Devastatee's,
Even for the eternal pessimist, it was so easy to forget the time back then when 'all hope was lost'.
Sydney were gone - gorn for all money - after Round 6 of the regular season.
They were completely cactus in anyone's language.
Toast.
No team had ever come back after straight losses to Port, Dogs, Pies, Weagles, GWS, and Carlton to make the Top 8.
It was season over right there and then with some tough teams still to come.
But then...
For months on end, false hope was engendered by winning 15 of their next 17 matches, and against all odds they did make the finals, as undoubtedly the 'form' team of the comp.
The Bush Telegraph in the corner of the loungeroom chattered into life just after half time in the semi-final; ripped off the tickertape to find it was a message from My Spy at The Ground.
"Season over. The Banjo is full of penny bungers and it's on the fire. One, just one, lesson learnt. Never lose six on the trot. Ever"
Had a bad feeling in my water about the Geelong game pretty early on, on match day.
Had to perform an enormous nervous shit straight after coffee, just for a start off.
Dangermouse, Selwood, Hawkins, Motlop etc etc; Geelong'd been disgraced the week before by Richmond - beware the wounded Cats, that sort of thing.
It was made worse, this bad feeling, by the fact that all the so-called pundits had been tipping a saloon passage for the Swans through to the Prelim against Adelbrain, also away, in a "Promoter's Dream".
But, Coach General C.Scott had other ideas, and he must have laboriously gone through the video tapes of the Swans two losses to Hawthorn frame-by-frame, to have a very good lookie at what they did right.
[Saw the second loss to the Hawks on the international satellite television while in Port Vila, and thought to myself "mmm, there's a few chinks in the armour there", but convinced myself that it was only the kava talking.]
So, Scott employed the very same tactics, and also told his players to suck in the Umpires with a few judicious "dives" in front of goal, and suck the Swans into putting all their eggs into one basket trying to shut down the Boogey Man Geelong Dangermen, leaving the Cats with loose men everywhere.
Worried out it they were, and in any case it was pretty clear that Sydney had played the match too many times in their heads already.
It was plain for all to see that Plan A wasn't working from fairly early on, and SC Horse was also sucked in by not employing Plan B and then Plan C, before it was way too late.
Never mind that the Swans just didn't turn up to play.
Still gurgling and frothing at the mouth over that particular one.
It's not as if they put on a jolly good show and made a close run of things to go down gallant in defeat by a handful of points.
They were thrashed senseless, after their previous biggest loss of the season was in Round 1, by five goals.
It always begs the unfathomable and unanswerable question - WHY NOW?
It reminded me very much of the '14 Grand Final, having just flown in on the morning of the match from Paris via a couple of days in Saigon having missed the entire finals series but looking forward to an easy Premiership win, only to see them taken apart by their nemesis, the bloody Hawks, again.
Found myself asleep on the lounge at half-time through jet-lag and awoke to find the Swans had been done like a dinner in a ten-goal football lesson.
The similarities were plain eerie.
Six goals down at the main break again and also whipsawed by ten goals at the finish, and, just quietly, the Swans score of 5.9 [39] was their lowest, in any game, in 20 years...twenty years!
The Stats Guru also found it his melancholy duty to report, after whirring the beads on his abacus in a desultory fashion, that it was the South Melbourne's lowest score in a finals match in a century.
The Swans kicked 3.17 [35] in the semi-final against Collingwood in 1917, for chrissake.
Thanks Guru, didn't need to know that.
There's nothing worse than ending up as burnt toast in The Big One, so perhaps, just perhaps, it was better to be found out in a semi-final rather than on That One Day in September, when losing becomes excruciatingly unbearably painful.
Geelong had not lost a game all season after leading at quarter time; guessing that that's why they finished second on the ladder.
Just goes to show yet again the critical importance of finishing in the top 4 and getting the second bite at the juicy cherry; the Cats had already had their 'off day', but they lived to fight another...in quick succession.
Longmire, after giving his charges an almighty gobful at quarter-time, and an even bigger rocket up the runter at half-time, had pretty much given up on them mid-way through the Championship Quarter, and by the final stanza the television camera's showed him beginning to nod off in the Coach's Box - he'd had enough - there was nothing he could about it.
After pulling out all the hair that he had left on his bonce, SC Horse fronted the press on interview after the debacle and simply said "Our blokes looked a bit buggered tonight, to be honest".
A bit buggered?
It didn't auger well from the off, when Lance Franklin appeared on the ground with a pure morphine poultice strapped to his corked thigh; clearly injured - would not have played but for the fact it was a semi-final - so it was an open invitation to the Cats, they just put two rotating tags on him and squashed him flat...he was two or three yards too slow, all day.
No Buddy goals, no cigar.
The Swans were carrying nine passengers - they know who they are - who had less than a dozen touches each.
In an 18-man boat, you can't get very far with that many crew doing nothing on the oars.
Just as a random sample, Sinclair went from absolutely huge one week, to touching the ball but twice the next.
He had two blokes and the Bamfords on his back, all day.
SC Horse then went on to concede the bleeding obvious "We didn't really fire a shot".
Not at a goal a quarter after quarter time, they didn't.
Nope.
It was a very good thing that betting on football is not really my thing, as you wouldn't want to be the punter who'd had $100,000 on the Swans straight out at $1.38.
A certainty gone badly awry, and the bookies would have been laughing all the way to the Tattersalls Club.
And it's a shame that Old Man Jarrad "Odd Head" McVeigh went out a loser on being admitted as an AFL Life Member by playing in his 300th game, but as JPK pointed out post-match "it's season over and we have a long six months ahead of us".
Don't we all, Josh?
2017 is gorn.
All that we now have left to cling to is to wish the Greater Western Sydney Pygmies the best of British luck in their quest for an inaugural Grand Final berth.
They are an excellent team now, and good on them if they make it, but even after taking full advantage of super generous draft concessions and the reported $25M+ cash the AFL has tipped into the vast pit that is the "second Sydney experiment", they still can only attract the lowest AFL/VFL finals crowd [14,865] since World War One...at the Sydney Showground...their home ground.
No-one there to hear the Fat Lady sing.
Ouch.
Aerial Ping Pong still has a long way to go in the heartland of rugby league in Sydney's Armpit, and let's face it, it will never be the dominant winter sport on this side of the island.
Maybe us fool Swans supporters, as The Professor obliquely suggested, have wasted far too much time and money on trying the re-live the "Miracle Year" of '05; what's the point of trying to be better than perfect?
That's a long time ago now, and this is an eternal pessimist speaking.
Missed.
Bugger It.
AFL 2nd Semi-Final 2017
GEELONG: 3.0, 9.4, 13.4, 15.8 (98). Goals: Dangerfield 4, Menzel 2, Menegola 2, Duncan 2, Stanley, Smith, Motlop, Hawkins, Blicavs
SYDNEY: 2.2, 3.4, 4.9, 5.9 (39). Goals: Jack, McVeigh, Mills, Papley, Reid.
At Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Crowd: 55,529.
