“You come at the king, you best not miss.” You ring your bell and you hoist your flag, you better make sure the game’s in the bag. You run into an open goal and you have a shot from centimetres out, you better make sure you kick it. It’s tempting here to focus on Fremantle, and to ask how the hell they let that premiership slip. It’s a question that will haunt everyone associated with the club until they finally jag one. But the story of this grand final was the magnificence of the Lions – the way they didn’t panic, didn’t deviate, didn’t break. Don’t get sucked into any narrative that Fremantle pissed this premiership away. Brisbane won it on their merits.
It will be remembered as the most extraordinary of Brisbane’s six premierships. But in the immediate aftermath, the mood in the MCG was one of shellshock, even among the winning supporters. It was a similar feeling to that which enveloped the ground following the drawn grand final in 2010. How the hell had they done it? What the hell just happened?
The final quarter will be remembered for a flurry of moments – moments of madness, brilliance, Swiss precision, utter confusion. It will be remembered for the nerveless Logan Morris, for the imperious Will Ashcroft, for Lachie Neale bouncing off three tacklers, for Zac Bailey’s no-look goal, for Ryan Lester’s chasedown on Josh Treacy and for Josh Dunkley’s smother on Shai Bolton. It will be remembered for Brisbane’s refusal to yield.
And it will be remembered for Wharfie Time. We can’t tiptoe around it, or downplay it, or dismiss it altogether. When Patrick Voss put the Dockers 17 points up in time-on, he set off on what loomed as a lap of the entire perimeter of the MCG. That was the prevailing mood of the moment. No one knows whose finger hovers over the activation button. But they pressed go. The MCG quaked. History was about to be made. And then everything changed.
Everything that makes the Lions a champion team was evident in those final few minutes. If you want to learn how to cooly exit a stoppage with bodies flailing all around you, study Ashcroft’s final quarter. If you want an example of the sporting adage “it may not be your day, but it can be your moment,” look at Morris’s last quarter. If you want to know what motivates this team, and how not to press their buttons, listen to what the Lions’ players said after the game.
They spoke all week about Wharfie Time, and how they channelled it to their advantage. Usually things like that are pop psychology. But Brisbane truly believe it, and truly live it. Almost all their players mentioned it in the aftermath. All year they were at their most dangerous when the bear was poked, when the blade was against their skin, when all looked lost. From the moment that button was pushed they were a different team, a team with nothing to lose. But this was no cornered rat routine. They won it with skill, precision and an unfailing belief.
Fremantle had their chances to win this grand final. But they could never quite land the knockout blow. In the third quarter, they had the ruck dominance, control of the ball, all the momentum and the whiff of history in the making. But they needed a bigger lead to show for it. When Alex Pearce went down like a rhino in a David Attenborough program, they too could have fallen in a heap. If anything, their defenders were even more resolute in his absence. But he was sorely missed in time-on in the final term. They missed his ability to read the ball off the boot, to absorb punishment and to keep his head when everyone else was losing theirs.
Bolton won the Norm Smith medal, but it would have been one of the harder medals to vote on in recent memory. At one stage he took off from half back like Byron Pickett in the 2004 decider – bouncing, weaving, cutting the Lions to ribbons. But he will rue two moments in the final term when he was running towards goal but sprayed his kicks. In truth, any number of players would have been worthy winners. Caleb Serong was arguably Fremantle’s most influential player, combining repeatedly with Luke Jackson. Dayne Zorko was at his audacious best. And Ashcroft could have won it on his final term alone. There was a book about Norm Smith medallists released two decades ago titled When it Matters Most. The players profiled weren’t always the superstars of their team, though several were. But they were all footballers who had great timing, footballers who seized their moment, who ate up the big occasion. There’s no better example of that than Ashcroft. When it mattered most, he was the one who turned this game.
In the rooms afterwards, Chris Fagan walked around in a semi daze, muttering “unbelievable, unbelievable”, to his many well-wishers. That Lions song, the riff on that glorious old Fitzroy number, was on high rotation. With their age profile, their weight of talent, and their insatiable desire to prove everyone wrong, it’s a song we’ll be hearing for years to come. “Do it as hard a way as possible,” seems to be their only prerequisite.
