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Opinion
July 16, 2026 — 11:45am
Stewart Loewe, the St Kilda great, walked past me a few years back at a grand final moments after the final siren sounded, and commented wistfully, “Makes you sick, doesn’t it?”
It begs the question: if you give every morsel of your being to achieving something for a decade or so, and you don’t achieve it, have you failed?
In a world where we like things to be binary and without nuance, of course the answer is yes. But let’s explore a little deeper.
A premiership is what players play for, but that’s not the way the journey begins. You ask any junior footballer what they want in their life, and they all say one thing: to get drafted. There’s no talk of premierships at such a tender age. They simply want the opportunity to train and play with their idols. To set foot onto the MCG or SCG or the Adelaide Oval, to live the professional athlete lifestyle.
If they are lucky enough for that to happen, the next goal remains just as simple: to play a game.
Everyone is different, but it’s generally around the third or fourth year in the system, or the 50-game mark, where the focus turns more toward team success. You’ve got your own game a little more under control and the focus turns from “me” to “we” … and winning.
To illustrate how different the journeys can be, Essendon’s Nate Caddy and the Brisbane Lions’ Logan Morris played against each other last Sunday in a game won by the Lions by 90 points. They are in that period of their careers now.
Caddy was drafted in with pick 10 in the 2023 draft and has played 43 games, for 11 wins. Morris was drafted at pick 31 of the same draft and has played 61 games, including eight finals, for 44 wins. Morris kicked 2.4 from 12 disposals, Caddy kicked 2.1 from 11 disposals.
For the purposes of this article, I asked three list managers at AFL clubs a question. If they were the list manager at the Tasmania Devils, and they only had one pick, who would they take out of Caddy and Morris?
After long deliberations and smiles suggesting “what a great question” (thank you), two said Caddy and one chose Morris. The one who picked Morris qualified it by reasoning that when you start a new club, you need players who have seen what good leadership looks like. The fact that Caddy re-signed recently means he also knows what good leadership looks like.
During my playing career, I went to every grand final I could, and stayed until the winning players did their victory lap. It was some sort of macabre punishment that left me feeling sick in the stomach for not being as good as those 22 players experiencing the ultimate.
But you walked out of the MCG still filled with the hope of the next season. Once that final siren sounded on the season, all teams were back to equal top or bottom, depending on your level of optimism/pessimism.
The feeling of watching the grand final in the year you retire is an entirely different proposition if you haven’t experienced premiership success, though. The sickness wasn’t there; it was replaced by numbness. A grieving numbness.
That year, I skipped the obligatory post-game beer at a pub and went home. I sat on the couch feeling empty. The dream was dead. It wasn’t death-in-the-family grief by any stretch, but it was real.
Premiership winners come into their own in grand final week. They have a particular strut. I didn’t experience it, but I feel like I understand the strut. When they see other players who have won premierships, there is a knowing nod, with a smile that suggests a brotherhood. Us losers keep our eyes down slightly.
That feeling of failure dissipates reasonably soon after retirement once you forge a path into other adventures: family, work and beyond. Would life be better if I’d won a premiership? Probably, especially grand final week. Does it worry me? Not one bit. I love my life.
The broad experiences you have and the people you meet during a career in professional football are to be cherished. They give you a head start that no university course can, and if you have the humility to accept starting near the bottom again of a chosen field, the next chapter can be just as rewarding, premiership or not.
In The Lumineers’ song Stubborn Love, Wesley Schultz sings “It’s better to feel pain, than nothin’ at all. The opposite of love’s indifference …”
Did I feel pain and choose love over indifference? Absolutely, and I’m bloody glad I did.
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