There has never been a match on the Gold Coast as big as Friday night’s. Not even close.
There has never been a win for Gold Coast as big as Friday night’s. Not even close.
The Suns’ at times rampant, at other times terrifying, and in the end bowel-clenchingly tight six-point win over Collingwood has surely done more for football on the glitter strip than the previous 15 years, 320 games and 99 victories put together.
Not only did they stun the ladder-leading Magpies, undefeated since April, with a comprehensive stoppages mauling to leave them goalless at half time and 40 points in arrears midway through the third quarter; they recovered after a mesmerising Magpie blitz had them seemingly on track for their most extraordinary heist yet with perhaps the clutchest five minutes this football club has ever produced.
There are Suns galore who leave People First Stadium with already burgeoning reputations enhanced.
In a finals-like atmosphere, Matt Rowell was best afield by the length of the straight; no fewer than three Magpies in Ned Long, Scott Pendlebury and Jack Crisp attempted to quell his influence at the coalface, and all were simply incapable of matching his raw power. No one on the field had more than his 12 clearances and 18 contested possessions, while the juxtaposition of his 13 tackes – three of which earned him holding the ball free kicks – and his game high nine inside 50s, to go with two vital goals, is an almost unthinkably complete game.
Noah Anderson lacked the volume of influence, but while his stats make for impressive reading too, it was the captain who lifted his Suns off the canvas after the Magpies slammed on five goals in 15 minutes, having managed three across the previous three quarters behind, to take the unlikeliest of leads.
It was Anderson who, with the Pies having won three centre clearances to none to power their final-term burst, got first hands to the game’s most critical bounce and dished a clever underground handball to Brayden Fiorini to allow the Suns the forward foray that ended in Ben Long’s go-ahead goal.
It was Anderson who, just moments later at the next centre bounce, perfectly sharked Jarrod Witts’ tap, kept running after giving the handpass to Lachie Weller, and with Scott Pendlebury’s ageing hamstrings creaking in his wake, slammed through a goal that runs his after-the-siren winner against Richmond three years ago for the greatest he has kicked at AFL level.
In a flash of brilliance from the skipper, the Suns, having seemed dead on their feet and holding on for grim death, didn’t just have the lead, but enough breathing space that they could cling by their fingernails to a lead until the final whistle, making the Pies rue not capitalising on the few opportunities they had to hit the scoreboard in a major way.
Of the rest, Witts’ tap dominance over Darcy Cameron and ability to deny his Pies counterpart the around-the-ground influence he usually has was of paramount importance; so too was the electric run of Daniel Rioli from half-back, and the safe ball use of a former Pie in John Noble. Both have fitted in at the Suns like a square peg in a square hole.
Brayden Fiorini’s ability to push in off a wing and add to the pressure around the ball with nine tackles helped gel the Suns’ dominance at stoppages, denying the Pies their ability to spread from the coalface; in the dying minutes, Bodhi Uwland, Joel Jeffrey and especially Mac Andrew had sizeable wins inside defensive 50 with the Magpies surging home.
It’s difficult to know what Damien Hardwick would have been most thrilled with: rallying from their first position of disadvantage all evening, or the first half in which they suffocated the Pies to a low they haven’t seen since Nathan Buckley held the reins.
The key to that dominance was being suffocatingly restrictive, to a level the ladder-leaders haven’t received all season, on the Pies’ ball movement, particularly from defence.
On average, the Magpies take the ball from their defensive 50 all the way through to the attacking arc about one ever five times in 2025; in the first half, just three from 22 chains ended up in an attacking position. Hence just 18 inside 50s to half time, in a stroke nullifying Collingwood’s main strength: scoring from their forward half. You can’t score when it ain’t there.
What was noticeable on a tactical front was that the Suns were fine with the Pies taking significant metres by foot, so long as it ended with a kick to a contest.
Take this kick from the back pocket from Brayden Maynard:
The man on the mark, Lachie Weller, backtracks a good 30 metres, right to the 50: meanwhile, Fiorini pushes up along the boundary line.
