Not Again

The final siren had gone about twenty minutes earlier and I was still sitting in my seat.

Most people had left. The Sydney chants had only just finished. The players had stayed out on the ground for a while, applauding the crowd, and the crowd had given plenty back. Now I was mostly just staring at the ground, trying to make some sense of what I had just watched.

Can someone explain that to me?

This was a preliminary final. Win and Sydney were going to the Grand Final. Lose and the season was over. Tickets had gone on sale on Monday and disappeared quickly, and I had managed to get one early enough, although at $220 it was about twice what I would normally expect to pay for a football ticket.

I still bought it.

After work, my boss shouted dinner for a colleague and me, and from there we walked across to the SCG. Somewhere over dinner, the previous Fremantle game came up. It had been another night when Sydney had looked in control before everything changed.

Nobody particularly wanted a repeat.

I got to the SCG about an hour before the game and it already had that finals feeling to it, although it wasn’t full yet. Despite the sellout, the ground took its time filling and, five or ten minutes before the bounce, people were still appearing everywhere. Some were still arriving after the game had started.

Eventually there didn’t seem to be an empty seat. The official crowd would be 45,129, overwhelmingly red and white but broken by obvious patches of purple. Perth is a long way from Sydney, so it was good to have a decent Fremantle contingent there. They weren’t going to win the numbers battle, but at least there was another voice in the ground.

The people sitting in front of me had come considerably further than I had. Three generations of Sydney supporters, grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, had flown up from Melbourne for the game. We spent much of the hour before the bounce talking and checked in with each other occasionally through the night.

The previous Fremantle game came up there too.

Not again.

Mostly, though, everyone was excited. People were talking to strangers and making noise before there was much to make noise about. Sydney had already done something unexpected just by getting this far, and it felt possible there might be one more game in them.

Even the weather had cooperated. It was a beautiful night, not warm exactly, but nothing like the cold night games of only a few weeks earlier. I spent about half the game in a T-shirt. Spring had arrived just enough to be noticeable.

So had the moths. Big ones kept appearing around the lights and occasionally dropping low enough into the stands to frighten people. In a preliminary final, with more than forty-five thousand people waiting to see who would go to the Grand Final, there were still adults being menaced by moths.

For most of the first three quarters, Sydney made the football difficult. It was physical and contested, with plenty of bodies around the ball and very little space. Fremantle still looked quicker and sharper whenever they found room, but Sydney kept stopping them from finding enough of it.

By late in the third quarter, Sydney had led by 28 points. Even after Fremantle reduced that margin, Sydney still took a 21-point lead into the final change.

Then Hayden Young kicked a Fremantle goal after the three-quarter-time siren.

I didn’t like that. There is something about a goal after the siren. The quarter is already finished, everyone is supposed to be heading towards the huddles, but instead the entire ground has to stand there and watch one team have the last word.

It felt like exactly the sort of thing Sydney didn’t need. Still, we were 21 points ahead.

My boss sent me a message.

“Dare we dream?”

I replied:

“I’m looking at flights for Melbourne. It’s on.”

I wasn’t actually looking at flights. It was just confidence. A lot of confidence.

Sydney had spent three quarters frustrating Fremantle. Even if Fremantle kicked a couple, I thought Sydney would find enough somewhere to hold them away. They would have to do much more than kick a couple.

Then Fremantle kicked the first goal of the final quarter and almost immediately it felt different. Not lost, not even close to lost, but that goal after the siren followed by another one so quickly after the restart was enough to make me think something was on.

Fremantle kept coming.

Sydney didn’t suddenly stop trying and it didn’t feel like a team giving up. They just seemed to run out, and Fremantle suddenly had the space they had looked dangerous in all night.

The margin fell to nine. Then Shai Bolton kicked another and it was one point.

One point.

For what felt like a long time, the whole ground seemed trapped there. The Fremantle supporters could suddenly see it. Their team had spent most of the night behind and now a Grand Final was right there. Around them, Sydney supporters were quite literally on the edges of their seats, waiting for something from the team we had watched for the first three quarters.

One goal. One mark. One bit of control. Anything that might stop what was happening.

The noise was extraordinary because both groups had something to believe in at exactly the same time.

Fremantle believed they were coming. Sydney believed they could still stop them.

I was waiting for the Swans from earlier in the night to come back. They didn’t.

Eventually Mason Cox kicked the goal that put Fremantle in front, and the fourth quarter kept moving in the same direction. Fremantle kicked five unanswered goals. Sydney managed a single point.

Then the siren went. Season over.

The Fremantle supporters had their moment. Sydney’s players stayed around on the ground and the Sydney chants continued even after there was nothing left to change.

I stayed too.

For about twenty minutes I sat there while everything slowly disappeared. Players left the ground. Rows emptied. The noise faded until the SCG looked very different from the place it had been a couple of hours earlier.

At some point I thought about the $220 ticket. Not because the night had been worthless. It was just difficult not to notice that I had paid $220 to end up sitting there staring at the ground.

Eventually I stood up. Not because I had worked any of it out.

I just couldn’t sit there all night.