Five years ago, NSW football honoured it’s “Greatest Team Ever” and Dane Rampe was named as an emergency. Since then, the now veteran defender has gone from strength to strength, preparing to play his 250th AFL game in Friday night’s preliminary final against Port at the SCG. He would surely be hard done by not to be in the best 22 had the team been named today.
Indeed, 42 years on from the relocation of South Melbourne to Sydney, Rampe is exactly the type of person club and League officials would have been dreaming of at the time. A local boy who chooses AFL over other sporting options and becomes a household name in the Sydney market.
Rampe is that and more as he prepares to become the 292nd player in AFL history to reach 250 games – an exclusive group comprising just 2.2 per cent of the AFL playing family. He will be the 16th ex-rookie, the 12th Swans player, and only the second player born in Sydney to reach the milestone.
But it could so easily have been different for the footballing academic, who is studying a Masters Degree in Commerce with a focus on International Business, after a Graduate Certificate in Commerce. Because having first nominated for the AFL Draft at 18 he was overlooked by every club in four drafts and was 22 before he was picked up as a rookie.
Even when he finally got his chance as pick #37 in the 2012 Rookie Draft, Rampe was the Swans’ seventh choice. Before him in the National Draft they took Dean Towers at #22, #Harrison Marsh at #44, Tim Membrey at #46 and Matthew Dick at #64, and in the Rookie Draft they chose Jake Lloyd at #16 and Xavier Richards at #29 before Rampe.
Towers played 57 games for the Swans, Marsh 25, Membrey one for the Swans and now 178 at St Kilda, where he’s still playing, Dick six games for Carlton after missing out in Sydney, and Richards 12 games.
Yet on Friday night Rampe will be just the second player from the Draft Class of 2012 to 250 games. Only Port Adelaide Brownlow Medallist Ollie Wines, who reached this key milestone in Round 24, was quicker.
Lloyd is 4th on the games list for 2012 draftees at 247, behind Wines, Rampe, Bulldogs’ pick #5 Jack Macrae (249), GWS Giants pick #1 Lachie Whitfield (233), Richmond pick #9 Nick Vlaustin (233), Melbourne pick #26 Jack Viney (219), Sydney teammate Brodie Grundy, who was #18 to Collingwood (218), Essendon’s Jake Stringer, who was pick #5 to Bulldogs (212), and Brisbane’s Joe Daniher, who was pick #10 to Essendon (202).
The Rampe journey is like the ‘local boy made good’ stories of QBE Sydney Swans Academy pair Isaac Heeney and Callum Mills – with one huge difference. He took himself to Melbourne as a teenager thinking it was his best chance of breaking into the AFL.
Having grown up in suburban Clovelly in Sydney, Rampe was an avid Swans fan and at 13 joined East Sydney juniors and played at Trumper Park in Paddington.
But at Newington College in Stanmore, soccer was his primary sporting focus. Not until he finished school did he play Australian football seriously at the University of NSW-East Sydney in the Sydney Football League.
“That’s when I decided that the AFL was what I wanted to do,” he has said. “I was hopeful of being drafted, but realistically knew I didn’t have much chance. I was never selected in any state sides or anything.”
So after two seasons at UNSW-ES and his first draft knockback he took himself to Melbourne to play under ex-North Melbourne star Peter German with Williamstown in the VFL.
Despite two pre-seasons with the Western Bulldogs, a Williamstown win in the inaugural Foxtel Cup and an appearance with ‘Willy’ in the 2011 VFL grand final, it didn’t happen. Not until he returned home to win the 2012 Phelan Medal as the best and fairest player in the SFL.
After being drafted as a rookie at the end of the 2012 season, Rampe made his AFL debut in Round 1, 2013 against GWS at Stadium Australia, collecting seven possessions and three tackles before being subbed out in the second half of a 30-point Sydney win.
In his first team there were three other ‘locals’ – Kieran Jack was born in Sydney, Jarrad McVeigh hailed from the NSW Central Cost, and Lewis Roberts-Thomson was born in Brisbane but grew up in Sydney.
Proud to have seen the massive growth of the game in Sydney, he’s played regularly at AFL level this year with ‘locals’ Heeney, Mills, Nick Blakey, Errol Gulden, Braeden Campbell and Caiden Cleary plus Wagga boy Harry Cunningham, while the list also includes Sydney two-gamer Lachlan McAndrew and the untried Will Edwards and Indhi Kirk.
The Rampe journey is an undeniable argument for the next review of the ‘Greatest Team Ever’.
He’s had seven top 10 finishes in the Bob Skilton Medal – 9th in 2014, 6th in 2015, 5th in 2016, 6th in 2018, 1st in 2019, 4th in 2020 and 9th in 2020. He was All-Australian in 2016, co-captain from 2019-23 and won the AFLPA Robert Rose Award for the League’s Most Courageous Player Award in 2020.
He’s among club royalty as he follows John Rantall (1979), Mark Browning (1987), Michael O’Loughlin (2007), Adam Goodes (2009), Jude Bolton (2010), Ryan O’Keefe (2012), Jarrad McVeigh (2015), Heath Grundy (2018), Kieren Jack (2019), Josh Kennedy (2021) and Luke Parker (2022) to 250 games in red and white.
Set to play at 34 years 110 days on Friday night, he’ll be the 2nd-oldest behind Rantall, who was 35-plus. But only because Rantall had three years at North Melbourne after his first 10 years and 174 games at South Melbourne before returning in 1976.
Win or lose on Friday night, Rampe will have the best 250-game win/loss record of the group. At 161-2-86 he’s already got Heath Grundy (160-2-88) covered.
The seventh 250-gamer under John Longmire, he’s missed 33 games since his debut – equal with O’Keefe (33), less than Browning (37), Grundy (39) and Jack (39) and more than O’Loughlin (32), Rantall (25), McVeigh (24), Parker (17), Bolton (14), Kennedy (11) and the indestructible Goodes (6).
Four times he’s had 30-plus possessions in a game and six times he’s polled in the Brownlow Medal – but never both in the same game. It’s not the Rampe way. The man with the raking left-foot and the trademark moustache is not a big statistics guy. He’s a ‘no-frills, get-it-done, team-first’ guy.
Yet as he plays his 22nd final on Friday night, continuing his quest for the flag that eluded him in grand finals in 2014, 2016 and 2022, he’ll go into the penultimate game of the season on a rare ‘streak’ – for the first time in his career he’s kicked a goal in consecutive games.
NSW ‘GREATEST TEAM EVER’
It’s a very good side that doesn’t include Dane Rampe …. but it is a very good side. So good that Rampe had to be content to be among nine players named by the selection panel but not included in the 22-man team. It was:
B: Chris Lethbridge, Leo Barry, Ross Henshaw
HB: Jarrad McVeigh, Gordon Strang, Dennis Carroll
C: Shane Crawford, Lenny Hayes, Neil Davies
HF: Terry Daniher, Wayne Carey, Luke Breust
F: Paul Kelly, Bill Mohr, John Longmire
R: Bruce McGregor. Brett Kirk, Haydn Bunton
INT: Mark Maclure, Isaac Smith, Kieren Jack, Tom Hawkins
EMERG: Perc Bushby, Daniel Cross, Geoff Kingston, Stan Lloyd, David Murphy, Ricky Quade, Dane Rampe, Don Ross, Bernard Toohey
COACHES: Allan Jeans, Neale Daniher
