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I don’t have a team which I support in the AFL, but I think if I was to choose one to lend my allegiance to, I’m pretty sure the decision would be the Sydney Swans.
It’s hard not to admire them, and if you’re a member or fan, you certainly keep getting extra value for your buck.
The Swans will limp into Perth later this week with a list of injuries longer than a queue for the bar at the football. Yet somehow they have made it again, to the penultimate match of a season, the fifth time it has happened in the past 10 years.
Now who out there wouldn’t be happy with their team making it to the preliminary final every second season?
It’s hard believe that the team, once such a laughing stock of the Sydney sporting landscape, is now so well received and more importantly admired.
This is a club that in the 20 years after their arrival in 1982, made just 12 appearances in finals’ matches.
Against Fremantle on Saturday night, the Swans will play their 24th final since 2003, having missed post-season action just once – in 2009 – in the past 11 seasons.
In that period only Collingwood (23 finals) and Geelong (also playing their 24th final this weekend) have managed a similar number of finals’ appearances.
And this is a team not littered with superstars, but instead living proof that a champion team really can compete with and beat a team of champions.
I was speaking with a colleague, a Swans fan, earlier this week, and he made an interesting point. He said that over the period the Swans have been successful, apart from Adam Goodes, there probably really isn’t one Sydney player which supporters of other clubs would covet.
Sure they have had some quality players, some All Australians in fact, over that timeframe, but really, just the one superstar.
Yet, this is their 24th finals appearance, their fifth preliminary final, they have had three grand final visits, and won two premierships.
When you put all the pieces of their puzzle together, and they all play the way they have been taught to play – Swans’ football – look what can, and has happened.
Kurt Tippett and Tom Mitchell have now both pushed their way onto a bulging injury list this week, with coach John Longmire confirming yesterday both will be unavailable for the trip west.
Add those names to others who would be instantly in the best 22 – Goodes, Lewis Roberts-Thomson, Rhyce Shaw, Alex Johnson and Sam Reid. And let’s not forget Marty Mattner who was forced to retire earlier in the season.
Then there has been the long-term injuries of Gary Rohan and Lewis Jetta in 2013.
Perhaps instead of asking can the Swans upset the Dockers, we should ask how are the Swans even here?
But on paper the statistics look OK.
Sydney have met Fremantle just once in the finals, back in the 2006 preliminary final when the Swans were flying and won by six goals.
They have played two memorable finals in Perth, losing to the Eagles by a kick in 2005, then winning by a point against West Coast in 2006, although the Swans have only beaten Fremantle once in their four matches in Perth since 2003.
And even against Ross Lyon, the coach who helped mastermind their 2005 premiership success as an assistant to Paul Roos, the figures are not lopsided.
Against the Lyon-coached Dockers they have one win and a draw. Against all Lyon-coached teams dating back to 2007 when he left Sydney and started coaching at St Kilda, the record stands at five wins apiece, and that one draw earlier this season.
But games are not won on paper and statistics can be tossed in the bin when the opening bounce is made.
The Swans will face a freshen Fremantle, a packed house at Patersons Stadium, and all the purple people banking on their first grand final appearance.
When you get this close to a grand final, if you lose there will naturally be shattering disappointment.
But if I was a Swans’ fan, regardless of what happens in Perth on Saturday, I would have every right to feel extremely proud of the job my team has yet again done in 2013.
The once ugly duckling of the AFL, have blossomed into a beautiful – and highly successful – Swan.
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