By Vince Rugari
At half-time at the SCG on Friday night, after Sydney coach John Longmire had addressed his players, Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin was still three goals short of 1000. He went up to Chad Warner and told him: “Look for those little dink kicks, because I’ll be on.”
So when Warner had the ball later in the fourth quarter, in a position where he’d usually burst forward and go for goal himself, he suppressed his instincts. Then he saw Buddy, on 999 goals, calling for it.
Ollie Florent and Chad Warner probably weren’t expecting to be on Driver Avenue in the third quarter.
“He was right there. I thought, ‘I’d better hit him,’” Warner told the Herald and The Age. “But if anyone else had have led at me, I probably would have run in and bombed it over his head.”
Warner can’t recall much of what happened immediately after the ball left Franklin’s boot, as most of the 36,578 fans in attendance rushed the field - aside from remembering the man of the moment was just out of reach, and feeling overwhelmed by a strange combination of euphoria and fear.
“I was thinking, ‘If I go down here, it could be a bit dangerous.’ The initial part of the moshpit, you had to use a fair bit of strength to get yourself up,” Warner said.
“When I tried to get to him, I just saw this drink get thrown, stuff going everywhere - I didn’t get hit by it luckily, but I assume a few beers were poured on him. I saw a little kid go down, then he just vanished; I don’t know what happened to him. It was total chaos. Obviously, everyone wanted to get to Lance, but the crowd was loving [all the players] they went past. It was just a good atmosphere in there.”
Setting up Lance Franklin’s 1000th goal will go down as a career highlight for Chad Warner.Credit: Getty
Around 20 minutes later, long since separated from any of his teammates - presumably after the viral video was filmed that captures Warner in disbelief, screaming “I f---ing kicked it to him!” - Warner stumbled across Ollie Florent in the thick of the madness.
“I was getting pushed over, I was on my back at one stage,” Florent said. “I was like, ‘Chad, Chad, get me up!’ And he went full hero mode, moved people out the way and got me up.”
Ollie Florent.Credit: Getty
Most of their teammates by this stage had retreated to Sydney’s race at the southern end, which leads into their change rooms. Warner and Florent were stuck at the other end, closer to where visiting teams run onto the field, and realised they weren’t getting past the thousands of bodies in the way. The Swans briefly contemplated issuing a plea over the PA to locate the missing players.
Warner and Florent moved to the relative safety of the Geelong race, where they bumped into a Swans staffer. But from there, the only way back to their teammates was the long way around - so the staffer took them into the bowels of the stadium, through a tunnel and out onto Driver Avenue, where thousands of revellers had also spilled out.
“A lot of them just ended up going home at that point when they were all outside,” Warner said.
“We were walking with them, going out the gates, as a fan would, walking along the street. They were all just looking at us like, ‘what the hell are you doing out here?’ We were talking to each other to say, ‘I can’t believe we’ve still got a game going on right now - and we’re outside.’”
“It was pretty funny, people’s reactions,” Florent said. “‘Aren’t you meant to be playing a footy game? What the hell, the game’s still going boys!’ Stuff like that. We were pretty much buzzing the whole time, it was hilarious. [Warner] was walking with a big spring in his step, that’s for sure.”
Eventually - after being stopped every five paces for a photo - they got back into the stadium and down to Sydney’s rooms.
“Everyone said they’d been looking for us for a little while,” Warner said. “I said, ‘where’s Lance?’ They pointed him out to me and I went straight up and congratulated him. It was a pretty nice moment.”
Warner’s phone hasn’t stopped buzzing since, and the magnitude of the sequence of play he was involved in hasn’t quite dawned on him. Still only 20, teeing up Buddy’s 1000th goal is a career highlight that will probably only ever be topped by a premiership. And even then, they give out 22 of those medals every year.
“He just makes things happen, that bloke,” he said of Franklin.
On Sunday, before the Swans reviewed their 30-point win over Geelong, Longmire gathered his players in a circle.
“He goes, ‘I just want to reflect on the moment it happened, because we don’t want to take it for granted’ - so he got us to talk about any stories anyone had. We talked about ours a little bit,” Warner said.
“Ramps was sitting down at a picnic for a second, eating a pie,” Florent added. “I wish I had a perspective of every player, what they were seeing, what they were doing, because everyone’s got their own unique story.”
But nobody will top Warner’s.
“It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” he said. “I just think, ‘Oh yeah, this happened, that was that, and I’ll move on.’ When you think about it a bit more it’s pretty surreal. It’s one of - wait, the best thing in my career. So far, at least.“