Thirty Years On: The SCG Prelim That Still Haunts Us Bombers Fans
Thirty years, and I still can’t watch the replay without my stomach doing that thing it does at three-quarter time when the Bombers are up by a point and I know, I just know, something’s about to go horribly right for the other mob. The SCG prelim between the Swans and Essendon wasn’t just a famous game — for a lot of us Bombers people it’s one of those dates that lives in the same part of the brain as bad hamstring news and dodgy 50-metre penalties.
Setting the scene: madness at the SCG
You have to remember what the SCG was like as a footy venue back then. Tight, loud, that weird cricket-ground bounce where the ball did things it wasn’t supposed to do, and a crowd that could turn from morgue to bedlam in the time it took a bloke to snap one from the boundary. Thirty years on, Dale Lewis, Troy Luff and Matthew Lloyd have all been telling their versions of the story this week, and what strikes me listening to them is how differently three blokes can remember the same forty minutes of absolute chaos. That’s finals footy for you. Everyone’s got their own private nightmare or their own private highlight reel, and depending which colours you wore that day, it’s usually one or the other.
Plugger’s point, and why it still matters
You can’t talk about that Swans-Bombers era without Tony Lockett looming over the whole conversation like he’s about to lead at centre half-forward in your dreams. Plugger wasn’t just a spearhead, he was basically an argument-ending device — the sort of forward who made opposition defenders reassess their footy careers at three-quarter time. Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of that preliminary final, and I promise you every Bombers supporter has a very firm opinion, the truth is Lockett’s presence changed how the whole game had to be played. You could set up the perfect defensive structure and he’d still find a way to bend it, or bend someone in the process. As an Essendon fan I’m allowed to say it hurt watching him do it to us. I’m also professionally obliged, thirty years and several tribunal sagas of my own club later, to say fair’s fair — he was a genuine great, and games like that are the reason.
The Bombers boys who lived it
Matthew Lloyd was just a kid getting his first proper taste of what September footy actually feels like when your season’s hanging by a thread, and by his own admission it left a mark on him that shaped the way he went about business for the rest of his career. Troy Luff’s memories, from what’s been shared this week, paint a picture of a game that swung on moments so small you’d miss them blinking — a spoil here, a smother there, the sort of contest that decides whole seasons and nobody outside the four white lines even notices happening. That’s the cruelty of finals footy, and it’s a lesson my club has had reinforced roughly every second September since. You don’t lose prelims by ten goals. You lose them by inches, by one contested mark you didn’t quite get to, by one MRO-worthy bump that either goes your way or doesn’t (and don’t get me started on the tribunal system, more on that in a tick).
Why this game still gets talked about
Why this game still gets talked about
Because it had everything, frankly. It had the venue mystique of the SCG, which back then genuinely felt like an away fixture from another dimension for interstate travelling sides. It had a genuine champion in Lockett doing genuine champion things. It had young blokes like Lloyd getting baptised into finals footy the hard way. And it had that unbearable, can’t-look-can’t-look-away tension that only a preliminary final can produce, because unlike every other game on the calendar, there is no next week if you lose. Grand final week for the winners, and for the losers, a very long, very quiet pre-season starts immediately. Essendon fans of a certain vintage will tell you they can still recall exactly where they were standing, or sitting, or pacing around the loungeroom, when it all came down to the wire. I certainly can. I won’t repeat verbatim what I was yelling at the telly because my mum still reads this column occasionally and there’s language in there that would get you three weeks even under today’s looser standards.
An accidental expert’s perspective
Look, I’ve watched this club go through more Tribunal appearances than most supporters watch in three lifetimes, so I reckon I’ve earned the right to say this: finals footy in the mid-90s was a different beast entirely to what gets reported and graded these days. Contests that would have three separate camera angles, a HD slow-mo replay and a week of MRO commentary now were just… play on, back then. Nobody’s pretending the game was better for it necessarily, but there was a rawness to those SCG battles that the current, heavily-officiated version of footy doesn’t always replicate. Watching the highlights this week, you notice how much stuff just got waved away that would be a free kick, a 50, and a please explain letter to the AFL these days. Whether that’s progress or not is above my pay grade, but it does explain why those games have such a mythical, almost lawless feel when you rewatch them now.
What it means thirty years on
The thing about anniversaries like this one is they force you to reckon with how long ago it actually was. Thirty years is long enough that half the current Essendon list wasn’t even a concept yet, let alone a person. It’s long enough that the SCG itself has been rebuilt more times than my club’s forward line has been rebuilt this century (and that’s saying something). But it’s not long enough that the ache has gone out of it for those of us who were there, or who watched it happen on a telly that probably still had an aerial on top. Dale Lewis, Troy Luff and Matthew Lloyd can all tell their version, and each version will be slightly different, slightly self-serving in the way memory always is, and completely valid. That’s finals footy. Everyone remembers the bounce that mattered.
The final word
Thirty years on, I reckon the honest Bombers reflection is this: it was a genuinely brilliant game of footy that happened to end in the worst possible way for our mob, featuring one of the competition’s all-time great forwards doing exactly what all-time great forwards do. You don’t have to enjoy losing to respect the game that beat you. Plenty of Essendon people still wince at the mention of that SCG prelim, and fair enough too — but if you can’t appreciate genuine footy history just because it went against your own team, you’re watching the game for the wrong reasons. Here’s to thirty years, and here’s hoping the next SCG September classic goes our way for a change. We’re about due.
