Brent Harvey had evaded another tackle and set off again into the distance with the ball tucked under his wing.Brent Harvey stops to pose for the cameras during North Melbourne’s training session at Arden Street Oval, 25 July 2016.Brent Harvey will make AFL history when he runs out at Etihad Stadium against St Kilda this Saturday.Last modified on Mon 10 Oct 2016 21.31 EDTUnsurprisingly he’s hawking a book of the same name, not coincidentally released this week. It was just another game of footy to the Harveys.More than half the players picked ahead of Harvey in that class of ’95 never reached their 50-game milestone in league ranks. Earlier this week Harvey claimed that the club’s focus should be on beating St Kilda and shoring up their finals spot, not on his 427This extraordinary AFL career has also spanned the most drastic tactical and philosophical evolution the modern game has known – from the abandonment of semi-amateurism (Harvey worked in a gym, a sports store and incurred Pagan’s wrath by considering a plumbing apprenticeship early in his career) and one-on-one contested play through the onset of floods, zones and presses, plus the frenetic player-rotations that have made the game so relentlessly physical in the past five years. How many times he must have wondered when his brother would finally join him in the country and suburban leagues.That it was Harvey who would achieve such lasting brilliance at AFL level would surely confound the talent scouts who overlooked him. Common sense prevailed. In a game of such relentless physical challenges and myriad chances of injury, Harvey’s indefatigability and the consistency of his form place him in rare territory. Perhaps he’d get a better run if the persona truly matched the flashy playing style. A footballer like him can only be truly appreciated and understood through his most compelling means of self expression – when he’s streaming through the centre of the ground with a Sherrin in his hands and a goal in his sights. Opposition fans, on the other hand, tend to loathe him with fiery passion. Football is all Harvey knows and he is its loving and devoted dependant. His brother, Shane Harvey, played 14 games for Essendonand North Melbourne from 2002 to 2004. View details that no one tells you about. Harvey details one training session in which he fails in a goal-kicking competition against the likes of club newcomers Jarrad Waite and Shaun Higgins – a source of mild and passing amusement to most of his team-mates but a genuinely wounding experience for the veteran. Brent Harvey. Harvey’s done well out of the game and, having grown up in the blue collar suburb of Preston in Melbourne’s north, he knows it. The most glamorous it gets is a screen shot of his guest appearance on Family Feud, which if you were to pick a television program that best represents Brent Harvey, is probably spot on – not a Hollywood production but a Reg Grundy job.We shouldn’t even be having this conversation, when you think about it. Every single player in the league’s 300-game club has him covered for height, most by 10 centimetres or more.Dustin Fletcher, the contemporary with whom Harvey once shared an odd couple pursuit of Tuck’s record, earned his stay of execution on account of biology as much as merit; reliable key position players are thinner on the ground than the running men, so in return for being nursed towards 400 games the Essendon champion had every bit of utility wrung from him, standing the behemoth forwards who were too strong and experienced to be handled by younger team-mates.In one of the more amusing passages of Boomer, Harvey shares his obsessive compulsions, from the standard alphabetisation of DVDs and touching of the walls of the players’ race as he runs out for games, to the more unusual removal of excess coathangers in the cupboard and the specific positioning of his shoes therein. At 38, after three decades of professional football, Harvey still doesn’t think he’s fully proven himself. Now every single player to have pulled on a boot at league level stands in it too.North Melbourne supporters have inexhaustible reserves of goodwill for their record-breaking champion, and well they might after watching him swerve his way around opponents and kick so many team-lifting goals for all these years. As nimble and quick as he is, when the ball is in his hands the game slows just a little. Tony Lockett could have eaten him. Brent Harvey. “A little boomer” is how one of his junior coaches had described Harvey as she handed the eight-year-old a “most courageous player” trophy. When the time eventually comes for him and North to part, one wonders whether they might just let him maintain the spiritual equilibrium he derives from his anally retentive training regimes and daily locker room rituals.Harvey has needed to do far more to survive, so much so that comparisons for his current decade hovering just below the elite level of his very peak are better found in other sports; Roger Federer’s ceaseless excellence in this lengthy era in which he has stopped winning grand slam titles but still beats everyone bar the men who usurped him at the top, or perhaps Dallas Mavericks NBA star Dirk Nowitzki, now 38 like Harvey so no longer the subject of hype and platitudes, yet still somehow a champion in the present tense.Yet you don’t envy him these overriding insecurities, about his size particularly, but also his need to be recognised and reassured of his greatness by team-mates, opponents and the public.
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