What Sydney Swans fans were screaming in their seats as Brisbane won the AFL Grand Final
They were the loudest, yelling for their biggest footy stars to step up. But then thousands of Sydney Swan fans started to leave their seats, to flee the ground.
AFL News
Don't miss out on the headlines from AFL News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The expressions at half time told a sad story.
Sydney fans looked resigned, tight-lipped, and slightly numbed by the past 12 minutes of football, when Brisbane kicked a goal, then another, then another.
They didn’t need to turn to the record books, which told them that no side had recovered from a 46-point deficit to win a grand final.
They already knew the result. Indeed, every one of the 100,000 fans at the ground knew the result.
By then, thousands of the Swan fans had started to leave their seats, to flee the ground or at least the spectacle of their team’s smashing.
They had been the louder of the two teams in the opening of the game, armed with a throaty roar that matched the bigger Melbourne clubs. The red and white colours seemed to dominate every view of the ground.
Then, the Lions had piled on six goals in the second half of the second quarter, with the applied zeal of a mathematician who has finally figured out the formula.
Some of the goals were bludgeoning, some sublime for their silkiness.
Eric Hipwood defied the laws of physics and anatomy to conjure a left-footed goal from the right forward pocket of the ground.
“Grundy, do something,” a frustrated Swan fan yelled from the top of the Ponsford Stand as Brisbane’s Jarrod Berry kicked one of the goals.
The Swans ruckman seemed powerless to act, along with his teammates. They had wilted so suddenly that the second half wouldn’t matter. Had the quarter gone any longer, you’re certain, the Lions would have accumulated more and more goals.
A season of football had just been reduced to the time it takes to get a beer at the MCG.
Swans fans didn’t know where to look or what to say. They stared at their phones, as if hoping that Apple might provide a distraction if not a solution. There was nothing to say anymore, much less yell.
Brisbane coach Chris Fagan had been right – at least for a time.
“Equal dogs,” he had called the grand final clash, in a turn of phrase which deserves to stick.
A first quarter wrestle, of back and forth, two goals here and two goals there, suggested a finish like so many of the nailbiters of 2024. It was the kind of intense football that every grand final aspires to.
But Fagan’s own players had exposed the limits of his prediction. The underdogs, as the betting markets labelled Brisbane, were overperforming. As ABC radio put it, the fans at the ground were witnessing a “murder”.
Some dogs, these Lions players were telling us, were more equal than others. Sydney was having a dog of a day that none of its fans will seek to analyse any time soon. And Brisbane’s dog days of drought, more than two decades of them, had ended.
A win for the Lions also felt like a win for Melbourne.
Beforehand, outside the ground, disco music throbbed. Golf carts on steroids tooted and beeped through the throng.
Stunt bikes (and their riders) spun and twisted in the air.
At the Shane Warne statue, the city’s unofficial meeting place on MCG game days, hands waved in greeting.
Band members disguised as enormous footballs played outside gate two.
A ticket hopeful engaged in some last minute ticket scalping negotiations outside gate one.
Much of the grand final talk before Saturday’s game had involved a highlight who stands at 173cm, weighs somewhere south of 60 kilos, and has played zero games of football.
Katy Perry, in following her promise to be “speccy”, wasn’t as loud as Kiss at last year’s grand final – who could be?
She opened up with her set with the song Roar at 1.40pm, after entering the arena astride a vehicle which aficionados might liken to the Angry Anderson’s musical transport for the 1991 grand final.
Perry was the big-ticket import for a clash played between two imported teams, at a venue which imported its fine weather from the north for the occasion.
(The sun was a jarring contrast, as meticulous historians would note, to the 5000-odd people who braved rain and mud to watch Fitzroy down South Melbourne in the 1899 grand final.)
There have been other big Melbourne moments in recent years, such as Tay Tay and the tennis. But they have played like highlights in a city which lost its buzz in the post-pandemic torpor.
Saturday afternoon at the MCG felt like a belated moment in the sun, literally and otherwise, a celebration of a city that has sometimes felt like it has forgotten how to cheer itself up.
Marvellous Melbourne was popping for her interstate and international guests.
May she keep on popping, as the Melbourne of old and the Melbourne of new.
Join the conversation
Boyd backs Dogs to help – but is it best for Jamarra?
One of the few people who may understand the pressures around Jamarra Ugle-Hagan is Bulldogs hero Tom Boyd – and he has some specific advice for the fellow No. 1 pick.
Read more
Draftee lights up match sim as SSP prospects push their case
Not only did Joe Berry line up on the A team in Port Adelaide’s match sim session on Friday, he starred. Get all the intel as the race for round 1 – and the final list spot – heats up.
Read more