GWS will play its first premiership match on Saturday night, but the occasion will also mark a significant milestone for its opponent.
It's almost 30 years to the day since the Sydney Swans began playing home games permanently in the Harbour City.
But unlike the GWS' situation, at the time there was nothing permanent about the Swans' foray into Sydney, with the venture a virtual experiment - and an expensive one - to gauge whether a transplanted Victorian club could attract enough support to survive in Australia's largest city.
The theory was that if the club survived and thrived, so too would the code. And, of course, it has - but not without challenges that took the Swans to the brink several times.
Swans ruckman Steve Taubert (now the club's long-time ruck coach) provided a hilariously vivid insight into the difficulty faced in winning over the locals.
Taubert recalled it was "some imbecile's idea" to have Swans players promote their club and code during the change of innings in a one-day cricket international between Australia and the West Indies at the SCG. The crowd reacted violently.
"The pro-rugby Sydney crowd thought we were girls - they wanted to punch Warwick Capper's lights out," Taubert told the AFL Record in 2009.
"And they'd just seen Joel Garner nearly decapitate about three Aussie batsmen, so they were pissed [from drinking] and pissed off."
With cardboard beer cartons becoming "lethal frisbees", skipper Barry Round ordered his teammates to "Hit the ground!" Realising they were then stationary targets, Round screamed: "Every man for himself!"
The Swans were largely left to fend for themselves, despite the best intentions of the then VFL.
The story of the Swans' relocation starkly contrasts with the all-encompassing start-up support afforded GWS and Gold Coast. It's a history lesson - indeed, a cautionary tale - that has clearly been heeded by recent AFL administrations in their push to grow the game nationally.
The lesson begins in 1979, not at South Melbourne but fellow off-field battler Fitzroy.
As was detailed in Jim Main's 2006 book Shake Down The Thunder, the Lions could have been the first AFL/VFL club in Sydney. The name Sydney Lions had even been registered, but the Fitzroy members outright rejected the proposal, which opened the door for the Swans.
A mediocre side on the field, off it the Swans were in dire straits, with a low membership base, little corporate support and spiralling debts.
During a series of meetings with the VFL, the option of relocating to Sydney was floated.
The South Melbourne club quickly split into two camps - the Keep South at South movement and the group that supported the Sydney move - and a virtual civil war ensued.
Both factions even appointed their own coaches - the Lake Oval loyalists were led by John Rantall, while Rick Quade headed the relocation enthusiasts - and trained separate groups of players.
The issue was so inflammatory that then league chief Dr Allen Aylett, the man behind the game's expansion, even received death threats.
In the end, the Swans were faced with the ultimatum: relocate or fold.
Put in those brutal terms, it was an easy decision, and when the move was confirmed late in 1981, the VFL paid the club's $1 million debt and South Melbourne was transformed into the Sydney Swans.
Although the team was scheduled to host 11 games at the SCG in 1982, the players would continue to live and train in Melbourne, and fly to Sydney every second weekend before returning home on Sunday night.
From 1979-81, eight VFL games were played at the SCG, and South Melbourne had played two of them (one each in 1980 and 1981). But the build up to their first genuine home match in Sydney - against Ron Barassi's improving Melbourne side - was fever-pitch.
In the days before the clash, the Swans received correspondence from the VFL wishing them the best of luck, and hate mail from old South Melbourne fans who had turned their backs on the club.
It was to be just the first step in a long journey but for the Swans, the league and the code, it seemed only a Swans victory would suffice to justify the move north.
The pressure to win was so intense that first-year Swans coach Quade was reduced to the kind of pre-game jitters that might affect a first-game player.
"I was physically ill before the game," Quade told Main. "My nerves were red-raw and I felt this enormous weight crushing my head and chest."
The expectations were so high that even the oldest player afield, Swans skipper Round - a joint winner of the previous year's Brownlow Medal with former Bulldogs teammate Bernie Quinlan - later revealed it was a game he wouldn't like to play again.
David Rhys-Jones, one of the youngest players on either side at just 19 years of age, describes the hype as being similar to that which precedes a final.
