Clash of the champions

IT could be a meeting of the mighty at the MCG tomorrow night if the AFL’s best defender Alex Rance goes head to head with the competition’s most fearsome and in-form forward, big Cat Tom Hawkins, as top side Richmond clashes with the eighth-placed Geelong.

IT is the marquee match-up of the AFL’s nominal 2018 All Australian full forward against its All Australian full back.

There are only two caveats attached to the Tom Hawkins versus Alex Rance match-up tomorrow night.

Richmond is extremely likely to back in its system and instead play David Astbury on the white-hot Geelong forward.

And is Rance actually the All Australian full back after a six-week period where he has been below-par compared with his peerless standards?

Tomorrow night’s game is mouth-watering enough before you even get to who might play on Geelong spearhead Hawkins.

Coming off two seven-goal games, he is the hottest forward in the AFL.

Yet the one truism of the way Richmond plays is it does not really care what the competition wants it to do.

Rance is the 0-30m defender, happy to take whichever tall forward is stationed in his area closest to goal.

So much so that when these two teams met in Round 13, the Tigers threw first-gamer Ryan Garthwaite on to 221-game star Hawkins. Astbury was out with an ankle sprain, but the Tigers refused to upset their structure by pushing Rance further from goal.

Garthwaite gave up two early goals but was otherwise extremely solid as Rance in- stead played 53 solid minutes on Patrick Dangerfield and only 20 on Hawkins.

It has been two years since Rance played Geelong with Hawkins his main opponent, Astbury keeping Hawkins to one goal in last year’s qualifying final. So tomorrow night, Rance will almost certainly play on his own man (Patrick Dangerfield or Jack Henry) and try to intercept at will against Hawkins.

Rance has plenty at stake in the past month as he tries to do what even AFL legends Steven Silvagni and Matthew Scarlett did not. Another All Australian jacket for the current All Australian captain would give him five consecutive nods, rarefied air in the competitive modern era. But by his own admission he has not been at his razorsharp best in the past six weeks.

Champion Data actually has Lions full back Harris Andrews ahead of him on rankings along with Jeremy McGovern, nominally the All Australian centre half back.

Rance has finally shown he is mortal after four of the dominant seasons we have ever seen from a defender.

All of it makes tomorrow’s clash even more intriguing.

Does Damien Hardwick just throw Rance on to Hawkins and tell him to beat his man above all else?

In a game where every football fan believes Geelong can knock off high-flying Richmond, we are about to get plenty of answers.