GRAND FINAL FEELS - Mark Duffield Editorial - 28.09.2026

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Every gameday, you show up for your team. Now, it's your time.

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Mark Duffield (1:21)

Hello, everybody. Sorry about that. I've got to turn my own microphone on today. I don't have someone holding my hand. Welcome to the SENWA radio studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium. Monday morning in Perth. We are here thanks to Beaumont Homes. Award-winning design, built to be loved forever. Going to have some showers in our city today, atop of 19 degrees. Made in WA for WA. This is Mornings with Mark Duffield on SENWA.

So, Freo fans, I'm sorry for your loss, and I share your pain. An epic grand final, the equal of anything I have seen in my time covering footy.

A magnificent performance by both teams for all but four minutes, and then one of the teams lifted and franked its footy greatness.

And it wasn't Freo.

It was brutal. At the MCG, the purple people in the crowd all around me went from raucous to silent. The Brisbane Lions section, a couple of bays further round, lifted like their team in a wave. Where we sat, it felt like a tsunami had crashed down on us. Now, it's a free country. We live in, so you can deal with this however you like. But as a person who does desperately want to see Freo get one of these things, this morning, I'm going to tell you how I'm going to handle it. I'm going to give credit where credit is due, to a Brisbane Lions team brilliantly coached by veteran mentor Chris Fagan. They have played in four grand finals in a row, and they have won three of them. This century, only Brisbane, between the 2000 win over Essendon and the 2004 loss to Port Adelaide, and Hawthorne, between the 2012 loss to Sydney and the 2015 win over West Coast, have achieved what Fagan's team has achieved. Now, congratulations to Shay Bolton on his Norm Smith medal, but Will Ashcroft may consider himself unlucky not to have emulated Dustin Martin. Three normies from three grand finals, which produced three premierships. His last quarter and those last four minutes in particular were nothing short of astonishing.

Logan Morris took advantage of the absence of Alex Pearce. He went from three first half touches to three last quarter goals. I suspect that if the Freo captain had still been out there at the end, fit and charging as he does, Freo would have flown home with the Cup yesterday.

From a Freemantle perspective, this was a mighty grand final against a mighty opponent. And Freemantle had the better of it for longer until that last four minutes. So how do you deal with it? Well, the first thing I'd suggest is ignore the rubbish around warfy time being a factor. Because rubbish is all that is, regardless of the post-match rhetoric from the Lions. Do you honestly think they were just putting around 75% and were suddenly woken up by Hell's Bells? Oh, warfy time, boys, let's get going. What happens is that they were three goals down with four minutes left. For them, it was then or never, with or without warfy time.

The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look optimistically to how the Freo list management team is going to handle this. They've done a great job building a grand final list, and they have done it without father-sons and top-end Academy picks. Dare I say it, unlike their opponents on Saturday. Freo do have decisions to make. Scans will reveal the extent of Alex Pearce's Achilles tendon injury, depending on what they reveal, and there is optimism he won't need surgery. The Dockers do need to decide on whether Hugh Davies can step into a role, whether Brennan Cox can stay sound with those soft tissue issues, or whether someone has to be brought in. They need to decide, and this is brutal, how much footy Luke Ryan has left. And if the judgment is not much, then they need to decide whether Josh Draper can step up into that role. Can Cooper Simpson become another ball user out of defence? And do they have the small forward who can fill the gap that Sam Switkowski is going to leave? So what did we learn?