“I’ve been told it’s the greatest night in footy, and now I know,” said 2025 Australian Football Hall of Fame inductee Garry Lyon.
Yet Tuesday night was so much more.
A night of making good on historical omissions. A night of the game properly embracing half the population.
And maybe it even served to bring inner peace to two of footy’s most fierce competitors.
In South Australia, Ken Farmer rides with Sir Donald Bradman in status and statistical enormity – 1417 SANFL goals at an average of 6.33 per game sounds apocryphal. It was not.
Forget the silly snobbery of VFL v SANFL or WAFL or elsewhere; there was absolutely no reason to up and leave home to play footy interstate in a depression.
Farmer’s 50 goals against Victoria in ten state games shows that he proved everything he needed to at the very highest level.
If South Australian football collectively rejoiced that Farmer was officially made a legend, the rest of us would like to enshrine a rule to have a larrikin South Australian bring the house down every year.
Peter Darley, whose ‘lifestyle wouldn’t have worked in Victoria’, is the man all non-South Australian followers wished they had known for the last 60 years.
The Western Australians and Tasmanians had their moments too with George Owens and John Leedham.
Leedham’s induction is a reminder of what matters amid the political machinations in that state, while Owens’ achievements of a Sandover Medal, seven WAFL premierships and then five WAFL Grand Finals as an umpire may be the most noble contribution of anyone in the sport’s history.
The most powerful speech of the night belonged to Erin Phillips.
Anyone who has ever doubted the validity of AFLW just had to listen to Phillips recalling her childhood and that ‘footy was always my passion, from the grippo to the deep heat’.
The girl who wanted it so much, but was only allowed it late, and still managed to make an unexpected fairytale impact that will reverberate through the generations.
Did anyone not replicate father Greg’s tears when Erin mic dropped with this?
“I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to tell your 13-year-old daughter that she couldn’t play the game she loves anymore. And 27 years later she’s standing next to you in the Hall of Fame.”
Daisy Pearce’s induction showed that no two experiences in AFLW are the same.
While Phillips was a surprise stealth mission to return to the game she loved, Pearce unwittingly carried the weighty mantle of being the face of women’s footy before AFLW, and then again as the speculative dream became reality.
She finished that journey skippering a premiership with Melbourne in 2022, and having introduced a league as well as any figurehead could.
Pearce dedicated the honour ‘for those women servicing in an era that was a lot tougher than mine’.
“Thank you to the real women’s footy pioneers,” she said, the natural statesperson of the game for her generation – male or female.
When you have four premiership and two Norm Smith Medals, you do not need further recognition.
The ultimate playing mix of brilliance with blood and guts, Luke Hodge’s emotional tribute to wife Lauren showed that this night is as much about the recognition of the family in the shadows as the player.
Those medals of Hodge’s signify Grand Final success, something two more inductees, Nick Riewoldt and Lyon, do not have that on their CVs.
We are conditioned to believe that premierships override everything in the game. Deep down, that perceived failure has likely made revisiting their own playing careers difficult at times – more so when those two were uber competitors and leaders, who transitioned straight into the alpha world of media post-playing.
In Lyon’s case, his media presence has almost overshadowed his own playing exploits.
Riewoldt and the Saints got as close as you could, hoisting his team to a narrow loss on the big day in 2009, and then a drawn Grand Final a year later.
Lyon’s heroics as a 20-year-old helped get Melbourne to an unlikely 1988 Grand Final, where Hawthorn, arguably the greatest team ever, belted them by 96 points.
It is not hard to imagine the two comparing notes on what was a worse feeling.
The Hall of Fame, quite rightly, should not depend on premiership medals. For that, the induction of Riewoldt and Lyon provides catharsis for themselves, and perhaps, their teammates.
“Footy is incredibly binary, you either won a flag or you didn’t,” Riewoldt said.
Putting it down to perspective, maturity and time away form the bubble, he acknowledged a healing.
“I feel that has changed within me,” he added.
Riewoldt’s Saints were magnificent and had as much emotional impact on St Kilda fans as other clubs’ flag-winning teams; just like a Lyon-inspired blue-collar Melbourne nipping at the heels of more talented teams for half a decade warmed Demon hearts.
Both can be unashamedly treasured. These inductions confirm that.
26 years on from last lacing up a boot, Lyon relayed the transformative feeling of that Hall of Fame phone call.
“I thought, shit, I feel like a footy player again,” he said.
It is a night that makes us all feel like footy players again.
