No Notes: Brisbane Were Simply Imperious When It Counted
There’s a version of this column that spends 1200 words picking apart how Fremantle let a flag slip through their fingers, and honestly, that story will get written a thousand times by other people this week. I’m not interested in that story. I’m interested in the fact that when the Lions absolutely had to be at their imperious best, they were, and that’s the whole ballgame.
Because here’s the thing about grand finals that nobody tells you until you’ve lived through a few of them as a fan: the pressure doesn’t reveal weakness in the team that’s under it, it reveals character in the team that isn’t. Fremantle felt the moment. Brisbane just played the moment. That’s the difference between a club still looking for their first cup and a club that’s genuinely built different at the pointy end of September.
The premiership quarter, again
We talk about this every single year with this Lions group and it never stops being true: they have a premiership quarter in them that other sides simply don’t. It’s not luck. It’s not a fluke run of the footy. It’s a group that has been in enough finals furnaces now that when the game gets tight and scrappy and ugly, they don’t panic, they just play their footy a fraction better than the bloke opposite them.
You saw it again on the last Saturday in September. Fremantle had their moments, they really did, and credit to them for the football they played to get there in the first place. But when it was genuinely on the line, when one score either way was going to define the whole contest, it was Brisbane winning the hard ball, Brisbane making the connecting kick, Brisbane getting the release handball that actually goes to a teammate instead of into the guts of a pack. That stuff isn’t destiny. It’s a team that has drilled composure under fatigue for years and it shows up exactly when you need it to.
Leaders doing leader things
No notes on the way this side is led. When the contest was at its most brutal, it wasn’t the flashy bits that stood out, it was the senior players putting their head over it, making the deperate smother, doing the one percenters that don’t trend on socials but absolutely win flags. That’s the legacy piece of this group. Every finals series builds a new layer of belief and this one’s no different.
And it’s not just the household names either. That’s the bit that gets me legit excited about where this club is at. Blokes who were kids in the stands during the club’s earlier premiership stretch a couple of decades back are now the ones setting the standard in the biggest game of the year. You can’t manufacture that kind of internal culture, it just gets built year on year by a group that keeps choosing each other under pressure.
Fremantle will feel this one for a long time
I’ve got nothing but respect for what Fremantle did to get to the big dance. It’s a genuinely brutal path through September footy and they earned their spot fair and square. But there’s a brutal truth in footy that every fan of every club without a flag understands deep in their bones: you don’t get unlimited chances at these things. You ring the bell, you better back it up. Fremantle had their looks at goal, they had passages where the game was there to be seized, and it slipped away from them in the moments that decide flags.
That’s not me being nasty about it, it’s just what grand finals are. They’re cruel. They expose the tiny gaps between good sides and premiership sides, and the gap on this occasion was composure when it mattered. Whether that haunts this Fremantle group depends entirely on what they do with it from here. Plenty of clubs have had their near miss become the making of them. Plenty of others have let it linger for a decade. Time will tell which version this becomes for them.
Why this Brisbane group keeps delivering
What’s genuinely wild to me, and I say this as someone who has barracked through the lean years too, is how normal this is starting to feel for this playing group. There’s no fluke premiership in this bunch. Every single one has been earned through a finals system that does not forgive soft periods of footy, and this latest one is no exception.
- They win the contested footy battle when the game is tightest, not just across the whole four quarters
- Their run-with players and defensive structures hold up even when legs are gone in the last term
- The senior brigade refuses to let young legs panic when the margin swings
- Their forward line always seems to find a way to manufacture a score from nothing
Put all of that together and you get a team that doesn’t just win premierships, it wins them in the manner that suggests more are coming. That’s the bit Fremantle fans and honestly every non-Brisbane supporter should be worried about. This isn’t a one-off. This is a genuine era.
What this means for footy in Queensland
I’ll bang this drum every single time I get the chance because it matters: every flag this club wins is another brick in the wall for footy north of the border. Kids in Brisbane and beyond are growing up now thinking premierships are just what this club does, and that changes everything about how the game grows in this state long term. It’s not just about one grand final day, it’s about the next generation of Queensland footballers who’ll pick up a Sherrin instead of a footy of the other code because they watched this happen.
The bottom line
Fremantle will replay their misses for years and that’s the nature of the beast in this game. But the actual story of this grand final, the one that deserves the headline, is that Brisbane were sensational when the flag was genuinely up for grabs. They didn’t blink. They didn’t panic. They just did what this group has quietly built a habit of doing on the biggest stage in the sport. No notes. Absolutely no notes.
