Grand Finals, Volume III 1979-2018

Grand Finals Volume III is a comprehensive account of Premiership deciders spanning the last five decades—a time of momentous changes in the the game, its administration and its reach. Within ten years of Carlton’s stirring 1979 triumph over Collingwood,a struggling 12-team League representing Melbourne’s suburbs had morphed into a national sporting and media juggernaut with teams dotted all over Australia. From Wayne Harmes’s immortal boundary line lunge of the 1979 Grand Final, right up to Richmond’s fairytale rise to claim the 2017 Cup, this compendium revels in the brilliant and bizarre—from Helen d’Amico’s infamous 1982 confrontation with Carlton’s silent and stoic champion Bruce Doull and Gary Ablett snr’s heroic and forlorn nine goals of the spellbinding 1989 decider, to Dustin Martin’s unprecedented domination in 2017.


This period covers the various golden eras of Melbourne-based powerhouses Carlton, Essendon and Hawthorn, but also charts the rise of a truly national competition, from Mick Malthouse’s West Coast and Malcolm Blight’s Adelaide sides of the 1990s, to Leigh Matthews’s fearsome Brisbane Lions team of the new millennium. In the process, readers will celebrate the feats of players and coaches whose greatness was confirmed when it mattered most: on that final Saturday in September.