This Saturday at about 10am Scott Fletcher will put a lead on Louis the Cavoodle, pump out Angry Anderson’s Bound For Glory and pound the pavements of the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale.
Fletcher fears that, should he not repeat the familiar routine to which he has adhered on the morning of the AFL grand final for the last two years, his beloved Brisbane Lions will be denied another three-peat.
“If we don’t win, and I hadn’t done that, then I’m going to wear it, you know?” he says. “The Lions losing will be on me”.
The logistics clerk says his clan stick true to the club with origins in Fitzroy, the Melbourne suburb to which his great-grandfather migrated, despite the fact that “the Fletchers moved south of Yarra back in the 1930s” – and that Fitzroy merged with a side from a city 1,700km to the north 30 years ago.
“I’ve deliberately forced myself not to listen to that song all year,” he says of Anderson’s 1990 rock anthem. To do so might incur a jinxing of catastrophic proportions.
Fletcher’s is a strand of logic that makes perfect sense to the football tragic. It is a kind of thinking that has gripped the city now home to the club to which old Roy Boys like Fletcher remain loyal.
As they prepare for their team to face Fremantle this Saturday, Lions fans – still buzzing after a preliminary final that some speculate may have been the greatest Australian rules football match ever played – are gearing up for their fourth consecutive grand final.
Traditions have had time to take root. Superstitions sprout like mushrooms.
Those who do not barrack may scoff, but the true believers know that the gods of sport may – according to their whim – reward such small acts of worship with miracles.
Take Brett Young and Madonna Cullinan, whose back deck in Tarragindi hosted “big get togethers” for the Lions’ 2001-2003 grand final victories. Cullinan would dye pickled onions blue and skewer them on toothpicks with bits of yellow cheese and slices of red onions. Brett made margaritas. Son and daughter Oliver and Maddie banged pots and pans with the neighbourhood kids to announce every Brisbane goal.
That was the ritual until the family of four travelled to Melbourne for the final game in 2004, which ended in an “extremely painful” loss to Port Adelaide.
Twenty years later, though, Young’s pain would be of a more physical variety. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years prior, he endured the agony of chemotherapy for much of the second half of 2024.
Finishing fifth on the ladder that year, the Lions had to take the long route if they were to make the big dance. First, they held off a surging Carlton in the elimination final. Then they produced arguably the greatest finals comeback in AFL history in their semi against Greater Western Sydney.
“Every game I would think, ‘if we lose, I don’t know how Brett will handle this’,” Cullinan says. “But we won – and kept on winning.”
Next, the Lions prevailed in a preliminary against Geelong that ranks among the finest AFL final matches of all time. This “most extraordinary run” inspired Young and Cullinan “to keep going”, to believe the chemo would work.
But Brett was booked for an MRI scan for the final week of September. He was told not to travel.
Then the first of three “magic things” transpired. Brett’s MRI was pushed back by a week. So the family bought business class tickets for the first time in their lives and flew to Melbourne – despite the fact they had none for the grand final itself.
“We told everyone the universe would provide tickets,” Madonna says. “And it did.”
Which meant that Young was among the throng of 100,000 at the ground with his wife and children, masking the extent of his physical suffering, as Brisbane thumped Sydney for their first flag in two decades.
“It was the best weekend of mine, and the kids’ and his life,” Cullinan says.
It would prove the last time Brett would see his Lions play. The Monday he returned to Brisbane, Brett was told his cancer had spread too far to continue treatment. He died at home less than four weeks later, his family and dogs beside him, looking out the front window at the jacarandas.
Two old teammates from his university footy club, the UQ Red Lions, carried his coffin.
Cullinan and her son Oliver pulled out the same rabbit last year, booking flights to Melbourne before somehow managing to secure grand final tickets to see Brisbane beat Geelong.
Maddie could not join them. She was two months pregnant at that 2024 grand final and now has to care for little Annie.
She will watch the game again with mates this year, dusting off her lucky scarf. A “threadbare old thing” dating back to the 2004 grand final, the scarf is already earmarked to become “an heirloom” to be passed on to her daughter, richly entwined with the memory of a grandfather Annie never met.
Cullinan has booked her flights, convinced she is destined for another September miracle.
“I know the universe will provide me with a [grand final] ticket again this year,” she says, before repeating the one word that coach Chris Fagan has made his Lions mantra. “Believe!”