"It was a groundbreaking," Rhys-Jones says. "The competition was still called the VFL but, in hindsight, that day was really the start of the AFL because the competition was spreading its wings.
"And as players we certainly felt a bit of responsibility, especially in that first game, to make an impact and do something for the club and the code in Sydney."
On the sunny afternoon of Sunday March 28, 1982, a crowd of 15,764 attended to watch the Swans take on a Melbourne side studded with stars like Robert Flower, Gerard Healy and that season's Brownlow medallist Brian Wilson, along with colorful characters like Mark 'Jacko' Jackson, Brent Crosswell and Peter 'Crackers' Keenan.
After a tight first quarter, the Swans burst clear, extending their lead to 41 points by the final change before cruising home by 29 points.
Although Wilson dominated with 29 disposals and 3.3 and Flower collected 28, the Swans boasted a host of strong performers - penetrating left-footer Mark Browning gathered a game-high 35 touches, ruckman Round had 23 disposals and was a tower of strength, and Rod 'Tilt' Carter restricted the fiery Jackson to just two kicks and one goal.
"We were pioneers," former Swans forward Tony Morwood says. "So to win the first game, after all the upheaval that we'd endured and would continue to endure for some time to come, was always going to be emotional and fulfilling. And it was.
"There was great excitement and pressure before the game and enormous relief after the siren."
Despite the magnitude of the occasion, Rhys-Jones is vague when asked for his memories of the match.
"All I can basically remember is that we won and I didn't get reported, which was a bit of a novelty in itself in those days," jokes the most reported player in League history.
Rhys-Jones has clearer recollections of the celebratory after-party, which was held at Lady Mary Fairfax's lavish home, which overlooked Sydney Harbour. That night the players felt special - like royalty or rock stars, depending on who you ask - and some even they acted like rock stars.
"There were all these red and white balloons floating in the swimming pool, so blokes were just slipping their empty stubbies (of beer) in there," Rhys-Jones says. "And I don't think Lady Fairfax appreciated us traipsing up and down her luxury carpet.
"But if you invite a football team around, especially in the early '80s, you couldn't expect a whole lot of social grace."
Morwood recalls the evening being a "bizarre" experience with players mixing with socialites who knew little or nothing about the game or the Swans.
"I'd suggest it was rent-a-crowd," he says. "The chardonnay set was there, along with the hob-knobs from the VFL.
"It was quite comical - Sydney's upper-crust was entertaining the working-class Swans from Melbourne."
The aftermath
Despite the disjointed nature of their 1982 season, the Swans still managed to perform reasonably well on-field. That July they won the night series, a title that brought with it prizemoney of $105,000. And with three rounds left in the premiership season they were just a game outside the top five, before finishing seventh.
All Swans players moved up to Sydney for the start of the 1983 season. Generally speaking, the young single players saw it as an adventure, but some older teammates who were married with children found it enormously stressful, even traumatic.
Sydneysiders took time to warm to the Swans but that all changed, for a time, following the arrival of Dr Geoffrey Edelsten, the millionaire businessman who bought the club in 1985 and bankrolled an unprecedented recruiting campaign that landed Tommy Hafey as coach, along with a host of stars including Greg Williams and Gerard Healy.
And of course the Swans already had in their midst perhaps the most marketable player in the game, the inimitable blond bombshell Capper, who had a penchant for taking sky-scraping marks and kicking bags of goals.
The Swans finished in the top four in both 1986 and 1987, but then the money disappeared, and so did the stars and the glitz.
Many believe Barassi helped save the Swans by coaching the club from mid-1993 to 1995. The club lured champions Tony Lockett and Paul Roos and made a Grand Final under Rodney Eade in 1996.
After another dip in performance, Roos (who had made his League debut against the Swans at the SCG just three weeks after that first match of 1982) lifted the Swans to successive Grand Finals and a premiership in 2005 - their first flag in 72 years.
The Swans have missed the finals just three times in the past 16 seasons, and only once in the past nine.
THE SWANS IN SYDNEY (1982-2011)
Gms W L D Finals %
350 198 151 1 10 (8-2) 56.6
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs
