Hawthorn played Melbourne to a stalemate in a much more competitive third quarter.<\/p>\n
The only problem was that the improvement came on the back of an embarrassing first half, in which it appeared the Hawks left their spirit on the mainland.<\/p>\n
Whatever Sam Mitchell told his charges at the long break \u2013 surely the feedback was pointed \u2013 worked as Hawthorn almost quadrupled their half-time score.<\/p>\n
They finally neutralised, to a degree, the Demons at the contest and looked dangerous on the outside for the first time all afternoon.<\/p>\n
But the horse has bolted. No matter how much damage is minimised from here on the scoreboard, Melbourne look set to receive a percentage boost, which could prove vital in the congested upper regions of the ladder.<\/p>\n
Max Gawn has been impassable, while Jacob van Rooyen has enjoyed a day out.
Melbourne lead by 78 points – 113-35 at three-quarter-time<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hawthorn played Melbourne to a stalemate in a much more competitive third quarter. The only problem was that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":777924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-777923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/777924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}