Sydney would have to become the first team in AFL/VFL history to lose a game by over 100 points and win the premiership
There’s more than 100 years of evidence to suggest Sydney can’t win the AFL premiership in 2024, but that means nothing to coach John Longmire.
AFL
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Sydney coach John Longmire’s first move in the wake of his team’s horror loss to Port Adelaide was to give the players extra time off to “mentally refresh” with more than 100 years of AFL/VFL history now standing in the way of the Swans achieving premiership success.
No side has ever lost by more than 100 points during the regular season and gone on to taste grand final success and last Sunday’s 112-point hammering, the largest loss in Longmire’s stellar coaching career, has made that the task for the stuttering ladder leaders.
The biggest loss by a premiership winner was the 1945 Carlton team, which lost by exactly 100 points to Essendon in round 3 of the season, but scraped into the finals in fourth before ironically defeating the club which became the Sydney Swans, South Melbourne, in the grand final.
Swans players were given the training break after a fifth loss in six games for the one-time premiership favourites as Longmire searches for ways to get his team out of the mire in Friday’s huge SCG clash with Collingwood.
Longmire denied his players had “hit the wall” and said he was keen for the disappointment to “wash through” in the days after the loss, knowing he had to head into “solution mode” as fast as possible with the Magpies, still out of the eight, needing to win to stay in finals contention.
“You go through enormous disappointment obviously the day after the game, and you let it wash through, and then you sort of come in yesterday, like we did as coaches, and I’ll speak to a couple of the senior players, and you just work through some of the solutions,” a pragmatic Longmire said on Tuesday.
“You need to get that out of your system pretty quickly and look towards some of the solutions of that, and part of it was giving ourselves a couple of days off. We look at our training, we look at personnel that will come back in again this week, some of the changes that we can make that helps us attack Collingwood this week with some sort of level of certainty that we can compete.
“And we’re confident in that, because we’ve shown this year, time and time again, week after week, that we can do it. Our players know that. We know that as coaches and we need to go and do it.”
Despite the horror recent run, the Swans still sit a game clear on top of the ladder, evidence of their dominance up to round 16, a run that included just one defeat.
Asked how concerned he was about the rut his team was in, Longmire said every team went through “ebbs and flows” and there had been enough examples from his team this season to give belief the tide would turn.
“I’d rather it not happen at the end of the year. There’s no question about that, but it does happen,” he said.
“We understand that we’ve been a little bit below our best, and certainly on the weekend, well below our best.
“It wasn’t that long ago that we weren’t too bad in the competing sense, so that’s something that we’re mindful of, and we feel like we’ve got the tools now to help change the momentum for this week.”
Longmire was also happy to push aside the fact history is against his team winning the premiership, declaring it meant nothing.
“Whether it’s statistics or it’s the ifs, buts, maybes, what could happen in 10 weeks time, it’s not really relevant for us,” he said.
“As a coach, you’ve seen most things that happen over the journey.
“What we know is we’ve played some really good footy this year. We know that our best is very good. That’s been proven.
“We’re confident in our playing group and our staff to be able to return to that.”
Key forward Joel Amartey is expected to return against the Magpies after he was left out of the Port clash.
Originally published as Sydney would have to become the first team in AFL/VFL history to lose a game by over 100 points and win the premiership
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