Grand Final – Geelong v Brisbane: Portrait of a premiership

Portrait of a premiership

 

I’m not a scientist, so please treat what I’m about to explain here with necessary prudence. But I have heard it told that even the slightest interaction that any foreign material or matter has with a spider web, even just a minor section, will change its entire essence completely. Put simply, if you were to even breathe slightly across even the straggliest part of a web, this would change its entire chemical composition. Some scientists posit this in musical terms – suggesting that the spider detects the vibrations caused by any interaction in a melodic way.

 

In late 2016 the Brisbane Lions lost by 138 points to the Adelaide Crows in a game that exists now only in the foggy ruins of time for our team – my team – who yesterday became back-to-back premiers. Harris Andrews played that night; he was only nineteen. Dayne Zorko, Ryan Lester and Eric Hipwood too. At the end of that inglorious season for the Lions, Hawthorn football manager Chris Fagan was appointed coach. We finished bottom the following year in 2017. But the spider web had been touched.

 

It’s easy now, when we know how the story ends to see the narrative being formed and forged. But they really became my team, the team that captured my heart and not just my interest – like Fitzroy used to be, throughout those years of constant sorrow. Harris was a boy doing a man’s job with a quiet yet authentic sensibility that gave the Lions a dignity and integrity that mattered to me so much more than wins. Ask any Fitzroy fan, or Bears fan for that matter and they will tell you that teams don’t really capture hearts and minds with success, but when they are on their knees.

 

The threepeat team of 2001 – 2003 were not really my team in the way that these guys now are. We Royboys and Roygirls sort of acquired rather than truly earned the pillars of those teams – Voss, Leppitsch, Akermanis et al through the merger. Most of that team became Lions in a corporate boardroom and not through a draft. We didn’t watch their early, gangly and awkward baby foal steps into the AFL the way we got to with Zorko and McCluggage. I cheered for them, I barracked for them, I loved watching them, but I felt like I’d joined the journey part way through. It was different last year. To see Harris Andrews hold the premiership cup aloft hit different to seeing Michael Voss do the same thing. It’s because I remember him when he started. I remember the steely eyed square jawed look in the nineteen-year-old boy that night in Adelaide before he became the man who must surely be counted one of the great leaders and footballers of this or any time.  The last two flags were partly won that night in Adelaide when we were smashed by 138 points, and I was barracking for this team then. Part of the culture that is universally admired now, the spider web if you will, was being forged. We were welcomed into the fold, don’t get me wrong – but in hindsight, I felt like we were adopted children, welcome guests rather than part of the genetic DNA.

 

Consider this photo below. It’s my daughter’s scarf. He didn’t know it yet, but the boyish Harris Andrews badge on the left from these early days is the true portrait of the premiership that the man on the right secured.

 

 

 

I have a few unshakeable memories of the 2001 Grand Final that will linger forever. I wasn’t too far from where Kevin Murray stood in the stands, looking over the celebrations like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil. The media captured that moment and rightly suggested it to be the spiritual consummation of the merger. His blessing truly franking these Brisbane Lions as Fitzroy and Bears of old from that point forward. However, much later that night, I caught the Upfield train home to Coburg where I was living at the time. I was a young man with one foot still in childhood, trying to grasp the boyish fandom I had when I was ten – standing in the rain at Waverley on Elimination Final day in 1986, the Micky Conlon game. I wore my Fitzroy guernsey to that game, but I never did again after that. As I got off the train, an understandably disappointed Bomber’s fan mumbled something about me being a ‘bloody bandwagoner.’ I remember wanting to ask him what he expected me to be? Who he thought I should barrack for? But it’s a moment that has stayed with me for twenty-five years because he probably had a point. Not these premiership Lions though. I’ve gone the distance with them, we’ve walked through the valley of the shadows together. Most of the team I support now weren’t even born when Fitzroy played their last game. I’ve barracked for Brisbane longer than I did Fitzroy.

 

But that spider web. I still feel the vibrations and melodies in the DNA of these Lions. I’m not trying to write a match report here, there are others who write for the Almanac who do that much better than I can. This is an attempt to capture some of the memories from yesterday into the mosaic of my fandom. To listen in to the melodies of the Lion spider web that will vibrate and echo now. There was a bit of Richard Osborne in Levi Ashcroft stepping around the mark and kicking a monster goal. There is a lesson to be learnt in the way that teenagers like Levi run fearlessly run full tilt at the world. There’s a lot of Doc Wheildon in Darcy Wilmot, Garry Wilson’s leadership and mien permeates through in the style and dignity of our current captain Harris.

 

But this isn’t just a Fitzroy story. Lachie Neale’s captain’s goal yesterday had a lot of Michael Voss. Hugh McCluggage’s thousand cuts destroyed Geelong in a manner that Simon Black once did. I could go on – Matt Rendell and Oscar McInerney, both fine ruckmen but also both also heart and soul barometers. But let’s also remember yesterday for what it was on its own terms. After a quiet year, Charlie Cameron’s game was a greatest hits comeback special. Will Ashcroft put another blue-chip performance into his burgeoning resume.

 

Coach Fagan has openly borrowed some of his coaching optimism from televisions’ Ted Lasso who suggested to one of his players to ‘be a goldfish’ and have a similarly short memory as a way of shaking off mistakes. Zac Bailey played like this yesterday, missing goal after goal but still kept on enthusiastically playing like a kid in the school yard.

 

Cam Rayner has had games with more moments that will appear in his personal highlight reels, but he tackled selflessly like a man whose essence as a footballer has been shaped by a coach who has never stopped believing in him. Fans like me remember him missing a goal after the siren to win a game against North Melbourne in his early days. But we also remember his coach quickly suggesting that Rayner would have many future games of greater consequence in which he would determine results in the positive.

 

In putting his arm around a dejected Rayner in that moment and reiterating the line from Mandela that ‘we either win or we learn’ Fagan defined himself and his club. He touched the spider web.  This line about winning or learning has become a constant credo from Fagan throughout his entire time with us.

 

We lost that game in 2018, but in that moment and many others like it – Fagan created the 2024 and 2025 premierships.

 

 

GEELONG       2.3     5.6     6.8     11.9 (75)
BRISBANE      1.6     5.6     9.9     18.14 (122)

 

GOALS
Geelong: Dempsey 4, Blicavs, Bowes, Close, Holmes, Mannagh, Mullin, Neale
Brisbane: Cameron 4, McCluggage 4, Bailey 3, Lohmann 2, L.Ashcroft, W.Ashcroft, Morris, Neale, Rayner

 

BEST
Geelong: Dempsey, Holmes, Humphries, Atkins, Smith
Brisbane: McCluggage, W. Ashcroft, Andrews, Bailey, Cameron, Gardiner

 

INJURIES
Geelong: Cameron (arm)
Brisbane: Starcevich (head)

 

SUBSTITUTES
Geelong: Jack Martin replaced Rhys Stanley in the fourth quarter
Brisbane: Lachie Neale replaced Sam Marshall in the third quarter

 

Crowd: 100,022 at the MCG

 

More from Shane Reid can be read Here

 

 

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