but thankfully we were able to get it back against GWS for three quarters and win against Carlton.
"But even after West Coast we got past that really quickly and even though we lost the first three, we were just as excited for the Carlton game as round one, which is a bit different. We have been able to keep the morale on a high and be ready to go. If we let the morale drop you are no chance to win.”
