The most common frame for this year’s AFL grand final is that it is the first non-Victorian grand final for nearly 20 years. This makes it sound like some sort of significant threshold for the game. It’s not.
The competition has been called the Australian Football League since 1990. A non-Victorian team, West Coast, made the grand final two years later.
Lions co-captain Lachie Neale and Swans vice captain Dane Rampe wtih the premiership trophy.Credit: Getty Images
At least one non-Victorian team has appeared in 18 of the past 24 grand finals, including this one. Ironically, two of the six all-Victorian finales in that stretch were played interstate, the 2020 and 2021 COVID-era deciders.
This FIFO grand final is significant not as a milestone in the national competition’s history but as a marker of the way it has matured, and the game’s Victorian seat of power with it.
Six non-Victorian premierships in a row 2001-06 did prompt some fretfulness in Victoria about the erosion of a birthright. It was as if the expansion clubs had gone beyond their remit. It was one thing to join the competition, another to win premierships in it. A pair of epic grand finals between Sydney and West Coast in 2005 and 2006 barely alleviated this misgiving.
Eighteen years later, there are two more non-Victorian clubs in the competition and two in the final again, but Victorians seemingly are more sanguine about it all.
Blanket television coverage of the game means that every club exists everywhere, and everyone can have their choice. The pockets of parochialism are shrinking; AFL for all is a fact of life.
Yes, the competition’s geography mystifies outsiders.
“What I’m trying to get over is that Melbourne has 10 teams, and they’re not here,” said American singer Katy Perry, who will perform on Saturday. Yes, the competition is lumpen in shape, but it’s our lumpen shape.
Yes, there has been some predictable, pantomime-like banter this week between the heads of the NRL and AFL about how far AFL has infiltrated the northern markets. The answer is probably less than Melbourne would like to think and more than Sydney cares to acknowledge.
This grand final is unlikely to budge the needle much because grand final day is a self-contained event, like the Melbourne Cup, sitting outside any turf war. Because of the markets it will reach, this edition is almost certain to attract record viewership. Combined with 100,000 live at the MCG, it will make for a celebration of footy for millions of fans and a long weekend of balm in an anxious time for everyone else.
That’s not to trivialise what is at stake on Saturday for the clubs and fans crucially involved. This year, the do-or-die dynamic is especially acute. For the first time in nearly 60 years, the final brings together the runners-up from the previous two years. Not losing matters even more than winning, and yet someone must and will lose. This is the conundrum at the heart of all our sporting lives.
The rival coaches embody it. Brisbane’s Chris Fagan and Sydney’s John Longmire are two of the most admired people in footy; avuncular and empathetic, you can’t imagine that anyone in the game would wish misfortune on either. They have also shaped and directed consistently successful teams. The Swans have missed the finals only twice in Longmire’s 14 years. But they’ve lost their last three grand finals. Fagan’s Lions have been top five for the past six years, but when at last they made the grand final last year they lost it by a kick.
It was the legendary Leigh Matthews, who played and coached in 12 grand finals for eight premierships, who once best summed up the premium on the occasion.
Upon waking, he said, he was always seized by the certainty that the day could end only in triumph or despair; there was no in-between.
This year, that tension is magnified doubly. This is the living drama of the grand final. Two players, Sydney captain Callum Mills and Brisbane ruckman Oscar McInerney, are already living with grand final heartbreak. Certain selections, they will miss because of injury. Expect to see their blank faces frequently on the broadcast on Saturday. Win, lose or draw, they will feel hollow about it. It is another trope of the occasion.
But enough of the pathos. The AFL in all its width and depth has had a good year. Crowds, memberships and ratings are at or near record levels. The standard of play has been high and frequently thrilling. Andrew Dillon, in his first season in charge, has adopted a low profile, and whether it is cause or effect, there has been less melodrama. Perennial grumbles about umpires can be set aside because they will never be solved to the satisfaction of all.
One feature has been the number of matches decided by a kick or two, the apotheosis of the AFL’s 40-year equalisation project, the ideal by which any team can beat any other on a given day. In a conspicuously even season, the premiership would have felt to be within reach for more clubs and longer than ever before, which will make this flag as hard and honestly won as any in the game’s history.
It’s a national comp in which old geographical and cultural divides no longer apply. May the best team win, the nation’s best sport already has.
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