Go inside Tony Lockett’s remarkable 1996 season for the Sydney Swans
For all the hype of Sydney’s dream combination of rookie coach Rodney Eade with stars like Kelly and Roos, the 1996 season started with a whimper. Enter Tony Lockett and his 121 goals to save the day.
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Ten quarters into a 1996 season Sydney fans will never forget, the club’s fan base was in open rebellion.
For all the hype of Sydney’s dream combination of rookie coach Rodney Eade with stars Paul Kelly, Tony Lockett and Paul Roos, the season was almost over soon after it began.
Sydney had dropped Round 1 to Adelaide by 90 points, lost a home encounter to Fremantle and had slumped to a 17-point half-time deficit to Collingwood at the SCG.
As Roos reminisced this week, the Sydney fans were baying for a return of former coach Ron Barassi.
“I remember being injured in Round 3 and I can recall going up to the coaches box in an elevator and people were calling Ron’s name,” Roos said.
“I remember thinking, ‘This could get ugly quickly’ … And then everything just clicked.”
What happened next had ramifications that would echo across the AFL for decades to come, marking the start of Sydney’s rise as an AFL superpower.
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It would kickstart Sydney’s run to the Grand Final and propel Lockett’s greatest season at Sydney, a 121-goal year — a season up there with anything fellow Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes and Paul Kelly achieved in their glittering careers.
It would herald the start of 18-man defences and the onset of floods, clusters and webs.
Twenty-four years and two weeks later Eade can still remember the day in vivid detail.
“We got flogged in the first game and then beaten by Fremantle and were down against Collingwood at quarter time,” he said.
“Without getting too technical, we started the flood in many ways. As an assistant at North Melbourne the year before I had seen West Coast set up defensively and then kick laterally. (Glenn) Jakovich would mark, kick wide to (Guy) McKenna.
“So I wanted everyone to push up a line (to stop that kind of ball movement). Full forward to half forward, half forward to wing.
“We had been training it a lot and it didn’t work for us and then all of a sudden Mick O’Loughlin ran to half back and we just had this wave of players working hard defensively when they didn’t have the footy.
“It opened up so much space for Tony to get them on the counter-attack. Then we just got on a roll. It is amazing what confidence does.”
Lockett was capable of dominating in footy’s old-style one-on-one game, kicking 110 goals in his debut season at Sydney the previous year.
But all of a sudden his new coach had devised a scheme that would see him handed acres of space and quick ball movement from a team sling-shotting off half back.
Roos says that game plan laid the platform for a remarkable run.
“It was the early version of the 18-man defence, what people now call the flood,” Roos said.
“And it gave a lot of room for Plugger. He was such an incredible player and we were able to transition the ball quickly and enable him to get space.”
Troy Luff replaced the injured Roos that day only 36 hours after his wife gave birth to their son.
Luff said Eade was the perfect man for a list with a blend of young kids and hungry veterans.
“Eade was a breath of fresh air. I don’t know how to put it nicely but Barassi was past his time and the players needed someone with a new outlook and a new attitude,” Luff says.
“In 1995 we had a better year but suddenly we had this young blood. Micky O, Wade Chapman, Matthew Nicks, Simon Garlick. The club had players who wanted to be there.”
CRISIS AVERTED
With those Sydney fans suddenly on the side of this new-look side, the Swans rode their luck.
Lockett kicked a half dozen in a one-point victory over Richmond in Round 4, they beat Hawthorn the next week, then Lockett kicked eight as the Swans drew with Essendon at the SCG.
Simon Garlick, now Fremantle’s chief executive, said this week that while teammates learned to love playing with Lockett, he was still a bundle of contradictions.
“He was great. He used to be pretty social within reason,” Garlick said.
“Vicki and the kids were around and he was clearly enjoying his footy and it showed.
“He was the best I ever saw but we were so lucky to train with him. You would see him in a full ground ball movement drill and he would come off half back and scoop the ball up and hit a 40m laces-out pass to someone and people rarely saw that but his skills were phenomenal.
“He had chronic asthma but also nerves. He would throw up a bit before games. You would be in the race and he would be there dry reaching.
“You think about him as so dominant. He would strike fear into everyone else but he had these nerves before games.”
Says Eade: “He was a pretty quiet guy. He had his own habits and ways of going about it. He liked to train, he didn’t train extremely hard but he didn’t evade it.
“He liked to, as he called it, ‘shuffle around’.
“He was a chronic asthmatic and as Darrel Baldock said, he could have been a great centre half forward if he got himself fit. His touch and ability to kick a footy was so great.”
THE CHARGE BEGINS
After eight rounds Sydney was sitting in seventh place on the ladder with a 4-3-1 record and facing a Brisbane side that had played finals the previous year in Robert Walls’ final season.
“I remember being nervous because it was their first year under John Northey and they were the favourite for that game,” says Eade.
