Richmond v Carlton, 2013 elimination final
Though it’s also about great goals, soaring pack marks, lung-busting runs down the wing and the ascent to greatness, finals football is never better than when it delivers comedy. Not intentional comedy, but that tragic, face-contorting, snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory sort of comedy. Schadenfreude. Deriving entertainment from the misfortunate of others.
Here’s a hypothetical: is it better that your team experience a tight win against spirited opposition early in a finals series that doesn’t lead anywhere else or watching a loathed rival collapse and lose a prelim against an inferior side? An existential question of sorts but not an unreasonable one. It depends if it involves Collingwood, you’d have to say.
Anyway, there aren’t many feelings in football fandom as all-encompassing and intoxicating as schadenfreude, a word whose translation from German – “harm-joy” also gives it a kind of sadistic edge. Actually, wasn’t Schaden was the surname of a Richmond supplementary-lister from the mid 90s?
The Tigers are a good place to start, of course. For 15 years or so from the end of the 1960s Richmond possessed a host of players who could really turn it on in September. Now? Not so much. For the last three years Richmond’s finals games could have been shifted from Fox Footy to Comedy Central.
This year, having finished the regular season with only one fewer wins than three-peat hopefuls Hawthorn, the Tigers were undone by a 37-year-old and a forward who even Carlton fans weren’t all that worried about losing. Thus a side who’d beaten Fremantle, Sydney and Hawthorn earlier in the season was reduced to a dithering mess when it mattered. By Jarrad Waite.
Still, that’s nothing compared to 2013, when Damien Hardwick’s men lost a final to a Carlton side that hadn’t actually even qualified for the finals. That’s rare air. One hundred proof. Molto bene.
For once it’s best to leave you with the words of Dermott Brereton, who pre-empted that particular disaster quite neatly: “Look up into the top of the stand and you see a bloke sitting in Row Z on the top level and you know you can make him laugh, cry or sing by what you do in the next two hours.” And so it proved to be. This blogger sat in the very top row of the members that day. It’s doubtful he’ll ever laugh so hard at a game of football. Fair and just? No. Funny? You bet.
Western Bulldogs v St Kilda, 2009 preliminary final
It feels a little mean-spirited to pile into a football club with only the single premiership success to its name and the vanquished 2009 Bulldogs side that lost that heartbreaker to the Saints was full of the kinds of players that all fans love. But – and here’s a crucial point – it also contained Jason Akermanis, the triple-premiership Lion and self-styled iconoclast. It’s 100% OK to channel your finals schadenfreude through one player.
There are plenty of directions in which you could point fingers for that Dogs loss. You could blame Daniel Giansiracusa for missing a sitter with three minutes remaining in the final term. You could direct the ire at any number of his equally wasteful team-mates. You could blame Brian Lake for not stopping Nick Riewoldt’s goal with 82 seconds to go. You could blame the umpires, of course, because they didn’t realise that Dale Morris had actually touched it – another in a series of howlers that went against the poor Doggies in that game.
But it’s just more fun to blame Akermanis. With close to eight minutes left on the clock and his side holding a four-point lead, it was Akermanis who punted a 55-metre bomb towards the boundary on the outer wing, an effort that was quite correctly deemed by umpires to have left his boot with the sole intention of crossing the line undisturbed. From the resultant free kick St Kilda rushed forward and Riewoldt scored the other vital goal – the one that restored St Kilda’s advantage and preceded the sealer. The Dogs, who’d entered their 50 metre arc 16 times to St Kilda’s six in that desperate final term, sank to their knees and wept. No laughing matter… until you thought of Aka.
Essendon v Carlton, 1999 preliminary final
There are two things worth remembering about the Essendon side of 1999-2001: firstly that they were routinely compared to Manchester United’s treble-winning squad of the same time and secondly, that this comparison wasn’t a bad one. That Essendon team was a beautiful football side to watch; bold, assertive, skilful, quick, disciplined and hard as nails. It was as though everything Kevin Sheedy had ever learned about identifying and shaping a match-winning team of footballers had been distilled and poured into that one squad. They were close to perfect, so much so that you can complain that they only won a single flag in that three year spell and not sound like an ingrate.