The Pies’ standard practice is for Maynard to hit up a player leading right to where Weller is – in this case, it’s Tom Mitchell. Alternatively, they love a 20-metre chip down the line for a Steele Sidebottom or a Josh Daicos, two of their prime users.
Weller and Fiorini’s positioning here means both options are unavailable to Maynard; while the lack of a man on the mark means he can run his full 15 metres before kicking, the result is exactly what the Suns crave. A long kick to a contest, where the ball can be safely neutralised given contested marking ahead of the ball isn’t the Magpies’ strong suit.
It plays perfectly into the Suns’ hands – the biggest stoppage behemoths in the league, they’ll back themselves to the hilt to have Rowell or Anderson or Bailey Humphrey win any clearance and drive them forward. In this case, it comes from a free to Rowell for holding the man – something Hardwick had flagged to the umpiring department during the week – and ends with Witts marking in the pocket.
The results were manifest: the Pies mustered just 27 marks for the first half, while losing the disposal count by 36. They simply couldn’t keep hands on the football.
The Magpies have markedly improved their stoppage game in 2025 – what was once a weakness is now a strength, as despite being bottom six for clearance wins, they’re seventh at scoring from stoppages, and even more impressively, second-best at conceding scores from them.
But with the Suns and Rowell in particular tearing them apart, Nick Daicos subdued by an ankle injury and Pendlebury starting as the sub, Craig McRae was forced into a drastic shake-up for the second half: namely, Pendlebury coming on, albeit for a Jeremy Howe injury, and even more surprisingly, Josh Daicos injected into the on-ball group and at centre bounces in an attempt to add speed to a largely one-paced group.
It’s in here, though, that a bitter reality the Suns must face becomes clear: for all their dominance, for all the significance of this victory, the Magpies played quite clearly their worst half of football since Opening Round … and yet still could easily have pinched this game.
For all the Suns’ superb structure in hemming the Pies in, for all their stoppage ferocity, the Pies kicked 10 behinds before finding their first goal, nearly all of them highly gettable. Kick just one or two of them, and the entire complexion of the game in the second half changes rapidly.
And even despite that un-Collingwood-like profligacy, it took just 30 minutes of the Pies operating a near full tilt – led by Josh Daicos, whose final quarter is quite honestly better than anything I can remember his more famed younger brother ever producing – to completely overturn a Suns lead, and dominance on the game, that looked impregnable.
Those first two and a half quarters were the Suns playing at their maximum: but the scary thing about what Collingwood achieved to all but real them in was how easy it seemingly was.
There were no radical changes from Craig McRae, no sudden injury that turned the contest – Touk Miller’s hamstring went before the Suns really turned the screws in the second term. No gradual ceding of momentum, no rapid slowing down on Gold Coast’s part. One minute, they were in control and running riot – the next, a Magpies comeback felt inevitable.
The Pies, moreover, had every reason to not be at their best: a combination of illness during the week, to the key absences of Bobby Hill, Brody Mihocek and Patrick Lipinski to further stymy their ball movement, and especially Pendlebury being named as the sub, meant this was far from the Collingwood we have come to expect during a season in which they have quite handily been the best team in it.
But you know what? All the better for Hardwick and the Suns.
No matter how they come, four premiership points in a finals race this tight are worth more than gold – pinching them off the premiership favourites with a win of this magnitude in a game with such significance makes this triumph almost worth eight.
At a stroke, they have rubber-stamped their finals credentials, all but sewn up their maiden September berth, given themselves a huge chance at stealing a top-four spot, and produced a win that, given the size of the cheer that rocked People First Stadium to its foundations as the siren blow, captured the hearts of Australian sport’s most notorious graveyard in a way they have never done before.
The head says the Suns’ win comes with a caveat or two. The heart … well, the heart says it’s the final proof that Gold Coast, at long last, have arrived.
