Sport
AFL
AFL grand final
Opinion
Jimmy Bartel Geelong premiership player September 25, 2025 — 11.30am
This seems right.
Finally, Geelong and the Brisbane Lions will meet in a grand final. It’s the game football fans have been waiting all year for – perhaps even longer.
They each have four premierships this century and are competing in their seventh grand final of the 2000s.
Back in 2004, I was playing for an emerging Cats line-up that came agonisingly close to toppling the formidable Lions in a preliminary final. We lost by nine points. Last year the Lions charged over the top of the Cats by 10 points in a preliminary final that was one of the games of the year and cruised to the premiership the next week. In between those matches, Geelong booked themselves grand final berth