But preying on the misfortunes of Essendon football club is a sport itself to 17/18ths of football fans. Sheedy, for all his magnificent contributions to the game, was also a guy who could delight rival fans when his confident smirk turned to the thousand yard stare of defeat. He probably didn’t know what to do with his face after the 1999 preliminary final, which his men somehow conspired to lose by a point against a patently inferior Carlton side. Sure the Blues had peak Anthony Koutoufides playing out of his skin and were later found to be rorting the salary cap at the time, but just as equally, a side containing Ben Nelson, Adam White, Simon Fletcher and a bunch of clapped-out warhorses beat one of the most imposing in the modern game.
Essendon’s starting 18 that day was football perfection. Was there ever a back six that combined skill, muscle, guile, discipline and the odd sneaky act of brutal force like Dustin Fletcher, Dean Wallis, Damien Hardwick, Dean Solomon, Mark Johnson and Sean Wellman? Where’s the soft match-up there? Simon Beaumont and Matthew Lappin must have felt like they were heading to the gallows as they broke away from the huddle for the first bounce. That’s a goon squad, not a football team.
But somehow, they lost. They lost it by a solitary point and it was nigh-on impossible for rival fans to stifle laughter. The Blues didn’t stand a chance a week later in the grand final against North Melbourne. You knew it the minute the siren sounded against the Bombers. But that only made it funnier. The Bombers would never even test themselves against Wayne Carey’s side. Essendon, the ever-rollicking, knee-slapping, yee-hawing gunslingers from the northern suburbs – who were six wins better than the Blues in the regular season – were beaten in a game they should have blown out.
There was an interesting coda here and a quite apt one – that same night, having entered the Victorian state election as sure a thing as the Bombers, Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett was in the end forced to concede defeat to fresh-faced Steve Bracks and the ALP. Hello hubris my old friend.
West Coast v Collingwood, 2007 semi-final
Perhaps “choke” is an inappropriate tag for a finals team shorn of Chris Judd, Ben Cousins and Daniel Kerr, but when the 2007 Eagles tumbled out of that years’ finals series it was to the amusement of many. In doing so they become the first reigning premiers since 1996-model Carlton to be bounced without winning a final. Adding to the misery, they lost this one in overtime after scores were tied at the end of regulation time.
Worse, they were disposed of by Collingwood, who hadn’t beaten the Eagles in Perth for 15 years in the lead-up to this game. It has become a football burial ground for multiple generations of Pies players. Finally, and if the previous factors weren’t enough, there was also a truly appealing historical element at play here; the extra-time rule had only been introduced in the first place due to the Eagles’ 1990 tie with Collingwood, which forced them into a spirit-sapping replay trip out to Waverley, which they duly lost. Seventeen years later, all that was needed to complete the picture was some slap bass.
The Eagles never should have lost it really, even without the aforementioned stars and especially after skipping out to a 23-point lead halfway through the third term. The Pies were missing No1 ruckman Josh Fraser, leaving unheralded Chris Bryan and Guy Richards to counter Eagles stars Dean Cox and Mark Seaby. Then quite inexplicably, Eagles coach John Worsfold elected to rest full-back Darren Glass and ruckman Cox for large slabs of time late in the third term and it proved costly. In Glass’s absence, Collingwood spearhead Anthony Rocca kicked two goals and the Pies stormed back to within a kick at the final break and then steamrolled the home side in extra-time.
West Coast slinked away with their heads bowed sensing but not quite knowing that the glory days were over. But over they were. A week later captain Chris Judd – 24 years old and approaching his scything best – was gone and rival clubs gleefully picked at the Eagles carcass. For a brief period it even looked like Judd would end up at Collingwood. That probably wouldn’t have been quite as amusing.
The entire 1994 finals series
If it hasn’t happened already then you can probably add the 1994 AFL finals series to the Sunbury Music Festival and the White Stripes’ early-career show at The Tote in Collingwood on the list of boring stories that old men in flannelette shirts like to impart on young people.
To be fair, the ’94 finals series was actually a belter in the first week, which featured four top-drawer finals encounters. It was also very funny. First there was Hawthorn’s calamity. By that point it was never a bad thing to see the Hawks knocked off their perch and North Melbourne duly delivered in the historic first overtime finals win, which in those pre-internet days was a TV event akin to watching Wayne Carey burst through the centre square on a unicorn. He might actually have done that, come to think of it. Hell of a game. I’ll have to check the tape.
