It happens quite a bit in our game. A team gets up by five or so goals and starts to play like they want to maintain the lead. Conservative footy… it kills teams.
On the opposite side of the equation, the team behind senses opportunity and knows they have nothing to lose. They start throwing everything they can at the team in the lead and whittle away what looked like a match-winning lead.
Sometimes, they manage to overtake the conservative team. And other times, such as this game that saw the Sydney Swans hang on by a point, they fall just short.
With 90 seconds remaining, a hack kick out of defence floated out on the full, leaving Ben Keays with a shot to take the lead. Adelaide had been pressing hard, but repeated misses saw them trailing, despite finishing much stronger. Keays ran out on his left foot, curled the ball goalward, and started to celebrate.
His teammates soon joined in and the crowd went up as one. The Crows were in front!
Only… somehow, they weren’t.
The goal umpire was adamant that Keays’ shot at goal clipped the post as it went through, registering only a behind. No score review was called for, and it gave the Swans one last chance to clear the area. They did, they held the ball in, and they got home by a point.
It was a heartbreaking way to end the season for the Crows, and yet another embarrassment for the AFL, who have royally screwed up every aspect of the score review system since they rushed it into existence without enough clarity about its use, or investment in technology good enough to return anything but “insufficient evidence” when they have called upon it late in games.
And the one time it was clear? Nah… we don’t need to look at that, do we?
Idiots.
However, for the Swans, they notched their sixth win on the trot, and anyone who has studied the form of premiers over the last little while would know that teams with winning records late in the season tend to carry that form into September.
Who were the heroes? Who were the villains? What did I love? And what did I hate about the Swans and Crows in Round 23? Read on, baby.
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