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West Coast and Sydney: The best modern AFL rivalry

23rd July, 2015
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23rd July, 2015
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Six games, 13 points. From September 2005 to March 2007, West Coast and Sydney played each other on six occasions, four of which were finals, with the matches decided by an average margin of 2.17 points.

The last three games, where the rivalry ascended from compelling theatre to brilliant absurdity, shared the same margin of a solitary point.

Sport often has the feeling of determinism – as though a script has been pre-written, and the two teams are just playing it out. Eagles fans got a taste of that in 2004 when James Hird completed a fairy-tale, because of course he did.

The West Coast-Sydney rivalry is perhaps the best example in recent AFL history of the joy of determinism, especially in the 2006 grand final, for me the crown jewel of the rivalry, Leo Barry be damned, it felt like the football Gods, and not the players, were dictating the outcome.

The teams traded the final five goals, and every time West Coast extended the lead to seven points, it seemed as though fate started wearing red and white guernseys to cut the margin back to one, which the Swans did on three different occasions in the final eight minutes.

The final score that day was 85-84, the exact same scoreline as in the qualifying final the teams played against each other three weeks earlier. Fittingly, the two sides ended the ’06 finals campaign tied at 169, with the tiebreaker seemingly only the football Gods’ sense of fairness given Sydney’s victory the year prior.

Great rivalries are made by great moments. For many, Geelong-Hawthorn has succeeded West Coast-Sydney as the pre-eminent modern rivalry, largely because of its longevity (2008-2014) and its array of memorable moments: Stuart Dew’s legendary third quarter in the 2008 grand final, Jimmy Bartel’s match-winning point after the siren in 2009 and Tom Hawkins’ goal at the same junction three years later, to name a few.

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The Eagles and Swans produced just as many moments, in less than half as many years. The Leo Barry mark and Daniel Chick smother are the two most notable ones given their context, but don’t forget about Daniel Kerr’s game-saving tackle in 2007 and Michael O’Loughlin’s iconic goal-square finish and celebration to win the 2006 qualifying final at Subiaco.

They say styles make fights and West Coast and Sydney were affirmation of this. ‘Judd, Cousins, Kerr’ was the most devastating, exciting three-word sentence in football a decade ago. Sometimes diversity in a team is the most aesthetically pleasing phenomenon, but often homogeneity is just as breathtaking. Chris Judd, Ben Cousins and Daniel Kerr were all different players but their powers largely overlapped.

The talent they shared was momentum – the ability to combine vicious speed with commanding, battering force. Watching the trio explode from congestion time and time again was as majestic a visual spectacle as any midfield has produced. When they combined in the same passage, there was nothing you could do as a fan but rejoice and dance in the streets. It was special.

Aesthetically pleasing is not how anyone chose to describe the Sydney Swans of a decade ago. They were the Rafael Nadal to West Coast’s Roger Federer, wearing down their more attractive opponents with grit and persistence. So often their match-ups felt like a game of rock-paper-scissors, where Sydney was the rock and had made paper unavailable to the Eagles, forcing their western opponents to try and gnaw away at the rock with scissors.

Such was the supreme talent of the Eagles that they were often able to succeed this way.

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West Coast-Sydney stands as the most memorable football rivalry of my lifetime. Geelong-Hawthorn was ludicrously entertaining, but how great can a rivalry really be when one team wins 11 times in a row?

West Coast-Sydney didn’t end in March 2007 either. There was the Ben Cousins comeback game later that year forever etched into Eagles folklore, and the Barry Hall hit on Brent Staker in 2008, forever etched into boxing folklore.

Thanks to Cousins and deep V-neck t-shirts, the Eagles-Swans rivalry petered out at the end of the decade as the Eagles, who did win five of the seven clashes with Sydney in the heart of the rivalry, could no longer uphold their end of the bargain.

In 2015 though, the rivalry has relevance again. For the past two months the Eagles have been the second best team in the league, and despite last weekend’s catastrophe, the Swans can still make a credible argument that they have the most talented list in the AFL (do not yell Hawthorn fans, your team is unequivocally the best in the game).

Inside 50 differential and contested possession differential are arguably the two best basic metrics to judge teams in 2015, and on these fronts the Eagles rank first and third while the Swans rank fourth and seventh. They’re both elite squads and Richmond is the only genuine contender to dislodge either of them from the top four.

When they play each other on Sunday, there will be legitimate repercussions in the premiership race. That’s the first time a West Coast-Sydney clash has had that at stake since 2007. Of course, it won’t be the same. There’s not the same history between the players, no epic match-ups of Judd, Cousins, Kerr and Dean Cox against prime Adam Goodes, Brett Kirk, Jude Bolton and Darren Jolly. Goodes, Ted Richards, Sam Butler and Jarrad McVeigh are the only remaining players for either team from the 2006 grand final.

At the same time though, rivalries evolve through time and although they take different forms, they always retain something from the past. The 2004 line in the sand match between Hawthorn and Essendon had added significance because of what had transpired between those teams two decades prior. Collingwood playing Carlton will always be meaningful, largely because of things that happened 40 years ago.

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The players may be different on Sunday afternoon, but the colours will be the same as they were when Leo Barry rose up and plucked a premiership from the heavens. In the age of free agency, player movement and constant change, consistent laundry is something to savour.

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