Hawthorn keep destroying great teams but are they a legitimate threat?

Hawthorn, without attention or promotion, are 8-3 in their past 11 matches, with wins over Collingwood, Geelong, GWS, West Coast, Brisbane and Richmond in that span - all top-six teams from last season.

Most of the wins were emphatic, with only Collingwood getting within four goals of the Hawks.

This is the form profile of a premiership favourite - not a team drifting somewhere between afterthought and half-thought, and with just a 52.2% chance of even making Finals according to the Stats Insider Futures Model.

Admittedly, there is something about Hawthorn that is inescapably underwhelming. 

In the contest, the Hawks are lacking.

You have to go back to 2015 for the last time they ranked higher than 12th in contested possession or clearance differential. 

Football's two classic foundational winning ideas are that you need a dominant midfield, and you need a star key forward. The Hawks have neither, so the idea of them as a contender tends to trigger a physical reflex of immediate dismissal.

They have almost everything else, though. 

They still use the ball wonderfully. Picture the Hawks and you see Shaun Burgoyne or Luke Breust running diagonally towards the boundary line, under pressure, but with a split second of time, hooking a perfectly weighted ball across the body into a leading Jack Gunston for an easy shot at goal. 

The enviable vision and knifing foot skills of Burgoyne, Breust and Gunston continue to define the Hawks. Their aesthetic is sneaking towards mad running, with the burning dash of Isaac Smith and Tom Scully giving the team precious and constant width. 

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On the whole, though, this is a club that's tough to nail down, with a spate of characteristics that don't make much sense. 

The defence is unusually tall, and the midfield is extremely small, which gives the team something of an 'un-athletic' feel. 

This ‘giant’ defence has been well-publicised, and probably criticised too harshly. 

The air is more important than the ground in defence now, and Hawthorn have a small army of tall people to own the high ball in defensive 50. At times, however, they will struggle with pace in transition, and agility on the deck, as they did to varying degrees against both Brisbane in Round 1 and the Cats in Round 2. 

Yet under coach Alastair Clarkson, their structure and positioning is so sound that they'll often succeed in blunting opposition fast-breaks by having annoying bodies standing in the right places, polluting the attacking team's vision. 

Against a sleepy Richmond on Thursday night, the Tigers would frequently break from defence, and at speed, only to be abruptly halted on the wing, suddenly seeing Hawk players everywhere- energetic ideas of fun immediately ruined.

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Hawthorn's biggest concern is rather their lack of physical presence in midfield. 

Against Geelong, the Hawk's size in the middle was inadequate - Hawthorn doesn't have a single on-baller who touches 6’1”: Tom Mitchell, Jaeger O'Meara, James Worpel, Chad Wingardand Liam Shiels are all fine players, yet none are particularly bruising or gigantic. The Hawk midfield can however eat into the power deficit through heat, pressure and hunting the ball - as they did in quickly overwhelming the Tigers.

Yet there is still something very tangible that is absent, another level that the Hawks midfield won't be able to reach, simply because they're not tall enough to grasp it.

Hawthorn's semi-final loss to Melbourne in 2018 - a year when they finished fourth, perhaps the quietest top-four season in the history of football - still looms as an existential proof point against them, when they were belted by the Dees in contested ball (-15) and clearances (-8), and couldn't overcome the deficit around the ball.

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There perhaps isn't so much to read into Hawthorn's demolition of Richmond, just as there wasn't much to be read into Geelong's demolition of Hawthorn the week before. 

Strange games in this strange season are tending to be decided by which team shows up awake, and without a commitment to playing completely abysmally. 

This Hawks team does however feel somehow different and more complete to the past three iterations- iterations that, despite periods of winning, were always haunted by vindicated suspicions of ultimate toothlessness. 

Those Hawks sides felt known, with defined ceilings. 

The 2020 edition however is not defined - it is stranger and different. 

The backline is unique, the midfield, for its flaws, is still exceptionally deep in competence - replete with slightly above-average players - while the forward line is littered with class and opportunism. 

Wingard is a special, quick-twitch firework that the 2018 15-win team lacked. Despite an uneven start at Hawthorn, the former Port Adelaide star is beginning to play like one. His ability to explode from a stoppage at pace, head down, with daylight suddenly between him and the pack, is something the Hawks have long missed.

It’s not all perfect - one of Tim O’Brien, Jonathon Patton or Mitch Lewis will probably need to emerge as something beyond merely functional for the forward line to be properly frightening. The back six will have quarters, and games, where they get exposed and a reasonable experiment looks like a crazed disaster.

In Finals, and against the likes Richmond, West Coast, Collingwood, Geelong or GWS, the midfield will be over-matched by bigger and more violent bodies, and the expectation will be that the Hawthorn mids will be physically overwhelmed, as they were two years ago against the Demons.

With that said, this season is a ridiculous mess. And in the chaos and with everything burning, Hawthorn, for whatever they don’t have, can be trusted to have a plan, to take their chances, and to deliver some sumptuous passes by foot.

Most years what they have wouldn’t be enough - but this year, the idea of enough has never been so unclear.

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