From the Pocket: Sydney stars ready to take centre stage on AFL grand final return

“We just buggered it up today,” John Longmire said after the 2022 grand final. “It’ll take a long time to get over that.” That afternoon, they were a middleweight fighting a heavyweight. Geelong’s team was the oldest to ever take the field in a grand final. Half the Sydney team were 23 or under. They were a team still learning, and not quite ready. They were surprisingly passive, constantly rushed, and often pushed aside. With the exception of Chad Warner, their stars were barely sighted. In selection, in method, and in execution, they erred. “We hardly got anything right,” Longmire said.

It was a grim task, but they reviewed that game forensically – the lead-in and the first half in particular. But 2023 was a bit of a nothing year. They gave up a lot of three-quarter time leads. They’d go to sleep for 15 minutes and let games slip.

Superstar forward Lance Franklin retired and their captain Callum Mills was in a sling. But a far more mature, better balanced and premiership-ready team emerged this year. They’ve found the right mix of height, talent, role, and experience. They complement and gravitate around a trio of star midfielders – the immaculate Isaac Heeney, the exquisitely skilled Errol Gulden and the turbocharged Warner.

For so long, the Swans were a team that put the work boots on and battered and blunted the opposition into submission. This is a very different team, a team for its era, a team that is remarkably expressive in how they play, how they communicate, and how they celebrate.

That top echelon carry themselves with such confidence, and play with such flair, they can leave their home crowd swooning. Watching them gambolling about after they had toyed with Port Adelaide, it was easy to see them swaggering into Melbourne with their boyband looks, collecting their silverware, and kickstarting yet another golden era for Sydney.

But it’s never that easy, of course. For a start, as unencumbered by the past as they seem, Heeney, Gulden and many other Swans will be all too aware of their output two years ago. Heeney, the player of this year’s finals series, didn’t touch the ball until an hour into the game that day against the Cats, and Gulden finished with less than a dozen possessions.

Longmire plays the straightest bat since Geoffrey Boycott, but there are other doubts that will nag away. Since that grand final, they’ve won two games from seven appearances at the MCG. Through gritted teeth, they’ll say something along the lines of “it is what it is”. But it’s still a factor. Brisbane’s last game at the MCG was a win in one of the great finals against Geelong. Sydney haven’t played there since late April. A few weeks before that, at the same ground, they were harassed and beaten by the eventual wooden spooner.

No one at Sydney would dare say this publicly. But they would have loved another crack at Geelong this Saturday. Partly because of what happened in 2022 but also because the Cats looked so banged up at the end of the preliminary final. Brisbane go in without their first-choice ruck Oscar McInerney, and will have to put their faith in a man who has played two senior games this year. But they’ve beaten Sydney five of the last six times they’ve played them. And right now, they have the whiff of history about them, a team that’s proved – most importantly to themselves – that they can win from any position.

In the first half of the season there were patches – a half hour here, a 15-minute burst there – where Sydney played almost perfect football. It begged the question: how could any team sustain that for an entire season? The competition had months to pick them apart and to zero in on their weak points.

Like Collingwood in 2023, the Swans had a period when they were flat, where they were heavy-legged and where they looked particularly vulnerable. The Port Adelaide game in particular was a bloodbath.

But the Swans didn’t panic. They didn’t make wholesale changes. They gradually pieced their game back together and have now won their past five matches. They’re a magnificent team – a team that’s solved its problems on the run, a team with a point to prove, a team that brooks no doubt and a team that’s well placed to contend for years to come. But exactly the same thing could be said of their opponent. It’s what makes this grand final so intriguing, so hard to pick, and one of the most eagerly anticipated in years.

• This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions