Early in 1982 a sports columnist noted that North Melbourne had signed the Krakouer brothers from Claremont Football Club. It was predicted that their ‘black magic’ would set the Victorian football scene alight.
A memory unbidden and unwelcome surfaced: first full VFL game, 1949, North v Essendon at Windy Hill, opponent, Norm McDonald.
On that day I joined a long list of players to have received a football lesson from the Bomber champion. I had never reckoned McDonald’s blackness to be a factor in our contest. He could just run faster, jump higher and keep on getting the football. If these new boys on the block could bring yet another dimension to the game they would be special indeed. Watching them in action became a priority.
What I saw were two footballers who had an awareness of what was going on around them on the football field which went far beyond peripheral vision. In particular, they intuitively knew where the other brother was at all times.
This faculty was enhanced by an apparent foresight into the direction play would likely take—how events would unfold.
Other players have been similarly gifted in varying degrees, but the Krakouers were exceptional. Several factors set them apart. They had lived and played and fought and practised together for nearly 20 years, and each knew every facet of the other’s game. There were two of them, playing in the same team. And they were brothers.
As Sean Gorman calmly implies in Brotherboys, it should have come as no surprise that their apparently haphazard kicks and handballs into space so frequently landed in the hands of a previously unsighted sibling.
But even though their brilliant manoeuvres had an explanation of sorts, most spectators were caught up in the excitement and shocked surprise, as were opponents, who usually realised, too late, that they had been conned.
It was a double act up there with the best, carried off with the superb timing and effortless grace of Torvill and Dean and with the pinpoint accuracy and amazing understanding of Newcombe and Roche. With the press loving it and running with it, the ‘black magic’ tag passed into folklore.
But in a way this obscured the fact that here we had two tough and proud professionals who worked hard at their trade and were highly effective as well as looking good. In their eight years at North Melbourne they shared the leading goal-kicker honours on five occasions. They