....and their Mad Tuesday....and Mad Wednesday.....

What did they spend the whole time listening to rock and indie bands.

Better late than never....

Well, I was lucky enough to snap up a ticket on the Thursday afternoon in the release of left over AFL Members Reserve tickets. I was seated in Row CC on Level 4 of the GSS, which is the second row from the back.
I even booked my bus ticket before I even got my Grand Final ticket.
The price was $160, which was equivalant to Prime prices, even though I was sitting in the equivalant of standard seats.
It was the best atmosphere I have experienced, and the tension in the final minutes just added to the whole atmosphere.
It was well worth the trip down, even though I spent more time on a bloddy bus than I did in Melbourne itself.

Just a late update on this - following the rookie draft, Delta's little brother missed out. However, there was one interesting little story to come out of it -

Balmain boys can soar high
By Jenny McAsey
December 15, 2005

KIERAN Jack has committed the footballing equivalent of forsaking the family religion and converting to a foreign church. But in his switch from rugby league to Australian football, there are some things he can't leave behind.

Kieran, the eldest son of rugby league great Garry Jack, who played 20 Tests for Australia and 241 games for Balmain, was drafted on to the Sydney Swans rookie list on Tuesday largely because of a family trait.

"He's a tough little nut, very courageous," said Swans recruiting manager Ricky Barham of Jack, 18. As to whether such fortitude was in the genes, Victorian-based Barham can't say. "I don't know, I never saw his dad play but I heard he was pretty tough."

Tough on the field, but according to Kieran, his famous father didn't give him too much of a hard time when he made the decision four years ago to give up playing league to concentrate on Australian football. "He was a bit shocked but he has grown to enjoy it," Kieran said after training with the Swans at the SCG yesterday.

Standing beside his son outside the ground where he played his first Test for Australia against Great Britain in 1984, Jack Snr joked that he had made Kieran sleep outside when he first announced his code switch. Then he figured his teen son would soon come back to league. But four years later, Jack is happy to see his son playing a game he once regarded as sissy.

"It's fantastic, he has put in a lot of hard work over the past four or five years to put himself in the position to get picked up by an AFL club," Garry Jack said. "I didn't know a great deal about AFL four or five years ago but I have come to admire the game, the fitness of the guys and the level they play at. I'm happy for Kieran because it was his dream, his passion to play Aussie rules."

Kieran took up the game in 1998 when his Sydney primary school entered the Paul Kelly Cup, a schools competition designed by the NSW AFL to get more kids playing the code. Jack's team won the final at the SCG, and the game had found a future star.

"I just loved it right from the start. I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed it," Jack said. While he has courage to spare, coming to the indigenous game at the age of 11 has left the young Jack a little behind in some other areas. "I definitely need to improve my skills, my kicking. Coming from rugby league I just used to throw the ball down but now I am getting to know the drop and working on that with the (Swans) assistant coaches," he said.

His father doesn't rate the tackling skills of the average AFL player, and reckons his son's will be superior. "That is his advantage because he grew up in a rugby league family, tackling is one of his strengths as a player and he is pretty courageous. So if they are after a midfielder who can tackle, I know he can do that," Jack said.

Barham said Kieran's attitude compensated for his skill deficiencies. "We like the way he approaches the game, the way he attacks the footy and the improvement he has made over the past few years. His skills need work but he can find the footy, he just needs to play more," Barham said.

Jack, who was captain of the NSW-ACT under-18 side at this year's national championships, was overlooked in the national draft but was one of eight youngsters taken by the Swans in the rookie draft this week. That means he will train full-time with the club and play in the Swans reserves. Rookies can only play with the senior side if they are elevated to the list to replace a long-term injured player.

Jack will become another poster boy for the AFL in its push to develop the game in NSW. Only one other NSW-based youth, Dylan Addison, was taken by an AFL club during the draft process this year. A $20,000-a-year scholarship scheme announced recently by the AFL aims to attract talented NSW athletes to the code, no matter what their sporting background, and in the long-term boost the number of draftees.

Along with Swans premiership player Lewis Roberts-Thomson - a convert from rugby union - Jack will be a role model for the scholarship holders, who will be chosen by the 16 AFL clubs after a series of Australian Idol-type auditions in Sydney next year. "It is definitely tougher to get drafted from NSW, but the opportunity is there for young kids to pursue their dream if they want it," Kieran said.

Perhaps a suitable conclusion to this thread (unless someone has anything to add) that shouldn't pass unoticed - The Sydney Swans were named Team of the Year in the Australian Sports Awards, and Paul Roos was also named Australian coach of the year.

Predictably, Melbourne press saw it as proof of the Sydney bias of the these awards. But the following is from the Australian -

Swans, Roos given the ultimate accolade
Peter Lalor
February 23, 2006

THIS was another win for the brothers. A justification for the blood brothers and their boss. An award that settles a matter of honour.

