Sometimes you walk into the rooms of a losing grand finalist and wonder whether that team, or those players, will ever recover. There was devastation in Brisbane’s room’s last year but there was a certain pride and optimism too. They’d made Collingwood go deep down the well. So many non-MCG tenants have turned up their toes on grand final day. But no one left the MCG with anything but admiration for the Lions. A slip there, an incorrect advantage call there, and it was snatched away from them.
Twenty minutes after that game, Chris Fagan was remarkably calm and magnanimous. He rued late goals in the opening and second terms, and the extent to which they were beaten on both wings. But he was already selling a message of optimism to his players. “There’s lots of teams that have lost close grand finals that have gone on to win premierships in the ensuing years,” he said. “That’s plenty of evidence that grand final losses don’t have to define you or destroy you, but that they can be the making of you.”
It was typical Fagan. Get better each year. Fix the problems. Learn from your errors, or far more worryingly, take learnings from them. Leigh Matthews always said that by Sunday morning after a grand final, win or lose, he was solely focused on the next season. And Fagan, who like so many coaches leans on Matthews, would say something similar. “You fail your way to the top,” he often says.
Fagan never strayed from his belief that this list could win a premiership. He never accepted that they were flaky, that they were Gabba specialists, that they were hothouse flowers when the heat was applied.
But a few months into this season, it was an increasingly hard sell. Player after player kept rupturing their ACL. There was lingering scuttlebutt over an off- season trip to America. After nine rounds, as Sydney roared to the top of the ladder, the Lions were 13th. Their accuracy was the worst in the league and GWS torched them on a cold Canberra night on Anzac Day. After they lost to Hawthorn, commentator David King said it was time to look beyond Fagan, and that they should try and chase Chris Scott.
But their problems weren’t terminal. Their first quarter against Carlton, a game they led by 46 points and lost in freak circumstances, was as good as a team played this year. They were excellent against Melbourne at the MCG. Fagan kept reminding his players they weren’t far off, that the stats were positive and that they just needed to lock down a few key fundamentals. The boffins at Champion Data insisted that their numbers were jumping off the page, and that their 13th position was a result of shambolic goalkicking as much as anything.
In years to come, footy historians will zero in on the grand final but there were so many moments, so many flashpoints throughout the season, where this premiership was won. Following the bye, they reset, remembered how to kick straight, blooded some promising but hitherto unknown kids and embarked on a three-month long winning streak. Fagan says it was the best football he’d seen in his time at the club. All they needed was to maintain the momentum, and to shore up the double chance and two Gabba finals.
Then the goalkicking yips returned and they tossed away the Collingwood game and with it the double chance. When they were crushing teams, accuracy wasn’t a problem. But when they were playing for top two, they tightened up and missed doddles. To win the flag, they’d now have to do a Western Bulldogs in 2016, or an Adelaide Crows in 1998. They still believed they had the chops. But they’d have to take the long way home.
All through September, the doubts over them remained. Surely they couldn’t win from fifth. Surely it was too hard to win four finals in a row, and three on the road. Surely the physical and mental exertion of their two finals wins, two of the most intense games imaginable, would take too much of a toll. Surely Big Oscar McInerney would be too hard to replace. Surely the injuries to Jack Payne, to Eric Hipwood and especially to Lachie Neale would be too hard to paper over.
More than anything, surely the Swans were a bridge too far. They were the fresher team, the glamour team, the team supposedly stacked with the most talent. But these Lions have seen it all in finals. They’ve won by coming from the clouds and by flying out of the gates. They’ve been belted, they’ve won in a canter, and they’ve won at the death. They’ve been hyped and they’ve been written off.
Crucially, they’ve become a team that’s prepared to dig in. They comprehensively outplayed Sydney in every facet of the game in this grand final – in the air, on the ground, in close, out wide, even in the head. As I type this, a few tiers below, surrounded by seagulls, security guards and diehards, they’re strolling out onto the MCG with their partners, their beers and their medals – hothouse flowers no more, and the most remarkable of premiers.
