Brownlow Medal

• Hopefully, unlike last year’s final, it will be a gripping match.
• Perhaps most importantly, after lean years during COVID, there has also been bountiful spectator interest this season.
• All this follows a bumper season for the AFL, with 36,110 attendees per game, the league’s highest average since 2010.

Rivals with September history

• No other two clubs have faced each other more in an AFL grand final.
• The Magpies lost to the Lions in 2002 and 2003, so they will be especially keen to soar against their Queensland rivals.
• As with last week’s preliminary final, Collingwood will have the advantage of playing in Melbourne against an interstate rival.

The Lions are reborn

• In 1996, the Brisbane Bears were reinvented as the Brisbane Lions following an AFL-managed merger with the financially distraught Fitzroy Lions.
• A move from the Gold Coast’s Carrara Stadium to Brisbane’s Gabba embedded the newly branded Lions in Queensland’s capital.
• That said, after the heady three-peat of 2000-3, the Lions endured some very lean years, making the finals only once between 2005 and 2018.
• That year, the Lions were eliminated in the preliminary final, so it was a metaphorical opportunity lost.

Collingwood’s transformation

• But sport is not simply about winning or losing; it’s also about how you play the game – both on and off the field.
• In that respect, Collingwood is undergoing a renaissance that could not have been imagined just two years ago.
• This led to the 2021 release of the “Do Better” report, which found evidence of systemic racism at the club.
• Read more:
  As the 2022 AFLM season comes to a close, the game must ask itself some difficult questions – especially on racism