The Sydney Swans have put their supporters through a vast range of emotions within the past month. On Friday night, they served up a new one: heartbreak. Classic, traditional sporting trauma.
It turns out you don’t need to be at Optus Stadium to experience Wharfie Time. It doesn’t have to be a Fremantle home game for the purple haze to suddenly descend and dull the senses. It can happen anywhere, to anyone.
Fears that the Swans had “played their grand final” a fortnight ago were totally unfounded. From the outset of this classic preliminary final on Friday night, the Swans were rabid, aggressive, relentless, playing like their lives depended on it. Again. If their first effort didn’t stick, there was a second, third, fourth, fifth to follow. They knew where they wanted to go and wanted to get there in a hurry.
Whatever concoction sustained them in that qualifying final against the Brisbane Lions, there was more of it left … until, at some point in the final quarter, the punch bowl was empty. They were out of juice. The Dockers noticed, and they went to work.
“It looked a little bit like that,” said Swans coach Dean Cox. “This time of the year, you can’t give a team any momentum, and they took it.”
For three quarters, the Dockers were nowhere near it. Everyone knew they were the better side considering Sydney’s long list of absentees, but the Swans played like the better side, and the scoreboard reflected it. Yet they had left the door ever so slightly ajar for Freo, hitting the post four times and letting a number of other key opportunities slip, particularly in the first quarter.
Hayden Young’s goal for Fremantle on the three-quarter-time siren reduced Sydney’s margin to a manageable 21 points and restored in themselves a modicum of belief.
So who pushed the “Wharfie Time” button? You can take your pick, but it may well have been Patrick Voss, aka “the Prancing Pony”, who had hitherto been playing like a donkey. His only possession for the entire first half was a set shot after the half-time siren which did not even make the distance.
But then he produced a fend to remember; a nuclear don’t argue on Dane Rampe in the pocket in front of the Brewongle Stand at the SCG, before slotting a check-side kick through the big sticks and running away in glorious celebration.
Maybe the button was on Rampe’s chest. That was goal number three of what proved to be a match-winning, unanswered six-goal burst, reducing the margin to just nine points while also delivering a killer symbolic blow to the Swans, given the victim was Rampe, their inspirational defender and stand-in captain.
If he chooses not to play on in 2027, that could be one of his final acts in a Sydney guernsey – but as Cox said in his post-match press conference, Rampe, at 36, has earned the right to decide what’s next for him.
The Swans tried to hold on throughout the 10-minute arm wrestle that followed Voss’ goal, but they were cooked, and they knew it. Goals from Shai Bolton, Mason Cox and Isaiah Dudley finished them off, and the pain was etched all over the faces and bodies of Sydney’s players when the final siren eventually sounded and put them all out of their misery.
“I’m just extremely proud of everyone uniting, galvanising and coming together to try and get our season to the last game, and we fell short,” Cox said.
“It’s hard to say it’s a missed opportunity when you play a really good footy team. Prelims are big games and there’s a lot at stake because there’s a grand final next week. We missed the opportunity to take those moments to put ourselves in a grand final. The older players, they certainly understand that they don’t just come around every year. Some of the young ones, they just [think], ‘How good is it to be a part of it, and I’m learning everything, and I’ll grow from playing in them,’ but they’re hard to get to.”
So the ride ends here. After a month defined by the scandal at the Pullman Hotel and the on- and off-field fallout, the Swans can be immensely proud of the way their remaining players have gallantly defended the club’s colours and culture, as well as disappointed that it couldn’t take them all the way. They will never know how far they could have gone if “the Pullman Five” had simply behaved themselves that night, and that hurts, too.
What happens next for those players remains to be seen, and in any case will be largely determined by Victoria Police. But during their absence, the Swans found something else: Proof that whatever this club is supposed to stand for is bigger than any individuals, and sturdy enough to survive the damage they caused. Now they can try and build again.
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