Hinkley-Sicily was engrossing drama, but the aftermath revealed even more about everyone else

Football doesn't come any more gripping or tense than the conclusions to both AFL semifinals, dramatic finales which said a lot about why we love and celebrate the game.

Like it or not though, it's the controversial aftermath of Port Adelaide's nail-biting win over Hawthorn on Friday which may have said even more. Not just about the game, but about what makes us tick as people. Yep, as Mark Thompson might have said, "all of us".

Ken Hinkley's post-siren spray to Hawthorn's Jack Ginnivan wasn't a great look for an AFL senior coach. The Power live to fight another day, but he cost his team $20,000. But it was also an exercise in emotional expression, a release of pent-up frustration and anxiety from a man whose professional life had just flashed before his eyes.

READ: Power fined $20,000 for Hinkley's Hawthorn taunts

Let's be honest. Had Hawk skipper James Sicily's set shot with a minute left on the clock travelled a matter of inches further to the right, Hinkley would perhaps already now be out of a job.

No, that's not to excuse his lack of restraint and decorum. But it does help explain it. I wonder how many of those who were queueing up to give him a moralistic boot to the backside might have reacted had it been their jobs teetering on the brink for several hours and a wave of relief turned suddenly into hubristic justification?

But I also suspect that some of the tut-tutting, particularly on social media, came from those grappling with their own instinctive reactions to the conflict, that momentary heightening of the senses when we know normal reason and level-headedness has spilled over into the irrational.

Younger generations of football fans rarely if ever see that any more, and of course that's a good thing.

Because it's the sort of difficult-to-admit "gawking at a car crash" instinct which those of us older footy fans can recall we felt when in the 1970s and '80s, the game could explode in an instant into wild, violent conflict, episodes like the Windy Hill brawl of 1974 or the fury involving players, coaches and officials of Collingwood and Essendon at quarter-time of the 1990 Grand Final.

The more measured parts of ourselves are made uncomfortable even by our own surges of adrenalin as witnesses to that ugliness. It's not just theatre, but unscripted drama, dangerous, scary, and most of us in those few seconds are like moths to a flame.

We don't like recognising that, so we perhaps even subconsciously make a little more publicly of our rational distaste. Or in other cases, struggle to put aside our pre-existing emotional attachments to one or other of the parties involved in the controversy.

Watching the various reactions to the Hinkley-Ginnivan-Sicily drama in its aftermath was almost as entertaining as the incident itself. And an interesting window into people's levels of self-awareness.

You couldn't help but notice that some of the strongest reactions in the football commentariat came from those with some sort of connection to the cause. On TV, seemingly most upset by Hinkley's antics were Channel 7's Luke Hodge and Fox Footy's Jordan Lewis, two Hawthorn premiership heroes who played alongside both Mitchell and Sicily.

They were at odds with Nathan Buckley, who as a player became well used to on a weekly basis being the butt of opposition taunting and ridicule. And Jonathan Brown, whose playing and even current media persona revolves around an old school "eye for an eye" approach.

Kane Cornes' vocal defence of Hinkley's actions and criticism of the Hawthorn set for "having a glass jaw" will have surprised no-one given his connection to Port Adelaide and the coach.

And coaching games record-holder Mick Malthouse's comment that "there's one thing you do as a coach when you win, you shut up", it's fair to say raised plenty of eyebrows given Mick's own penchant for a little out-of-game conflict over the years in several different coaching boxes.

I thought two people who emerged well in the "self-awareness" stakes were (perhaps not surprisingly) AFL legend Leigh Matthews and (perhaps more so) Hawk skipper Sicily the day after it happened.

Matthews was critical of Hinkley's actions, but even whilst being so acknowledged: "I am probably being a hypocrite here ... saying do what I am saying, not what I did," when asked on 3AW Football about his confrontation as Collingwood coach with Essendon's Terry Daniher at half-time of the 1990 Grand Final.

Sicily's spirited on-field defence of his teammate was admirable, but he wasn't so self-righteous about it on Saturday that he couldn't forgive Hinkley, nor give himself a minor slap for inadvertently taking attention away from the acknowledgement of teammate Luke Breust's 300^th game.

"The only thing I do wish I had my time again with is that that exchange lingered too long and probably took the gloss off 'Punky's' 300^th," he said.

"It's not the first time Ken's done that and won't be the last, but it's an emotional game and sometimes it gets the better of us. ... I'm really cautious about what I want to say, but I really want to put this to bed. The better team won on the night, and all the best to them for the rest of the finals."

Classy stuff from the skipper. And while it won't be much consolation right now, in the reputational and psychological game, that in itself was at least some sort of victory for Hawks and their captain.

You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.