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‘A hard pill to swallow’: The 33 players who have been in a grand final – and lost
It’s the grand final with both teams bearing scar tissue. Last year Collingwood could not afford another near-miss as veteran players neared the end, nor could the old Cats of 2022. The career-defining ramifications at the MCG on Saturday for individuals have largely been overlooked. Thus, it’s a high stakes grand final and a day for redemption.
By Jake Niall
Brendon Goddard and Nick Riewoldt have often discussed what their lives would be like had they, and their valiant St Kilda teammates, prevailed in either of those close encounters in the 2009 or 2010 grand finals.
The 2009 epic was lost on a toe-poke by Geelong’s Matthew Scarlett to Gary Ablett, the next year’s denouement deadlocked in a draw that allowed a relieved Collingwood to pummel the Saints seven days later.
So, Riewoldt and Goddard consoled one another after witnessing Saint Nick’s cousin Jack Riewoldt’s 2017 premiership for Richmond. “I remember talking to him after Tigers won, it was straight after the game,” Goddard recounted.
The pain of losing a grand final: Sydney’s Chad Warner in 2022 and the Brisbane Lions’ Lachie Neale in 2023.Credit: Artwork: Stephen Kiprillis. Photos: AFL Photos
“He and I were counselling each other at the time. And we thought about, ‘Would our lives be different?’ It’s like in the whole scheme of things, no.
“But it would be.”
Goddard said some St Kilda teammates, such as Justin Koschitzke, had posed the same question. “Kosi” concluded that his life wouldn’t be different.
“But I’m like, ‘Mine would be’,” said Goddard, who left the Saints as a free agent in 2012 and walked into an Essendon crisis.
Disappointed St Kilda players in 2009, including Brendon Goddard (left).Credit: Sebastian Costanzo
He felt it most acutely in September, revisiting this very topic at a grand final function this week. He was wistful about the feeling that he and his core teammates had not experienced after 10 years on a journey.
“Like the old blood, sweat and tears and we actually never accomplished what we f---ing set out to,” he said.
“For me, that’s a hard f---ing pill to swallow.”
That less-than-appetising pill – of multiple grand final defeats – is one that will be gulped down by at least 17 players on Saturday about 5.20pm.
One of the most unusual, and historic features of this AFL grand final is that it pits teams with so many players who have tasted grand final defeat at least once.
Sydney have 16 players who played in the 2022 grand final massacre against Geelong, plus Harry Cunningham, who played in the Swans’ 2014 loss, and Brodie Grundy, who was on the wrong end (Collingwood’s) of Dom Sheed’s money shot for West Coast six years ago.
The Brisbane Lions will take the field with 17 of last year’s plucky, somewhat unlucky 23. All told, there are 33 players who have played in grand final losses without a win – a scenario that is almost without parallel in a heavily equalised competition.
Whereas many grand finals have one team with more on the line – Collingwood last year could not afford another near-miss as veterans neared the end, nor could the old Cats of 2022 – this one contains two teams, both bearing scar tissue, that would suffer more than the customary cuts of grand final defeat.
It is, thus, the highest stakes grand final we have seen for quite a while.
“This is extra high stakes,” said Leigh Montagna, who felt the sting of losses alongside Goddard and Riewoldt in 2009 and 2010 – Montagna, a Fox commentator, was noting the large majority of players who had been beaten in this game previously – plus Longmire and Chris Fagan’s records.
“Grand finals are always high stakes. This has got the extra layer to it,” he said.
How will those elevated stakes impact on individual psyches?
Once, four-time premiership coach, the late Allan Jeans observed that if you put a plank of “four by two” on the ground and asked someone to walk on it, the walk wouldn’t be a problem. “Put it between two buildings, and they’ll fall off.”
Only three of the grand final’s 46 have been on the winning side in grand finals – Josh Dunkley, one of Luke Beveridge’s boys in the 2016 Bulldog miracle, Luke Parker, who was substitute in Sydney’s last flag in 2012, and James Jordon, medical sub for Melbourne’s premiership-in-exile (Perth). Cruelly, Jordon did not get on to the ground for the Dees in 2021.
Josh Dunkley tackles Isaac Heeney in 2016.Credit: Eddie Jim
Dane Rampe and Jake Lloyd played in the Swans’ 2014, 2016 and 2022 grand final defeats. Isaac Heeney was there for 2016 and 2022. Should the Swans lose, Rampe and Lloyd will have 0-4 resumes in grand finals, Heeney would be 0-3, ditto for Tom Papley. A dozen in red and white will be 0-2.
