Hawks Rip the Bark out of the Dingos September 11th, 2009
Hawks 15. 16. (106)
def. Dingos 8. 3. (51)
Squaring off at Humber North, the Toronto Dingos met the Broadview Hawks on the oval field on what was a gorgeous summer Saturday. This was slated to be an interesting matchup. The Dingos have been, for the majority of the season, where the Hawks were last year (until their close loss to Hamilton): third in the league — only defeated by the golden boys of the OAFL, the Eagles and the Roos. After two straight losses with a narrow three-point loss to the Hamilton Wildcats and another against the Etobicoke Kangaroos, the Dingos were hoping to trounce the Hawks and get back into the winner's circle. As reported by the CNN Dingos correspondent, they were missing six key players but their coach still expected to win the game.
The Hawks, on the other hand, were the clear underdog with 2 wins in their last 6 games... one win against the Swans and a forfeit win over the Demons. However, anyone who was there at the game the week before against the second-seeded team in the league, the Eagles, would know that this was not a game "in the bag for the Dingos." With more and more people off the Hawks' injured list, the Broadview team has become a creeping threat late in the season, like one of those well known gaseous anomalies that Forbes "New Guy" Gemmell was praised for last year: Silent but Deadly (SBD).
From the opening horn, it didn't take a footy expert to tell which team was dominating the ball. What this reporter was seeing was that the Broadview Hawks were not what popular opinion had so easily concluded: just because a serial monogamist succumbs to a couple of one-night stands, it doesn't mean he/she's gonna be given up that easily all the time. The first quarter showed such a Hawks' supremacy over the ball that it almost looked like a half-court basketball game. The ball seemed eternally in the Dingos' end of the field; occasionally it would sail past the half-line only to be re-fed back to the Hawks' forward line. Half of the points scored by the Dingos this quarter was from a "50" penalty against Broadview: Hawks 22 to Dingos 12.
The domination continued into the 2nd quarter, the third, and into the fourth. The half-court game continued. The Hawks' back line and the Dingos' forward line could've pulled out some picnic tables, opened some of the 96 beers, and played some poker for all the action that was not happening around the Hawks' goal. Of course, I exaggerate but, in the end, the score speaks for itself: Hawks 106 to Dingos 51.
This was a game where the statistics did not match the reality. On paper, if you saw a team with a record of 9 wins and 3 losses go up against a team with 6 wins and 6 losses, one would expect the team with 150% better win record to be victorious. The Hawks not only wanted the ball more, the ball was bouncing like it wanted to be the sweet, caressing hands of the Hawks. It was almost begging to be manhandled by the boys in yellow and brown, much like the shredded remnants of two $100 Diesel T-shirts found after the game. If the Hawks' intensity keeps up for the Finals, there may be a sweet underdog team to root for that isn't Coke or Pepsi.
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