Lockett exploded with 11.1, followed it up with 9.2 against Fitzroy the following week and 10.3 against North Melbourne the week after.
That Round 11 win over North Melbourne — the third in a row — came at a heaving Princes Park and remains a touchstone win in a run that eventually grew to eight in a row.
Lockett was in full stride and Sydney would roar to the top of the ladder.
“They were unbelievable wins,” said Roos.
“We knocked off North Melbourne at Princes Park, Geelong at the SCG. We had momentum and confidence and no one saw it coming.”
O’Loughlin was a first-year kid playing in front of 30 people at SANFL club Central Districts 18 months before.
Suddenly he was in a forward line with the greatest goalkicker that ever lived.
“Plugger is the best player I have played with and seen,” he said.
“When he decided to change a game, the rest of us were just messing around. He was like Michael Jordan saying, ‘I have had enough of this. Give me the ball and I will do the rest.’
“Watching Michael Jordan on The Last Dance, Plugger had that same aura about him.
“There were times a switch would just go off. We only had to put it into his vicinity and he took care of the rest”.
PLUGGER STUMBLES
Lockett kicked his ton in Round 19 with a lazy dozen goals against Richmond, then disaster struck against Essendon in Round 21.
He was reported and tore his groin, an injury that would hamper him his entire career and see him receiving regularly painkilling injections pre-match.
He dodged suspension but the injury was severe enough to rest him in Round 22 as the Swans wrapped up top spot against West Coast.
Even then they were only able to seize top spot after Brisbane lost to 11th placed Collingwood in the final round.
The Swans would win their first final in 51 years without Lockett.
Suddenly they had a fortnight off and Lockett had his date with destiny after 14 seasons without a Grand Final berth.
SYDNEY’S FAMOUS POINT
Lockett had been largely unsighted with 132 seconds remaining in an epic Sydney-Essendon preliminary final, kicking just one goal.
As Eade says: “Tony hadn’t done a lot. He had pushed (Dustin Fletcher) over the fence at one stage and hurt someone else with a fair bump.”
Says Roos: “Coming into the preliminary final there was still doubt over whether he would play.”
Then Sydney surges the ball wide from a stoppage and Stuart Maxfield hits an in stride Lockett, who immediately wheels from the boundary and drops a perfect pass to Cresswell, who levels scores with his set shot.
Sydney surges the ball forward again in the final frantic minute, but Justin Blumfield clears from a Michael Symonds handpass.
Enter Wade Chapman, who goes back with the flight to mark, then immediately centres the ball to a surging Lockett.
Lockett marks as the clock ticks through past 15 seconds, aware he has the game on his boot with only a point needed for that Grand Final berth.
“He is the greatest goalkicker of all time and it gets brought up a bit that I kicked to him in a preliminary final,” said Chapman this week.
“I got the ball on the wing and looked up and saw Plugger leading out and thought I would give it a go and it landed in the right spot.”
One of footy’s purest ball-strikers, no one knew how badly injured Lockett really was as that pre-match painkilling injection wore off.
Luff offered support: “If you look at the video I had a quick word and just said, ‘get it over the line, a goal or point will do’.”
Eade was worried: “I must admit in the box at the time we raised the question whether he had the distance in him.”
Even Roos had his doubts: “I was in the centre square and normally you wouldn’t be worried but I remember thinking, ‘How is the groin going?’ As soon as he kicked it I knew it was going through. I didn’t know until later it wasn’t a goal.”
Chapman was one of the first to mob Lockett, quickly engulfed by a pack of euphoric Swans.
“I still remember we all jumped on top of him and all I remember him saying was, ‘I can’t breathe, get off, with a few expletives’.”
Says O’Loughlin; “That is the loudest roar I have ever heard at the SCG along with Nick Davis kicking four in 2005. I am the first one on the pack. I remember him saying, ‘Get the f--- off me’ because he had that sore groin.”
THE BIG DANCE
Seven days later Denis Pagan’s North Melbourne would swagger off the MCG having rolled a beaten-up Sydney by 43 points.
Yet for a moment at least Sydney had its foot on North Melbourne’s throat.
Four goals up midway through the second quarter, Paul Kelly chose to kick short to Lockett instead of backing himself from inside 50m.
“Kel was coming out of a pack and could have run in and kicked from 35m out and instead tried to kick to Tony,” says Eade.
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“It fell short and instead of us being five goals up they went down the other end and Glenn Freeborn kicked three in five minutes. Even then I just thought we might not have enough in the tank.”
Emboldened by Freeborn’s purple patch, North Melbourne led by two points at half time and an exhausted Sydney had hit a wall.
Yet Lockett would finish a perfect season with six Grand Final goals three years before breaking Gordon Coventry’s AFL record of 1299 goals.
Originally published as Go inside Tony Lockett’s remarkable 1996 season for the Sydney Swans