With 40 seconds left in one of the greatest preliminary finals I have ever seen, Jarman Impey was rightly pinged by Hugh McLuggage. McLuggage, who played himself back into form in the second half, drilled it to put the Lions up by three points.
But McLuggage had rushed the shot, probably not wanting to let the emotion or the lactic get to him. In a game where the teams combined for 22 goals from stoppage, it was a three-point game. The ball would be thrown up with 18 seconds left.
The Hawks had more than half a chance.
The ball went up and neither ruck got much of a hand to it and it fell to space, bouncing up as if suspended in mid-air. The entire country was asking, in the split second the ball was hanging, who had the juice left in their legs to get to it?
As the ball reached its apex, Will Ashcroft and Jai Newcombe were the two most likely. Ashcroft had just that little bit more speed, that little bit more agility to glide onto a ball that slightly changed angles and exploded onto it. He got there first, leaving a lunging Newcombe sitting on the deck pondering what might have been, as Ashcroft’s clearance drove Brisbane to a fourth straight grand final.
It was a show of speed and power, but also of will and fitness. It showed us that, if you have it in you, you can leave exhaustion behind for one last effort as Will Ashcroft did.
When Garry Lyon said supporters would “rail against it”, the man anointed Swanny during his honeymoon appointment said supporters “don’t care”.
He’s wrong. We do.
Both of the preliminary finals this year were about the kind of attrition that exists when games put massive load on players, then asks them to push through the pain barrier.
On the weekend, the games did that. They demanded that the combatants in them go into the fire again and again. They asked the players to reach deep within themselves and dig out one last sprint effort, then they asked for another one, then they asked for one last, one last one.
Those two minutes they want to take away at the end of each quarter pile up, and occasionally we get magic at the end of games.
In the Sydney v Fremantle game, Sydney’s final term showed a team that applied truly manic pressure for a game and three quarters, then didn’t have enough in reserve for a fourth.
They destroyed themselves physically and couldn’t hold on as the Fremantle wave started to take hold. They got asked if they could answer the bell one last time, and ultimately they failed.
However, it’s not only the attrition. To shorten the games would be to strip footy of its most exciting development. Among the four teams that contested the preliminary finals, the most obvious constant is the proliferation of high half-forwards or forward half midfielders.
Footy has become a game dominated by Dustin Martin/Cyril Rioli hybrids. Look at the prelims and you saw game-defining patches from Shai Bolton, Nick Watson, Kai Lohmann, Dylan Moore, Murphy Reid, Isaiah Dudley, and Braeden Campbell, and I could go on.
Is that true anymore?
With virtually every rule change over the last five years – the lasso rule, last touch out of bounds, throw up rather than ball up – the AFL has tried to inject speed into the game and it’s worked. The small players are now geniuses at building their tanks to let them push through constant, elite sprint efforts.
In moments of attrition, the really good ones like Bolton and Watson can separate themselves by bulldozing through the lactic to arrive at the ball first. It’s no coincidence that those two and Kai Lohmann defined the ends of their games.
Look at Watson’s sixth goal, with seven minutes to go in the final term. He started behind Darcy Wilmot but was first to the ball when it fell after the Mitch Lewis v Harris Andrews contest. He simply had more left than Wilmot.
Shorten the quarters and everyone is fresher, so the players with speed to burn lose the edge fatigue gives them.
Why would you want to take that away? Why would you want to take away the exhaustion that turns good games into great ones? Why would you rob players of their moment to show that they have something more to give than the man in the jumper across from them?
The majesty of footy is in the attrition. Don’t let the AFL take it away.