missed the mark

 

Disappointee's

'They had their chances' was the call at full-time, so it wasn't as if there was any bad luck involved, but there it is. Ba Boom! End of the section, season over. Just like that. Your ticket is punched. Swans go down in the Elimination Final by a single, solitary point to dash the hopes of the die-hard faithful.

After a see-sawing affair looked like turning into a rout at three-quarter time, and the match was seemingly gorn for all money by any estimation, like everyone, My Spy at The Ground was getting pretty frantic in the final quarter, when the Swans then threatened to have a very good dip at winning the thing after playing catch up football all day. But they missed the mark. Just to prove the Swans made a complete mess of the last quarter a message from the ground sputtered through on the Bush Telegraph in the corner of the lounge room. "Bell out of bounds, Haywood poster, Hickey behind, Wicks hits post, Bell yet another poster, Buddy behind". If any of those had been converted, South Melbourne would have won in a canter. But, alas, it never came to pass. Seven behinds in the final stanza will not win a final. You can talk all you like about whether they shifted from Plan A to Plan B too late, but it really was a shame to go out in the first week of the finals after finishing sixth. The Battle of the Bridge thing fell out of favour a long time ago, as there's never been any if this cross town rivalry thing that can get pretty bitter and twisted in natural two-team towns like Adelaide and Perth, so that passion was missing in Launceston, of all the joints on the face of this Gawdforsaken earth. GWS have no supporters anyway, as they're an entirely manufactured entity. As far as can be discerned from the Pygs opening finals performance, the key thing in their favour seemed to be that demonstrative thug in the form of the now rubbed-out Toby Greene. Please. Do not get me started on Toby "Fucking" Greene. Without the crazed wildman of the west, Geelong should gobble them up like kippers for breakfast in the semi's.

But nah, the game was full of coodabeens, shooldabeens, miteabeens and all that jazz. Buddy needed to go deep into September to really threaten the one million career goals milestone this season, so will now have to wait for the big time pay day - the 9th year of his contract with The Red and The White. Throughout the regular season the Swans never lost or won by very much for the most part - not many thrashings - but the Covid bubble arrangements skewed everything. For the second season in a row, the Premiers will have their name painted in gold on the timber panels down at the clubhouse with an asterisk denoting the *impossible conditions the season was played under.  In the final paralysis, it was a mighty effort just to prove the pundits wrong and make the finals at all. If you told any of the players before the season started they'd be playing a finals match in north Tasmania in search of a crowd, any crowd, they would have laughed you got of the room. Going forward, as they say in newspeak, even with a very solid basis for a Premiership winning side, they'll still need a little judicious off season buying in the player market, some trading away of their consistent passengers, and ushering through a fresh crop of draftee's. You'd have to think the future for the Sydney System looks bright. It's a margin call in these difficult and uncertain times, but maybe even brighter than the future of the AFL itself. Everything is very much kept in-house. The Swans could have done a week long pub crawl around the picturesque Apple Isle dressed in women's clothing to celebrate Mad Monday for all anyone knows, as it wouldn't have made the papers.

'They only had themselves to blame', was the call at full-time. And for once, losing by the slimmest of margins was hardly the fault of the Bamford's; they had a reasonable enough game, so there's that. Damn it. Back in the day there would have been the whiff of me pouring a beer tin over me bonce with smoke pouring outta the ears, but not so nearly as bad as the worst experience in world sport: losing the Big One by a point in a score measured in hundreds of them. It never fails to remind of that time many, many, many moons ago now, finding myself in the kitchen of an ordinary suburban home straight out of 1950's Adelaide with my inconsolable the then first mother-in-law in a distraught stupour. For a woman who only very rarely drank anything at all, she'd managed to put away the best part of a bottle of cooking sherry and was wobbling around attempting to slug some from the neck slurring to no-one in particular "a bloody point, a bloody point, a bloody point, a bloody point", and apart from the occasional grunt of "shit!" was incapable of saying anything else. The 1978 SANFL Grand Final was the cause of her angst and grief. Her beloved dear boys from Sturt, who were unbackable white-hot favourites, had been beaten in a classic snatching defeat from the jaws of victory scenario by those ruffians from Norwood by "a bloody point" with the absolutely insane scoreline of Norwood 16.15 (111) d. Sturt 14.26 (110) before a crowd of 50,867 at the now demolished Footy Park. 41 behinds in a match to produce a result of a "bloody point, a bloody point"...ah well, as they say in the classics...there's always next year.

SYDNEY:  3.2 , 5.4,  8.6, 10.13 (73). Goals: Heeney 4, Franklin 3,
Papley 2, Bell.
GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY:  3.2, 9.3, 11.7, 11.8 (74). Goals: Greene 3, Sproule 2,
Himmelberg 2, Hogan 2, Taranto, Lloyd.
Crowd: 8,635*(capacity restricted).
At York Park, Launceston.