“Give me 80,000 people at the MCG and I was Hercules,” Brent Crosswell once said. “Give me a grey day at the Western Oval and I wasn’t worth a cracker.” Crosswell, who probably would have won two Norm Smith medals if there was such a thing back then, would have been right at home in this Brisbane Lions team. They need a big occasion. They need the game to have weight. When it’s a sleepy shift in western Sydney or Tasmania, they drift. They drive their coach spare. When it’s all chips in, they are peerless.
This is Brisbane’s fourth grand final in a row. But it’s been seven years at the pointy end of the ladder. In that time, the competition has completely changed. The rules have changed. The way the game is played has changed. Their grand final opponents have all dipped in and out of contention. But the Lions have remained football’s great constant. They too have lost players. They too have shifted the way they play. But their excellence hasn’t waned.
They remain a rather bewildering teams at times. Every six or seven weeks, they will throw in a howler. Against the weaker teams, they’ll toy with them like a cat with a piece of string, and will win the match in 10 minute bursts of interest. Against the stronger teams, especially at the Gabba and the MCG, they will come with nostrils flared. It’s the mid-tier teams and the mid-winter games that bring out their sleepy side.
Even when they are fully locked in, they have their flaws. They are not as defensively sound as they were in previous campaigns. All year, they have conceded big scores. They let Carlton kick their biggest score since 2012. Brodie Kemp put four goals on them in a dozen minutes. By the end of the season, their defensive numbers were roughly the same as North Melbourne’s. This finals series, they have conceded an average of nearly 20 goals a game.
They’re not a team that dwells on poor games and bad quarters however. The coach, Chris Fagan, is not afraid to give them a rocket. But he never loses faith in them, and he almost never drops them. He’ll say words to the effect of “it better be a one-week thing”. And it almost always it. And even after a loss, or a run of goals against, it doesn’t temper their appetite for risk. Dayne Zorko will get the ball at full back, look up and he’ll say to himself “right, what’s the hardest kick I can take here, with the biggest possible payoff?” You hear about their embrace of risk at every press conference. You see it in every game, in every passage of play. This is a team that’s prepared to lose by 15 goals rather than forfeit their preferred way of playing. This is a team that won’t die wondering.
They have great pacing. They know when to coast, when to dig in, and when to unleash. And with the season never being longer, it’s a great trait to have. Operating out of the football bubbles of Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth has to help. For Collingwood or Carlton or Adelaide, a lean in patch in March or April can feel like those cities are closing in on a club. But in Brisbane, they can avoid a lot of the lunacy and the calls for heads. In so many instances with this Brisbane side, it’s been a case of reassuring themselves that there’s no need to panic, that their game is actually in good order. All through the Fagan era, they’ve had the added advantage of always being respected, always being in the mix, but never being the hype team. This will be the first of the four grand finals where they’ve gone in as favourites.
And there’s no real mystery to how they play. They say to the opposition – this is what we do, this is what we’re good at, good luck beating us. You can throw all your curveballs at us. You can station your traffic cops in the middle of the MCG. We’ll tic-tac-toe the ball around and through you. Our talent, our discipline and our experience will get you in the end. They play and carry themselves like a team that’s done it all before, that’s met every challenge, that knows they are better than anyone when it matters most.
With the other great dynasty teams of this century - Brisbane, Hawthorn and Richmond – we were always reaching for reasons to write them off. They rarely finished top of the ladder after the home and away season. All of them lost their first final in at least one of their premiership years. But all of them relished taking the long road home. “The only way we can do it now is the hard way,” Fagan said earlier this month. That sort of talk is usually a harbinger for the best of Brisbane to re-emerge, and the best of Brisbane is almost without peer in the modern era of football.
