Dom Sheed takes us through his nerveless goal that delivered West Coast a premiership
HOW does it feel to have the result of an AFL Grand Final on your own boot? Dom Sheed has written himself into football folklore after his nerveless match-winning goal.
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HOW does it feel to have the result of an AFL Grand Final on your own boot?
To hold the Sherrin in your hands with the clock ticking down and heart thumping out of your chest.
Knowing what you do next will crush your side’s dreams, or turn your own deeds into the stuff of premiership folklore.
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Two minutes on the clock, deep in the pocket, a baying MCG crowd aware a freak goal will snatch victory away from Collingwood’s black and white army.
In 20 years West Coast’s Dom Sheed, who only won his spot back in this team through Andrew Gaff’s suspension, will regale us with tales of nerveless precision.
Yet the reality, as football’s latest Grand Final hero told the Herald Sun post-match, was more visceral.
“Within two minutes to go in a Grand Final to put your team in front, you are sh---ing yourself a bit,’’ he recalled as the champagne and tears flowed in equal measure in West Coast’s rooms.
“But that is a reality and that’s what happens on the biggest stage.
“I knew I had to go back and have a shot. Not long left on the clock. I was 25m out, I had to have a shot,” he said.
“I was a bit in two minds what to do. I thought I could probably hit the ball better if I just stayed and did a drop punt. That’s where our race is at training so you usually have a few pot shots from there walking off the track.
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“I think the boys all walked around to set up the zone (for a kick-in). They thought I was going to miss it.”
“I thought I hit it well. I don’t really remember it all right now, it’s all so raw and surreal. I just can’t believe I have got a medal around my neck.”
The “King of Kalgoorlie”, who had never before nailed a match-winning kick, has now created the stuff of AFL legend.
And West Coast are the 2018 premiers as a result.
Instead of a wobbly point or scrounged goal West Coast won this Grand Final with a play of sheer perfection.
An end-to-end goal started by Jeremy McGovern’s intercept mark, spirited through the hands of Nathan Vardy and Liam Ryan to the pocket where Sheed calmly took the mark.
McGovern revealed post-match he had been hospitalised for two nights this week, Vardy was a Cats cast-off and bit-parts player, Ryan had earlier been pilloried for taking short steps in a marking contest.
If McGovern were a racehorse he might have been put down at times in the second half, lame as he tried to ignore the throbbing pain of internal bleeding.
Yet with 155 seconds on the clock he would launch the attacking sortie to break Pies hearts.
He surged when opponent Jordan De Goey folded back, hauling in his ninth mark of a remarkable afternoon to hit up Vardy.
Ryan’s short steps under a high ball early in the half had drawn gasps of horror, yet against interceptor Tom Langdon he found the courage to rise and drag down the Sherrin, then find Sheed in the pocket.
“I just had to go, I knew the state of the game and I had to mark it. I try to mark everything anyway, but I knew had to get the goal quickly,” McGovern said.
“I was actually pretty confident with Dom. He was on the left-footer’s side so I thought he was a good chance and he absolutely dobbed it.”
Teammate Elliot Yeo, another Eagles redemption story after his 2015 shocker, was just as optimistic.
“I actually though Dom Sheed is a mad chance to peg this,’’ he said later.
“He played an unbelievable game, he was a left-footer in that pocket, and I just thought, ‘You know what, he will peg this’, and he did”.
As Vardy said of a play Adam Simpson couldn’t have drawn up in his dreams, you spend a lifetime hoping about executing on the biggest stage of all.
“As soon as ‘Gov’ flew for it, you knew he was going to mark it, and I got the hit-up and in my head I just knew I had to move it quick and “Sheeder” just went with the drop punt and slotted it from there. It’s so special. He snaps them well at training but he was going for a drop punt.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know about this’, but he was very cool. Straight through the middle.”
Thirty metres out, the tightest angle possible, 211cm ruckman Mason Cox guarding the mark, the moment played out hundreds of times with his older brothers back at home.
This was Sheed’s moment and he took it with both hands.
As a result he will join Travis Cloke (2010) and Paul Chapman (2009) in football folklore as the man who changed the course of a Grand Final with a single kick.
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