Scintillating Swans: The Ultimate Season
Round 7 – A Point to Prove
Sydney v Essendon – Preliminary Final, 1996

“It was either Mad Monday or a Grand Final” - Paul Roos.

The city of Sydney embraced our Swans throughout the watershed 1996 season. For the first time since relocating, a night at the SCG was the big ticket item in town. In unprecedented scenes, a match against Geelong saw a 44,000-sell-out crowd packed inside, accompanied by thousands overflowing into the adjacent Sydney Football Stadium.

Two crucial members of that team, Paul Roos and Brad Seymour began the season at opposite ends of their careers. Roos, a decorated seven-time All-Australian, was in his second season in the harbour city, after moving from Fitzroy, while Seymour started the season as a 19-year-old with sixteen senior appearances to his name. The contrast was typical of the team at the time. Established superstars were joined by promising and talented youngsters, combining to form a formidable on-field force.

The previous season had seen Roos and fellow champion Tony Lockett join the club and momentum had been building to this point. Roos recalls his first meeting with the Swans. “I remember my first meeting with Richard Colless and Ron Barassi at the Hyatt and I could sense they were on the right track, unlike at Fitzroy where we were told year after year, we were going to do this, do that and it never eventuated.” He adds, “I sensed that there was a real plan and I’d played state footy with Tony Lockett and Mark Bayes, I’d seen Paul Kelly emerge as one of the best players in the competition, plus a real core of young players, like Brad Seymour, Mick O’Loughlin, Leo Barry and Jason Mooney, so I had hoped to be playing finals in maybe my third year.”

According to one of those youngsters - Seymour, there was one man working arduously to assemble the team that would lead the Swans’ renaissance. “There was a bloke behind the scenes that was pulling all the reigns and was responsible for putting that whole list and that team together, that was Ron Joseph. He’s an iconic football person who at that stage, the AFL put in charge of the Swans.” He continues, “He put that team together with clearly Roos and Lockett, but then added very good players, underrated players in Maxfield, Dyson and O’Brien who were added to go with the likes of Kel and Dunks, it was a really good mix and confidence was starting to build.”

And, so after an all-conquering year, finishing on top of the premiership ladder, we entered a finals series for the first time in eight years. After scraping past Hawthorn to earn the week’s rest, our boys had a somewhat interrupted build up. “We had Plugger’s groin injury, we were getting feedback about not winning a flag in sixty-three years and I’d actually had a compound dislocation of my finger in the last round of the year, so I was struggling. It was a really interesting week and it became more about Plugger and whether he was going to play and how he was going to perform, but I guess the rest is history!” Roos adds.

The lead up was anything but straightforward, but Seymour recalls a sense of self-belief leading in. “Although Plugger could hardly kick over a jam tin for most of the week, he hardly trained at the best of times. We had Rocket (coach Rodney Eade) who looked at the game differently to what a lot of players had perceived or thought was possible with footy. There were a lot of players moving in to different positions from half-forward to half-back, things that confused the opposition at the time and it gave us a slight advantage because we clearly had enough talent to win.”

Although momentum and belief had built progressively, the opposition were a renowned and regular finals combatant, ensuring that this would prove to be a titanic struggle. The match was tight throughout, with our Swans struggling to keep pace for parts of the match. “I just remember we hung in there and hung in there even though we weren’t actually playing all that well. We took some chances, were efficient with the footy when we needed to be, so we could just get over the line.” Seymour recalls.

Vivid memories of the SCG crowd that night have remained with many, and it’s no different for our players. “Over the course of the year, that stadium just became like a fortress, so by the time we came to this prelim, we were super confident playing at that ground because the way it’s built, 40,000 feels like there’s 80,000 or 100,000. It’s just electric.” Roos adds. “The crowd throughout that whole season were just phenomenal really, it was just incredible. Our first final against Hawthorn felt almost like a rehearsal and again it was the crowd that really got us up and over the line.” Roos recalls.

With the siren having sounded and the scores locked on sixty-nine apiece, Tony Lockett was lining up a set-shot from fifty-five metres out. The crowd was frenzied, but with Lockett being genuinely hampered by injury, making the distance was a concern. “He hadn’t kicked a ball for two weeks and now he’s got to kick it from fifty-five.” Seymour reflects, “I was standing in the goal-square, I don’t know what I was doing there, but anyway, it went through half-post height. He absolutely thumped it. It was just one of those moments in time and it was just euphoric, just incredible. The intensity of the noise at the SCG was quite deafening in our little colosseum,” he recalls.

The match ended with ‘Plugger’s point’, which is now entrenched in footy folklore. For Roos, it all played out almost like a fairytale. “We were a team that just kept fighting and fighting and it just felt like it was meant to be. We had a crowd that was over-hyped and just absolutely pumped and we had a player who I’d suggest was arguably the best player to ever have played the game kicking the winning point. It was just extraordinary,” he said.

After scurrying from the invaded playing arena, Roos recalls the feeling post-match. “There was just an incredible jubilation and it was just chaos after the game. We were quickly gathered in though and it suddenly became more calculated with how the next week was going to look. But, we were still on an enormous high with the realisation that we were going to play in a Grand Final and that euphoria doesn’t go away, it lasts for that whole next week.”

It is a match and an era that many credit with laying the foundations of the now famed Bloods culture. Although Seymour suggests those cornerstones were in existence long before. “When you think about resilience throughout the club and throughout our history since 1874, that word resilience echoes through the corridors of our joint and it has for many, many a decade.” That resilience has continued to this day. “They were years of solidifying the belief that we play finals, we prepare every year to play finals.”

The fairytale would not play out in full; however, the 1996 Swans earned the respect of the football world. Our club has now played in the most finals matches of any in the AFL era. It was a team with a point to prove and one that we all remain incredibly proud of.