AFL grand final 2024: Brisbane’s second-quarter blitz which set up a premiership
A Jason Akermanis-esque goal to Eric Hipwood will be repeated on highlight reels for years, but it was the second-quarter Brisbane blitz which won the Lions their 2024 premiership. JON RALPH unpacks it.
Five years of finals failure can crush your spirit or harden your resolve to seize the moment when the game is on your boot.
As Joe Daniher lined up for the set shot goal that would unleash 13 minutes of the most scintillating football this season, the weight of football history must have been suffocating.
In the stands father Anthony was confident his son would nail the chance given Daniher loves the big-stakes moments.
Co-captain Harris Andrews was praying Daniher would heed Chris Fagan’s message from Ted Lasso about having a “goldfish memory” and ignoring previous failures.
Only metres away teammate Jarrod Berry was waiting for his chance but feeling an eerie calm that mother Jedda, who passed in 2013 from breast cancer, was helping him from on high.
The context?
Five years of embarrassing defeats, straight-sets exits and cruel beats for Brisbane and coach Chris Fagan.
Three second-quarter set shots squandered in a matter of minutes from his teammates as the inaccurate Lions again butchered easy chances to put the foot to Sydney’s throat.
And for Daniher, an earlier pair of set shot misses and a goal line air swing that would jangle the nerves of any AFL player.
What would Daniher conjure after 200 games where he had proven a shank out of bounds on the full or a post-high torpedo were both possible?
As Daniher’s perfectly struck set shot flew through the MCG goals, it would unleash a 13-minute Brisbane blitzkrieg.
Six straight goals to a single Sydney behind in 13 minutes of perfect football from the 16-minute-mark of the second term to the 29-minute-mark.
Brisbane would surge from 17 points up after Daniher’s goal on the end of a Charlie Cameron assist to 46 points in front after Logan Morris’ time-on goal.
Put the glasses down.
Game over.
It would scar Sydney as a finals choker on the grand stage and establish 63-year-old Fagan as the grand old man of AFL football.
And yet the best part, on a day that will live long in the memory for the Fitzroy loyalists and the new wave of Brisbane fans?
It was a 13-minute patch that redefined reputations and left lasting legacies for the men involved in that glorious assault on a premiership rival.
Berry, shaking off the cruel memories of the 50m penalty that cost Brisbane so dearly in last year’s Grand Final as his teammates mobbed him after his glorious, long set shot.
Eric Hipwood, breaking Dayne Rampe’s ankles with his boundary line shimmy-and-shake to kick a gravity-defying goal after so many cruel taunts about the Lions inability to win a flag if he was in this forward line.
Daniher, maybe in his last game, but definitely now having cemented his reputation as one of footy’s ultimate big game players after seven straight finals of real quality.
So long pilloried as shaky on the big stage and a big game dud, he withstood the pressure of playing with his future as THE game’s big story to nail the moments that mattered.
Daniher might have disappeared into the change rooms after the celebrations but father Anthony had backed him to kick that massive set shot.
“Yeah, I knew he would get that one. He doesn’t miss too many, he’s pretty good,” he said.
“He does love playing on the MCG and he loves playing for a big cause, so they all turned up today, didn’t they?”
Across the crowded MCG changerooms a more sombre Berry was recounting the spiritual feeling he felt at the top of his mark.
“It’s pretty special to kick a goal in a Grand Final,” he said 11 years on from his mother passing away of breast cancer.
“It’s a childhood dream. When I was on my run-up I had this calming influence that made me feel like I would kick that goal and the calming influence was my mum, she was looking down on me. The year before it was a free kick and this time it was a set shot. It was awesome to execute on the big stage.”
Hipwood had battled osteitis pubis since round 19 and yet he too couldn’t miss despite the audacious nature of his boundary line kick.
Hipwood went with the Jason Akermanis hand-over-the-mouth-in-shock celebration after his boundary line scorcher as the perfect exclamation point.
“It was pretty special,” said Hipwood of that sublime stretch.
“It was one of the better quarters I have been a part of. Everything was going right for us, we were kicking straight which has been a problem all year. My goal was a bit of a shank, but I will claim it. I nearly broke my own ankle slipping over, it was lucky it went through.”
On a day when everything was at stake, Fagan’s message to believe had come up big.
“It has been a massive thing for us in the back half of the year, the goldfish mentality,” said Andrews post-match.
“The first half of the year we felt like we were doing a lot right but letting ourselves down in front of goal and with connection. So then Fages played the goldfish clip from Ted Lasso with Dani Rojas. As he said, you have to get on with life. The boys were able to sit back and laugh and take a bit of perspective from that. They actually kicked accurately today and we give them credit for that.”
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