But in almost single-handedly beating the Hawks, Carey had crucially consigned them to a nervous wait on results from other games, which due to a kink in that season’s finals system could either keep their campaign alive or kill it off. It was a system built for sporting comedy and injustice.
Then in scenes that were more heartbreaking than comical, an injury-stricken and desperately brave Footscray led Geelong by a single point with 30 seconds on the clock. But then the Cats won the final centre clearance and also the game when Billy Brownless marked 40 metres out and slotted the winner on the siren. “All I wanted to do was kick the bloody thing right through the middle,” he said afterwards. “I didn’t want to go back to Geelong if I’d missed.” You’d guess that the risk of property damage was always a thought in the back of Geelong player minds back then. Simpler times, the 90s.
Or not, as it turned out. Footscray’s loss meant that they too joined Hawthorn sweating on results in the next two games. Madness. For the Hawks to survive, the higher-placed sides needed to win the other games. First up that meant Carlton over Melbourne at the MCG, where the Blues duly botched it, dropping a 25-point lead in the second term and getting blown over by Hurricane Schwarz. The Hawks were goneski and never in a wackier manner.
For the Dogs to survive, minor premiers West Coast only needed to beat eighth-placed Collingwood at Subiaco – simple in theory but in running with the theme of the weekend, an epic hurdle in the end. With Bulldogs players biting what remained of their fingernails as they watched on TV, the Pies turned a four-goal deficit into a two-point one with barely a minute to go in the frantic final term.
Like Geelong in the earlier heartbreaker, Collingwood won the ball forward. Mick McGuane looked set to mark it, swooping onto Gary Pert’s long bomb inside 50. But then…but then he dropped it. Stone cold. The Pies were finished. Not just beaten, they were shattered. The Dogs lived to fight another day. But that didn’t really matter. Collingwood and Hawthorn – the axis of evil for so many Victorian fans – were out and a week later so too were the Blues.
St Kilda v Port Adelaide, 2004 preliminary final
Just say the words “finals” and “St Kilda” in any combination and you’ll invariably end up laughing. Even its one-point win over Collingwood in the 1966 grand final – their sole premiership success – was in regards to its precise execution quite amusing; a flukey one-point win immortalised by photographs of Saints players celebrating in Collingwood jumpers they’d swapped with opponents.
But mostly it’s been the bad sort of comedy; cruel bounces; toe pokes; crushed dreams. And that’s just when they were able to get within a bull’s roar of a finals spot. This is a club that lost its first 48 games of league football before breaking their duck against the ladder-leaders. Farce always lurks.
Still, few of St Kilda’s finals debacles were more perfect than the tragi-comedy of the 2004 prelim at Football Park. There were nine lead changes in that game against Port Adelaide. Neither side ever led by more than 14 points. The latter was the buffer the Saints enjoyed early in the game when hulking full forward Fraser Gehrig went back and slotted his 100th goal of the season. By then St Kilda had all the momentum, so what better way for fans to disrupt it than storming the ground and holding up play for the best part of five minutes?
In the ensuing chaos Gehrig had to be escorted from the ground by security guards against his own will. Somewhat inevitably, Port players huddled together and regrouped and in the end their cool heads prevailed. The hammer blow? Two late goals to Gavin Wanganeen, who’d gone without a touch in the first half. Only St Kilda could lose like that.
But the best part of the Gehrig debacle wasn’t revealed for years. Among the Saints supporters who’d led the charge towards him was Greg Baker, the late father of Saints tagger Steven Baker. “Lenny Hayes was near me, and the old man said ‘get an effing kick, boys’ then all of a sudden he was running off the ground with a big smile on his face,” Baker later revealed on Open Mike. “I think he’d had a few whiskies on the way to the ground.”
“He drove back all through the night and got back to my sister Vicki’s netball grand final in Colac the next day, got in a leotard and did a run at half-time on the netball court, so he was a bit of a character.”
With a decade to ponder it all, former Saints coach Grant Thomas was less enthused with the antics of Baker Sr and co. “If I can put my excuse hat on,” he told Fox Footy, “which I can now because I’m not coaching, it was unbelievably critical.” And for rival fans, unbelievably hilarious.