Paul Roos and the Sydney Swans, the coach and team branded as unattractive losers by the chief executive of the AFL, last night took out titles of coach and team of the year at the Australian Sports Awards. The Premiership club and its leader were presented with the gongs at a ceremony in Sydney. Roos took the personal award from a field that included the Socceroos' Dutch master Guus Hiddink and the architect of Sydney Kings' triple premiership run, Brian Goorjian.

The Swans' 2005 premiership win was vindication of a team underrated by most experts and of a coach who suffered the public indignity of having Andrew Demetriou publicly tell him his style was unattractive and would lose the team more games than it won. When senior commentators such as Robert Walls suggested Roos was coaching for himself and not the side, it added peer insult to institutional injury. Lesser men than the Swans coach may have crumpled under the attack, especially with his team sitting outside the eight at the time, but Roos stuck to his guns.

Lesser teams may have crumpled with the task facing the Swans in the 2005 finals series, but the team stuck to the game plan. Sydney finished third at the end of the home-and-away series, but was beaten by four points in the first final against West Coast Eagles which meant facing sudden death in the next two matches. The Swans appeared beyond hope when they trailed by four goals against Geelong in the last quarter of the second semi-final, but an incredible four-goal burst by Nick Davis, including a last-second snap, secured the match by three points.

A week later the Sydney outfit proved the old cliche that a champion team will always defeat a team of champions, overcoming a home-town advantage and the star-studded St Kilda line-up in the preliminary final. The Swans' 2005 grand final win has gone down as one of the most competitive and heart-stopping of recent times. Again the side came back from the dead with a brilliant team effort to snatch its first premiership in 72 years. The 22 players involved had shaped themselves into an outfit of singular purpose and intent. In private they knew each other as The Bloods, an almost-secret organisation that demanded total loyalty and commitment within the group. The bloods vowed to do anything for the team and more often than not did.

As Jenny McAsey revealed in The Australian after the grand final, Jude Bolton had entered the game with a dislocated AC joint and had played the previous seven matches similarly indisposed. He left the match with a severe laceration to the scalp. Leo Barry, who took the last-second mark now celebrated as the best to be taken in a grand final, was carrying three fractures to his cheekbone and had done so since the first final against the Eagles.

Adam Schneider also played with a fractured cheekbone for the last month, while ruckman Darren Jolly broke his hand six weeks before the match. Craig Bolton broke his nose, Michael O'Loughlin and Ryan O'Keefe were concussed and Jared Crouch tore the ligaments in an ankle during the game but none was willing to leave the ground.

"This has been three years in the making," O'Keefe said after the match. "The boys will do anything for each other. We would spill blood for any one of us. "The Bloods, that is our trademark. It is just the way we play." Bolton said the team's never-say-die approach was "classic Bloods" footy. Roos, whose calm demeanour and even-tempered approach, defines him from his more hot-headed peers, was equally effusive. "Lesser teams and lesser people and lesser characters would have fallen away, would have given it away," Roos said. "But that is not the group of players we have or the people around the footy club."

The coach of the year worked on his plans for three years before they came to fruition. He was the subject of a public campaign to win him the job he took over temporarily with the departure of Rodney Eade in 2002. Roos wrote a 40-page manifesto for his job application. It contained a three-year plan to win the premiership. Rarely has a job applicant lived up to his promise wich such punctuality or panache. His approach will almost certainly re-define the way the game is played, whether the AFL wants it to or not. In his desk he keeps a typed list of his secret coaching philosophies - they are now in demand from publishers, competitors and admirers.

Roos lifted his "tempo game plan" from other international sports, including basketball. A quick review of the statistics reveals how much the Swans' attrition football is a departure from the past. Teams once relied on bulk possession and particularly inside-50s, or goal attacks, to win premierships. At the end of 2005 the Swans ranked third-last in total disposals and 13th for inside-50s. The team won games by the quality of its possessions not the total. It denied the opposition the football, conceding fewer kicks, handballs and marks than any other outfit in the league.
Commentators accuse the Swans of flooding when in fact they asphyxiate the opposition. Demanding accountability for each possession and denying any easy ball, they wear down opponents and then pounce.

The fact that Roos' coaching principles have struck such a chord with his charges probably relates to their origins. "In 1998, I wrote down about 25 points about what it was like to be a player because I wanted to remember that, and I wrote it down in case I was coaching," he told The Weekend Australian magazine. Two of the things on the list are public: that a player never sets out to make a mistake and a player should never be dragged for doing so.

One of the highlights of the grand final for the Swans was the performance of former rugby union player Lewis Roberts-Thompson, whose bumbling efforts in the backline early in the season had even the club's biggest supporters despairing. Come the big day he was among the Swans' best, just as the nervous and confused Adam Goodes had gone from the edge of football oblivion to a Brownlow Medal in his first full year under Roos.

The Swans' code frowns upon ego, but maybe team and coach can feel a little pleased with themselves now.