Chris Fagan was seething on Saturday night. His team had lost for just the second time since May. They’d lost to a club whose chair had just a few weeks ago declared their season “torpedoed”. But Fagan has been around football long enough not to buy into that. He spent most of the buildup to the qualifying final warning his players and the commentariat that Sydney shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Fagan knows his own players inside out, and he knows they’re at their most vulnerable when the task before them seems straightforward. He can tell early whether the imperial Brisbane has turned up, or the complacent Brisbane. He says he can tell by their reaction times, by their energy and urgency at stoppages, by whether his defenders are on their heels or their toes. Sydney had six goals on the board before Lachie Neale had touched the ball, and Fagan’s careworn face said it all.
“I’m not sure my players believed me,” he later said. “To be honest with you, I tried very hard this week to convince our players it was going to be a tough game. But somewhere back in the deep recesses of their minds, I just wonder whether they really thought it was going to be as hard as what it was.”
Even if they had been switched on, Fagan said, and even if they had been somewhere resembling their best, he wondered whether they still would have won the game. That’s how good the Swans were. There’s been some incredible footballing moments at the SCG: New South Wales beating Victoria in 1990, Tony Lockett’s point after the siren in 1996, Nick Davis’s four goals in the final quarter of the 2005 first semi-final and Lance Franklin’s 1,000th goal. Sydney’s win on the weekend is right up there with any of those.
For all the self-inflicted turmoil and the captain’s rotten luck, there is still considerable spirit and talent in Sydney’s ranks. They won it with no-names and they won it with stars. They won it by nullifying Brisbane’s strengths and they won it by probing their soft spots. At one stage in the final quarter, Charlie Curnow, Errol Gulden and Brodie Grundy were all lolling back on the interchange bench, the most relaxed anyone at the club has looked in three weeks. Meanwhile, players like Harry Kyle, Tom Hanily, Jesse Dattoli and Billy Cootee, with less than 50 games between them, were still harassing and hounding a Lions side who had already turned their minds to next week.
Few people in football were under more pressure than Matthew Nicks heading into the first week of finals. And the pressure seemed to come out of nowhere. For weeks, Nicks had been telling us that his team were better placed than the one that finished minor premiers this time last year. Indeed, there’s been a quiet confidence about this coach and this team for most of the season. Sure, there’s always pockets of social media and talkback radio who think the Crows should be a superpower again, and that Nicks should be some kind of Malcolm Blight-like figure. But most see the reality – that he’s had one of the toughest jobs in footy, starting from scratch in the middle of a pandemic; that he took them from 15th to minor premiers in six months; and that the team itself is honest as the day is long.
That’s why, four days out from a cutthroat final, it was so disruptive to have the breathless reporting that he’d lose his job if they dropped the Bulldogs game. Someone was presumably leaking. The club quickly endeavoured to douse the fire, but not entirely convincingly. A few minutes into the final quarter, however, and the rat in the ranks was presumably feeling good about themselves. Adelaide seemingly had control of the elimination final at three quarter time.
But the Bulldogs kicked three goals in as many minutes to flip the game on its head. Aaron Naughton hitting the post zapped their momentum, however. It was one of many squandered chances, the majority of which came in the opening 20 minutes. Up the other end, Adelaide’s big men seized their opportunities. Up to that point, the Crows had been kept in the game by their defenders, and Josh Worrall in particular. But in difficult conditions for marking forwards, Riley Thilthorpe, Taylor Walker and Darcy Fogarty stood tall and kicked straight when the game was there to be won.
It was Adelaide’s first finals win since they trounced Geelong in the 2017 preliminary final. Every analysis of this final series was predicated on the belief that it was a gift to finish third and sixth, and therefore cop a broken Sydney. There was talk of the soft side of the draw like it was a tennis tournament, and of Brisbane just waltzing to a preliminary final. Now, for the third year in a row, the Lions will have to take the long road home. They have three things going for them that still makes them dangerous – a home final, the potential for two MCG games, and years of evidence that they excel when the blade is pressed hard against their skin.
