When Samantha Gordon sits down to watch the Sydney Swans on Saturday with her grandchildren, she will be thinking of her nanna and poppy’s red and white picket fence.
Her family has had five generations of Swans supporters, starting with her grandfather, who was born in a South Melbourne orphanage in the early 1900s.
A lot has changed since then. The team were still known as the South Melbourne Bloods, in a then blue-collar area of textile mills and timber merchants.
But this season, as the club celebrates its 150th year, Gordon says a pride in one’s history remains – a connection that has endured for South Melbourne supporters despite the team relocating north to Sydney in the 1980s.
“The Swans are my family’s religion,” Gordon says. “And I feel this is our year. The connection between South Melbourne and Sydney has never been as strong as it is now. I feel that unity, and I’m so proud at how hard they’ve worked to keep that relationship.”
Gordon’s mother was one of nine – all Swans supporters – and a member of Keep South at South, a movement which lobbied to keep the team in Victoria.
“It was gut-wrenching,” says Gordon, who spent her early years in South Melbourne. “But we knew we had to move. Now, you can still feel the feeling in South Melbourne during footy season, there’s red and white everywhere.”
Come grand final day, the most heaving spot in Melbourne will be the Rising Sun hotel, which, despite being more than 700km from Sydney, still describes itself as the “home of the Swans”.
For more than 100 years, the pub stood opposite the old “Bloods” home ground, and a strong football culture remains there today. Tables at the hotel are already booked out for Saturday, though walk-ins will be available for “loyal and local supporters”.
Richard Evans will be among those gathering at the bar to watch the match. A lifelong supporter, he remembers attending games at their home oval on the banks of Albert Park Lake in the 1970s. Now 60, his “passion for the Bloods hasn’t stopped”.
“My five brothers and I would get dressed in our duffel coats and South Melbourne jumpers, and get our mum to drive us to every game,” he says. “We loved it.”
At home in Sydney, the Swans are experiencing their strongest membership and attendance in history. This year the club surpassed 70,000 members for the first time, while average home crowds have reached new heights of about 40,000.
It is partly down to success: the Swans have been in six premiership deciders since 2000, and won two. But Sydney is slowly and steadily becoming an AFL-mad city, with record crowds at AFLW games and a sustained increase in supporters for the state’s second team, Greater Western Sydney.
For thousands of local fans who have missed out on grand final tickets on Saturday, the Sydney Cricket Ground is opening up for fans to watch the game, while a concentration of “Swans friendly pubs” in Surry Hills are also expecting massive crowds.
Crown Street will be abuzz with the atmosphere of Melbourne’s Swan Street or Bridge Road if Sydney takes home the flag, its famous Adam Goodes mural a reminder of the club’s legacy.
For the first time, a “footy festival” will also come to Sydney’s Henson Park – the AFLW team’s home ground.
Katie Lofthouse is one member who came to the Swans later in life. She will be catching the overnight train to Melbourne on Friday with fellow members of the Sydney cheer squad. Seats booked out quickly; Lofthouse was lucky to nab a sleeping cabin.
When we talk, she has partly lost her voice – “self-inflicted” after the team’s win on Friday evening.
She has supported Sydney since 2004, when a friend recommended she get to some games. “I loved it so much I became a member, and here we are,” she says. “At the Swans, everyone’s included – no matter their race, religion [or] ethnicity.”
To Lofthouse, the Swans have a score to settle from two years ago, when Geelong beat Sydney by a crushing margin of 81 points.
“After that game, I said, ‘We’ll be back here within the next six years,’ and it’s happened sooner than I thought,” she says. “I’ve had this excited, nervous feeling all finals – we’re going to go deep in September.”
Gordon will be watching the game at her daughter’s place (she cannot physically attend grand finals because of nerves) with her grandchildren. The three triplets, almost two, have just started to sing the Sydney song.
To her, finals season is all about family. She will be thinking of her late mother, who lived to see the Swans break a record 72-year premiership drought to win the flag by four points in 2005.
“She used to decorate the whole house, I’ll never forget it,” Gordon says. “It’s an emotional time.”
Lyn Lewis knows how she feels. Her Swans journey was inevitable – her great-uncle Ken Boyd played 60 games for South Melbourne in the 1950s, and all her mum’s side of the family were diehard fans.
When Lewis’s then eight-year-old son, Cameron, announced after the siren in 2005 that he had been “waiting his whole life” for the Swans to win, his 80-year-old nan said she had too.
“There are so many like us, who might not be members now because of where we live, but we are dedicated and passionate,” Lewis says.
“This year feels different than the last few we have made. It feels like this is going to be something special.”
