WHAT A QUARTER. WHAT A CONTEST. It’s frantic.
Collingwood 49 Western Sydney 45. One quarter of footy left.
All but two goals have been kicked into the end on the left. GWS are shooting into in the last quarter. Collingwood’s star forward Daniel McStay looks crocked with an ankle injury.
This is going to be epic.
Big Mason Cox puts Collingwood 57-51 ahead and promptly barges into a GWS player to goad him and gets his guernsey ripped in half as a reply.
This is sport.
They’re getting excited in the footy hotbed of the Nags Head in the Western Sydney suburbs.
Jesse Hogan reduces the margin to 1 point!
Maggies 58 GWS 57
06:18 left
Jesus the tension!
COLLINGWOOD ARE IN THE GRAND FINAL
Collingwood 58 GWS 57
Pandemonium at the G
I was having a look at the roll of honour there. It’s quite tightly bunched.
16 Carlton, Essendon
15 Collingwood
13 Richmond, Hawthorn, Melbourne
10 Geelong
Collingwood have lost 27 finals, nearly double that of any other club. Essendon are next with 14 losses.
The Colliwobbles tag arose from 8 consecutive final losses between 1960 and 1981. Collingwood since 1936 have appeared in 22 finals, winning just 4 and losing 18.
I got my first hint of Collingwood’s ubiquitousness in Melbourne in a café in London in August 1989 when my granny engaged in conversation with an Australian woman who must have been in her late 50s/early 60s who she said she was from Melbourne. I said something about Aussie Rules and her face lit up, “ooohhhhh I’m a massive Collingwood fan”, she wouldn’t shut up about Collingwood, it was Collingwood this, Collingwood that and Collingwood the other, she even had a Collingwood scarf in her bag. They won the flag in fine style the following year in 1990 when they beat Essendon up a stick in the Grand Final which featured an absolute smasher of a brawl.
Like Mayo their final losses weren’t quite consecutive - there was a draw in there in 1977 before they lost the replay. They last won in a replay in 2010. No replays next week though, they’ve been done away with.
In the modern era Hawthorn have been the most dominant force. They didn’t win their first flag until 1961, their next was 1971, then they had an almost Liverpool like dynasty through the 1970s and 1980s up to 1991 with the Dipper and John Platten etc. which I caught the latter years of on Saturday mornings on Channel 4, before having another dominant team in recent years.
Collingwood have two flags since 1958, Carlton haven’t been in a Grand Final this century, Essendon haven’t been there since 2001 and haven’t been near one either.
It would be hard to overstate just how big a deal a Carlton-Collingwood final would be in Melbourne. The place would go into meltdown.
Is there a self leveling mechanism in AFL or is it possible for a rich Aussie to buy his club and pump money in?
Collingwood winning 4 and losing 18 of their last 22 final appearances since 1936 is very similar to the record of the Galway hurlers.
In their last 22 All Ireland Hurling Final appearances starting in 1925, Galway have also won 4 and lost 18.
Galway had a drawn final in 2012 as well.
There is a rookie draft each year, team who finishes last get first pick of the eligible players declaring for the draft.
There are some anomalies tho to that. If you are a son of a former player, the club can pick you but have to give draft picks to the club who would have been next for selection. And there are also players who are in club academies, but again those picks have to be compensated. There is also a cap on wages. West coast eagles won the grand final in 2006, finished last in 2010, won the GF in 2018, and finished last this year, so really highlights the up and down nature of it. Some clubs are just always shit, amd some clubs are well run, like in amy sport.
Oh my days. Carlton lead 8-31 at qwawta toym.
It had been 2-31, mind.
Gman addressed the draft bit. There’s also a salary cap and a salary floor. I don’t think it’s ever really been tested whether a sugar daddy could buy a club out and do a Jack Walker. They’re members clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona or the big South American clubs so it would be very difficult. Collingwood have over 100,000 members and the other big clubs aren’t too far behind. What you can get are high profile club presidents like Eddie McGuire at Collingwood or a guy called John Elliott at Carlton back in the 1990s. Think Florentino Perez in Alf Stewart form. The AFL is also very hands on in terms of central planning of the competition a bit like the IRFU.
The reason there are only two AFL venues in Melbourne now is money. All the clubs used to have their own shithole home venues, but they didn’t pay the bills as the game became increasingly fully professional in the 1980s and 1990s so all these venues disappeared in the 1990s and all the games moved to either the MCG or the Docklands Stadium. Fitzroy and South Melbourne who were part of the original 12 VFL teams ended up ceasing to exist as the competition gradually went national. South Melbourne moved to Sydney and became the Sydney Swans. The Fitzroy Lions got subsumed into the fledgling Brisbane Bears to become the Brisbane Lions.
Conor McKenna goal.
Brisbane 28 Carlton 39 with 5 minutes left in Q2. I’m afraid Carlton are most likely going to get absolutely smashed from here on in.
Brisbane 42 Carlton 39 at half time and Carlton are lucky not to be further behind. They were swept aside in that quarter. Conor McKenna is running the show from the equivalent of a half forward position.
Stick a fork in Carlton. This will be a 60 pointer.
79-63 FT but Carlton only took the bare look off it in the last 10 minutes.
Brisbane have massive home advantage but I don’t think they’re that great and I think at the MCG Collingwood will beat them by around 30 points.
What sort of contract and money would Conor McKenna be on?
Google says an average AFL salary is around 387k Australian dollars which at current exchange rate is €233k.