Mitchell Re-Signs at Hawthorn. Shock. Horror.
Sam Mitchell has signed on for another year at Hawthorn, which is the footy equivalent of the sun coming up — expected, mildly reassuring, and not something anyone should be writing a thousand words about. And yet here I am, writing a thousand words about it, because that’s the gig.
The news that wasn’t really news
Let’s be honest about what happened here. A club that’s building something decent, with a coach who’s been at the helm doing a perfectly competent job, extended that coach’s contract. This is not the AFL equivalent of a shock retirement or a border-line bump getting three weeks. This is a football club doing the sensible, boring thing before the media cycle could manufacture some drama out of it. Good on them, genuinely — but let’s not pretend it required courage.
I’ve watched enough coaching sagas from the Punt Road viewing platform to know what a real one looks like. Real ones involve leaks, unnamed sources, a five-week “review” that everyone knows the outcome of before it starts, and a press conference where the CEO uses the word “process” eleven times. This was none of that. Mitchell signed, the club announced it, and everyone moved on with their lives. Refreshing, in a way. Slightly less fun to write about, but refreshing.
Why the Hawks aren’t panicking
Hawthorn’s list is doing what young lists do — some weeks it looks like the next big thing, other weeks it looks like a construction site with the scaffolding half up. That’s normal. What isn’t normal, at least not for most clubs going through a genuine rebuild, is the level of patience being shown behind the scenes. Extending your coach mid-project, rather than waiting to see how the next ladder position shakes out, tells you the club believes in the trajectory more than the fans on talkback do.
Mitchell’s fingerprints are all over the way that team wants to play — quick, brave with ball movement, happy to back the kids in rather than bury them in the twos for another year. You can debate whether it’s working perfectly right now, and plenty of Hawthorn supporters will happily debate it with you at length, usually after a four-goal third quarter against them. But the bones of it are there, and the club clearly reckons the bloke building it should keep building it.
A word on coaching stability, from someone who’s watched the alternative
I’m from Richmond. We know what instability looks like. We had eras where the coach’s box felt like a share house — someone new moving in every year or two, boxes never fully unpacked, everyone too polite to ask how long this one’s actually staying. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. You can’t build a game style, a culture, or any kind of on-field identity when the bloke drawing it up on the whiteboard changes his mind — or gets changed for you — every second season.
So when I see a club like Hawthorn quietly lock in their coach without the theatre, I don’t roll my eyes at the lack of drama. I actually rate it. It’s the sort of unglamorous decision that doesn’t win headlines but wins finals five years later, when the group that’s been together the whole time suddenly clicks. Ask anyone who was around Tigerland for our own version of this — it took patience, a fair bit of copping it from the outside, and a board that didn’t flinch every time a Saturday went pear-shaped.
The bit where I have to be fair to a rival club
It pains me slightly to say this, because Hawthorn have spent a good chunk of my footy-watching life being extremely good at footy, which — as a Richmond person — I find personally offensive on principle. But credit where it’s due: keeping continuity in the coach’s box while you’re still finding your best twenty-two is exactly the sort of boring, adult decision-making that clubs regret not making a decade later.
You could argue Hawthorn’s rebuild has had bumps — most rebuilds do, and anyone telling you theirs is going perfectly to schedule is either lying or coaching a team that hasn’t played anyone good yet. But the alternative — sacking or side-lining your coach every time the ladder looks ugly in July — has never once been shown to speed anything up. It just resets the clock and adds another name to the list of blokes who “didn’t get the job done” when really they just didn’t get the time.
What it actually means for the rest of us
For Richmond fans specifically, it means precisely nothing changes about how we feel watching Hawthorn — which is a complicated mixture of respect for the history and mild irritation that they seem to reload faster than everyone else. For neutral footy folk, it’s a reminder that the coaching merry-go-round everyone loves to speculate about in September doesn’t have to spin for every club, every year. Sometimes a club just says “yep, he’s doing fine, sign him up” and that’s the whole story.
Is it the most thrilling piece of news to come out of the AFL in the last month? No. Will it stop talkback callers ringing in with theories about who’s “really” under pressure at Hawthorn next year? Also no — those calls happen regardless of the actual news, they’re basically weather patterns now. But as far as football administration goes, this is the sensible, low-drama version of a story, and I reckon we don’t give clubs enough credit when they manage to be boring in a good way.
The final word
Sam Mitchell’s signed on, Hawthorn’s happy, and the rest of us can go back to worrying about our own clubs — which, if you’re a Richmond supporter, is a full-time occupation regardless of what year it is. Fair play to the Hawks for sorting this out without turning it into a soap opera. Wish more clubs managed the same trick, though I suspect a few of them are reading this and wincing a little.
