BRING IT ON

AFL Grand Final day has finally arrived and Richmond is a warm favourite to win its second flag in three years against GWS. Yesterday club captains Trent Cotchin (left) and Phil Davis were at the grand final parade eyeing off the trophy one of them will take home today.

WHEN GWS hung on to beat Collingwood in their pulsating preliminary final to advance to their breakthrough grand final, the initial thoughts of many fans would have been this is exactly what the AFL did not want.

There is no doubt a Richmond-Collingwood grand final match-up would have been one for the ages, not to mention the massive financial windfall that two traditional Victorian clubs would deliver.

But it did not take long to realise GWS’s first appearance on the final Saturday in September has provided some legitimacy to the AFL’s bold expansion plans of 2011 and 2012, a move that still has mountains of critics across the country.

Poor crowds in Western Sydney, even when the Giants are going well, and the ongoing struggles of the Suns have made the league’s expansion plans an easy target for criticism, especially when nine years on the competition is still funding the experiment.

But as Queenslanders will know from experience that even though Brisbane had played in multiple finals series in the 1990s, it was the Lions’ premierships of the early 2000s that truly cemented the club in the Sunshine State.

Western Sydney is a vastly different environment in that it does not have the numbers of expat Victorians that Queensland has, and there is a long way to go before the Giants can stand on their own two feet financially.

But a premiership will work wonders.

Expansion has always been about the long game.

The Giants and Suns were not expected to instantly convert lifelong adult fans of the rugby codes to our game, but to win the hearts and minds of their kids.

If the Giants can take a premiership cup back to Sydney with them this weekend you could expect a huge boost to Auskick enrolments the following year.

It would also increase the pressure on the Suns, who are a year older and had what was supposedly the easier task of gaining traction on the Gold Coast, which has a strong history in our game and has had a monopoly on the QAFL premierships for years now.

However, GWS’s success this season and Brisbane’s for that matter, also provide proof of what can be achieved with the right decisions.

Which is why, though I’m tipping a Richmond win today, part of me cannot help but hope for a Giants win.

Here are some areas I think will shape the game.