Forget what you think you know about Jack Ginnivan. He could be Sam Mitchell’s smartest player

April 11, 2026 — 3:00am

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The remaking of Jack Ginnivan into the mould of the football club he grew up loving has not been without its visits back to the workshop. There have been setbacks and triumphs and no one in a leadership position at Hawthorn is brave enough to suggest there won’t be plenty more of both.

But as the 23-year-old prepared to fly into Adelaide Airport and run onto Adelaide Oval, which have both provided the backdrop for birds and aeroplanes among but a handful of his famous confrontations over his relatively short career, the inescapable conclusion is that Ginnivan has become an on-field success story. Off-field he might remain a risky prospect, but Jack Ginnivan the liability has not been spotted for more than a season.

One symbolic comparison to Ginnivan’s transformation from a clever half-forward to something far more serious and elite up the ground, while he still manages to behaviourally challenge his football club, is his podcast Ball Magnets – a joint project with his former teammate Tom Mitchell.

Over the journey there has been some self-indulgent banter over-ridden by increasingly intelligent football analysis, often led by Ginnivan at his whiteboard dissecting his beloved game. Hawthorn and Sam Mitchell pride themselves on providing wide boundaries and even stronger fences, so when Ginnivan said he wanted to become a game analyst because he thought it was something he could make a career of, the coach said yes.

All he asked was for no surprises, so it’s no surprise that Ginnivan reaches a line often where the fence has to be tightened. After over-explaining a Hawthorn strategy involving Carlton recently, the club told Ginnivan that discussing his own club was off the cards.

But the impression that the young player can go rogue and give up his club’s tactical secrets is overridden by the reality that club officials study, and at times edit,........

© WA Today