The 2023 Sydney Swans have done what no Swans side has done before … come back from seemingly nowhere to qualify for the finals.

Remember where they sat at Round 17? They were 15^th on the 18-team ladder with six wins and a draw from 16 games. Two-and-a-half games and 6.9% outside the top eight.

It was worse, even, than 2017, when the Swans started 0-6. They won 14 of 16 to finish sixth but it wasn’t quite the same tightrope walk because they had three-quarters of a season to recover and were in the top eight by Round 16.

To find a Swans comparison more like that which the 2023 Swans faced, you have to go back 90 years to 1933, when in a 12-team 18-game season and a final four format South Melbourne were 8^th at Round 9 two-and-a-half wins and 7.0% outside the top four.

They won their last nine home-and-away games to finish second on the ladder two wins and 13.6% behind minor premiers Richmond, and beat Richmond twice in the finals to claim the club’s third flag after wins in 1909 and 1918.

It was a glorious year but, as the late Jim Main wrote in the club history “In the Blood”, it didn’t start well.

The club was dealt a savage off-season blow when captain-coach Johnny Leonard was lured back to Western Australia to work for football manager Ross Faulkner. He’d only been at South one year but he’d had a profound impact, taking them to the finals for the first time since 1924.

With the club having pulled off a string of major signings, Leonard recommended that 32-year-old vice-captain Jack Bissett take over. He’d only been at the club one year, too, after playing 19 games at Richmond in 1928 and a further 19 in 1931.

But his 18-game 1932 season with South and the Leonard endorsement was enough for the club to go with the then 32-year-old, who 70 years later in 2003 would be named Coach of the Swans Team of the Century.

South Melbourne had signed West Australians Jim O’Meara and Johnny Bowe, South Australians Wilbur Harris and Ossie Bertram, and ventured across Bass Strait to sign Laurie Nash and Frank Davies from Tasmania. Such was the influx the Swans were branded “The Foreign Legion”.

Nash, already a Test cricketer, was a huge signing. The son of ex-Collingwood captain Bob Nash, he’d moved from the Melbourne suburb of Richmond to Launceston in 1929 primarily for cricket.

He’d made his first-class cricket debut for Tasmania in that year and his Test debut for Australia against South Africa at the MCG in February 1932, taking 4-18 and 1-4 as the visitors were routed for 36 and 45 in a match which finished in less than six hours.

He’d played football primarily to keep fit, but when he won the City Launceston best and fairest in 1931 he sparked the widespread interest of VFL scouts.

South always had the inside running due to a close friendship between City president Hugh Cameron and South committeeman and ex-captain Joe Scanlan, but still they smuggled Scanlan aboard the trans-Tasman steamer ‘Nairana’ to protect their investment. He debuted in Round 1 in front of 38,000 people at Carlton’s Princes Park.

But it took time for the new-look side to gel. At the halfway mark they were ahead of only St Kilda, Hawthorn, Melbourne and Essendon, who would win only 14 games between them for the year – 11 against each other and only one against an eventual finalist.

But from that point on they charged up the ladder. From 9^th at Round 9 to 7^th at Round 11, 5^th at Round 13, 4^th at Round 16, 3^rd at Round 17 and 2^nd at Round 18.

They played Richmond only once through the home-and-away campaign – a five-point loss in Round 8 – but beat the Tigers by 18 points in the semi-final and by 42 points in the grand final in front of 75,754 at the MCG – at the time a record for a sports event in Australia.

Bob Pratt kicked three goals in the grand final for a season total of 109 goals – one more than Collingwood’s Gordon Coventry, who had kicked 108 in the home-and-away season to claim the Coleman Medal.

Pratt, Laurie Nash and Peter Reville led the Swans tally in the Brownlow Medal with eight votes to finish equal 13^th – 10 votes behind Fitzroy’s Wilfred ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn.

Harry Clarke was the club champion in a year in which he and Len Thomas posted their 100^th games and Dinny Kelleher joined the club mid-season from Carlton. He debuted in Round 10 as the club started what became an 11-game winning streak to the flag, and would go on to play four years at South for grand finals – one win and three losses.

Hec McKay, Bill Faul and Peter Reville played all 20 games, Bisset, Clarke, Ron Hillis and Thomas 19, Nash, O’Meara and Pratt 18, and Bowe and Terry Brain 17. Reville kicked 39 goals as a valuable side kick to Pratt, while Bertram kicked 28 and Brain 26.

Ironically, as ‘In the Blood’ recounts, the mid-season turnaround in 1933 came after a major shake-up off the field. In Round 7, president Archie Crofts, a grocery magnate in his first season at the helm, stood down following what he described as “excess drink expenditure” by guests at a party following a Round 7 loss to Geelong.

As Croft took off to Queensland for a holiday the players rallied in support of him. The five-point loss to Richmond in Round 8 was followed by a 19-point loss to fourth-placed Fitzroy in Round 9 before Croft returned to the position as the winning streak began in Round 10.

The 1933 premiership is unfurled at the Lake Oval.