Player Column | Nick Suban Grand Final

I AM super excited now for Sunday’s Grand Final on our home ground and I do have some premiership experience behind me, but if we are able to get up against Claremont then it will be the most special one to me for sure.

It’s certainly unique that I’ve already won premierships at two different clubs. When I was at Fremantle in the AFL originally I was aligned to Claremont and we won a premiership in 2012, but then a few years later all the Fremantle players went to Peel Thunder. I was then lucky enough to play in those two premiership at Peel.

Looking back to last week’s prelim, there definitely were a few doubters out there, we heard a bit of that during the week but we always had belief with what we have been doing and for us we try to treat every game like it’s Grand Final day. So whether it’s Round 1, 2, 5 or preliminary final day, we’ve been practicing for the Grand Final and I thought the boys got back to doing what they do best with that pressure around the ball. We were confident going into the week and I thought the boys were really good.

It seems like you always get a hard luck story in every Grand Final too and unfortunately we have one again this year with Jake Florenca. He’s had a great year Jake and he would have been one of the favourites for the Sandover the other night, and I think he polled pretty well. It’s pretty devastating for him because he has been one of our key drivers all year, but to his credit he has stayed upbeat and has had surgery already this week on the Achilles. I’m sure he’ll be there on Sunday cheering us on and if we are lucky enough to get up, he’ll be part of it and we’ll get around him for sure.

But now looking to Sunday’s Grand Final, it’s obviously our home ground and there’s a great history that goes with the oval, and a lot of greats of our club have done some great things on that patch of dirt so it’s super exciting to have the Grand Final on our home ground. But in saying that, just having the home ground advantage won’t get the job done on Sunday. We are excited to be there and having all our fans behind us, but the guys just have to prepare well and come up for the fight on Sunday against Claremont.

They were pretty good a couple of weeks ago and that was on our home ground as well, but we’ve got a couple of players back from that game and feel a bit better prepared this week compared to a couple of weeks ago with a couple of personnel changes and what not. We will just come to compete and our midfield bounced back last week, Haiden Schloithe was pretty good inside for us and that’s where the game will be won and lost. Hopefully we can get on top there.

We just have to come ready to compete most importantly. They’ve beaten us once this year and we’ve beaten them once so it’s one-all and we are super excited to come back and prove people wrong. I think there will be people out there thinking Claremont are favourites, but we have trained hard this week and we can’t wait to get out there to compete on Sunday.

You always go out there thinking you can win and we’ll be no different on Sunday. We know that last time we played them it wasn’t the result we wanted, but we learned some things that day and hopefully we can go back on Sunday and implement what we want to do, and bring that pressure around the ball. If we are able to play the way we want to play then I think we’ll get the result we are after.

If you want to know how hard tickets were to come by, I actually had to pay for my six-month-old and three and-a-half year old to get tickets into the game. But at least we managed to hunt some tickets down for them and it’s going to be a great atmosphere. No doubt 11,000 at Fremantle will feel and sound like 100,000 at the MCG.