Swans Couldn't Lose!

During the last quarter of last Saturday's AFL Grand Final, things weren't looking good for the Swans. They'd lost their half time lead to be trailing by 10 points. The Weagles seemed to have momentum. Swans fans had that familiar sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs.

Swans fans excluding this one, that is.

For some reason, at the very moment when Luke Ablett kicked the ball to the opposition and gave them the lead, it struck me that the Swans couldn't lose.

I was not so confident with this thought that I shared it with others at the time; to do that would be tempting fate a little too much, but none the less, I couldn't believe that the team would let this game slip after all they'd been through.

The omens were with them, and viewed from the centre of my footy universe (and recalled with the advantage of hindsight) they were clear. How could they lose when:

• The Melbourne football punditry headed by AFL chairman, Andrew Demetrio and commentator Robert Walls said their style was too defencive and ugly to win a flag.
• They lost the first final in Perth with the help of a couple of dodgy umpiring decisions.
• They came back from the dead to defeat Geelong with three seconds to spare.
• They comprehensively thrashed the Saints, then favourites for the flag, again against the opinions of the AFL punditry.
• Barry Hall got off his striking charge.
• They had no injuries, and played the same team for the entire finals series.
• Due to a friend, a full Swans member who was taking his family overseas, I obtained GF ticket preferences for myself and family.
• Actually obtaining the final seats was due to a woman giving me her queue ticket after she managed to get tickets by phone. This jumped us up 300 spots in the queue. It was unlikely that we would have obtained the tickets otherwise.
• We had friends in Melbourne who could accommodate us and mind our four year old for the day.
• On the day, before the start of the game, the pre-match 'entertainment' was staged on a large ground mat embossed with all the AFL logos. We were directly in line with the Swans logo.

So, when Barry Hall was lining up, 50 metres out, to get the Swans back within a goal of the Weagles, I felt he couldn't miss.

After the Swans regained the lead by a small margin, I was confident the team could hold the Weagles out. I would have preferred O'Loughlin to have actually kicked some goals, but in the end it didn't matter. Leo Barry's mark in the last seconds of the game saw to that.

Football supporter moments don't come better than this! We've been following the team for 23 years. Many of those seasons were bleak, but it was worth it. On Saturday, those 23 years were vindicated.