Parker, at 19, came on late in the stunning 2012 grand final, won by his team, and had two disposals. On Saturday, he will share coach John Longmire’s fate – either 1-4 in finales, or 2-3 – in what could well be his final game for the Swans (before leaving for North Melbourne).
Dunkley, thus, is the solitary player among the 46 to have tasted the full experience of being in the starting 22 on grand final day in a winning team.
In the lead-in to this grand final, the northern states match-up between Brisbane and Sydney – pioneers of the new order of a national competition – has been the dominant narrative, as Melbourne hosts something novel.
The career-defining ramifications for individuals, as much as teams, have largely been overlooked.
In a week when Lachie Neale was touted as a chance for a third Brownlow (and he didn’t poll near expectation this year), he will become a beaten grand finalist for the third time should the Lions lose; the Brisbane champ was part of another Ross Lyon nearly team, Fremantle of 2013, in addition to the 2023 Lions, who narrowly lost to Collingwood. Neale, as with Parker in 2012, was the sub in that grand final.
Charlie Cameron, lest we forget, was in that doomed Adelaide grand final team of 2017, alongside Eddie Betts, when Dusty Martin and the rampant Tigers upended the Crows, who haven’t recovered since that wrong-footed power stance before the bounce.
In the rooms after Brisbane’s brilliant comeback victory over the Cats, Cameron’s first comment to this masthead’s Peter Ryan was that this would be his third crack in a grand final.
The notion that grand final losses can serve as a spur – even in these more rational and professional times – was underscored by Chris Fagan’s revelation on the day before the game that the losing Lions had made time-capsule comments for themselves after their four-point loss to the Pies last year.
They’d “talked about what we learnt so that if we were lucky enough to get there again, then we’d carry those lessons with us”, Fagan said.
Should they fail, 16 of them will be carrying the Goddard burden, albeit every player processes grand final loss, like Tolstoy’s unhappy family, in his own particular way.
Montagna, who says he’s more “pragmatic” and less wounded by St Kilda’s agonising misses in 2009 and 2010 than Goddard and Riewoldt, felt that there was more consequence facing the Lions than Sydney, due to team demographics.
Dayne Zorko is 35, Neale 31, Joe Daniher and Cameron 30. Fagan, who did play a key role in four Hawthorn flags as Alastair Clarkson’s lieutenant, is 63 and unlikely to coach the Lions for too many more seasons.
“I feel it’s probably more on the line for Brisbane, like six years in a row, four of them have being top four,” said Montagna. “I think this is more at stake for Brisbane to get their chance ... My gut feel is the Swans are going to get another crack at it, I still think they’re young enough.”
That equation, though, does not apply to Lloyd, Rampe and Parker, nor necessarily even to Heeney, whose ascension to superstardom this year seems overdue, at 28.
The cult-followed Magpie of the ’70s and ’80s, Rene Kink, owns the unwanted honour of having played in a record six grand finals without a win (four losses and a draw for Collingwood, one loss for Essendon).
Rampe, 34, and Lloyd, 31, would equal some of those Geelong players of the Malcolm Blight-Gary Ayres vintage (four grand final losses, 1989, 1992, 1994, 1995) and Kink’s colleagues at Collingwood (1977, 1979, 1980, 1981) under Tom Hafey, on grand final pain.
The most consequential grand final defeat – and victory – remains the fabled 1970 grand final between Carlton and Collingwood, in which the Blues recovered from a 44-point deficit at half-time, mythically by Ron Barassi reinventing the game with an exhortation to “handball, handball”. Carlton, coursing with cocky confidence, became the game’s superpower, while their demoralised rival was flattened.
For the vanquished champions, such as Peter McKenna and Des Tuddenham, the pain remained. “We blew it,” McKenna told me in 2020, on the 50th anniversary of his team’s calamity and Carlton’s most celebrated flag. “I’ve never gotten over losing that game.”
Goddard concurred with Montagna that Brisbane had more at stake, musing this week about how either the Lions or Swans would deal with the wrong side of the ledger, since odds were against both making it back next year.
“If not next year, then it’s probably not in the next four or five years. Then a lot of the individuals careers are over.”
Another “if” that can be applied is the oft-quoted words of Rudyard Kipling’s If. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same.”
Montagna called the premiership medal “the last little piece you need” for the likes of Neale.
Should you come up short on grand final day, there’s the consolation of knowing that, as Montagna said, that “they gave their all”.
“It’d be nice,” said Montagna. “But it’s the journey more than having the medal.”
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