Sydney Swans overcome player suspensions to defeat Brisbane Lions in AFL qualifying final

When Sydney chairman Andrew Pridham declared his side's premiership hopes "torpedoed" after suspending five players, he was right.

Preparing for a finals campaign is a delicate exercise. A little shift here or there can have major impacts. The less things change, the better.

At least, that is what conventional wisdom says.

Last year, Adelaide's excellent home-and-away season was detonated by Izak Rankine's suspension for a homophobic slur on the eve of the finals.

Rankine's actions drew a dark cloud over the entire football club, and without him on the field in the finals, the Crows unsurprisingly limped out in straight sets.

Winning a final with five of your first-choice players sidelined? That appeared to be mission impossible for the Swans.

A lot has been made of Sydney's famed "Bloods" culture in the wake of the Pullman Hotel scandal. What is it? What is it supposed to look like? Is it real or just a PR myth?

While the club rightly admitted that the culture was not what it once had been off the field, on the field, there appears to be little sign of slippage.

With Sydney decimated by the suspensions, the Swans appeared to be their rivals' easy ticket to a deep September run, the helpless carcass hungry animals in an African savanna would feast upon.

Brisbane, by virtue of a slight percentage edge over Hawthorn, had the apparent gift of facing the Swans in one qualifying final while the Hawks looked doomed as they headed to Perth to take on Fremantle in the other. How quickly things can change over one weekend.

Sydney has been one of the AFL's model clubs over the past two decades as a picture of professionalism from the top down, and performances like the one against Brisbane remind you exactly why the Swans have been revered for so long.

Turn on a Swans game and you know what you're getting. Regardless of who is in the line-up or who is in the coaches box, Sydney shows up with a base level of effort and intensity to go along with a relentless never-say-die attitude.

All of these traits make up Sydney's true "Bloods" culture on the field.

If you wanted an example of what it looks like, the culture was on full display as Sydney eviscerated the two-time reigning premiers in front of an SCG crowd that was as raucous as it has ever been.

The louder the crowd got, the better the Swans played. The better the Swans played, the louder they got. The crowd and the players worked hand in hand like a beautiful symphony and the tidal wave they created swallowed Brisbane up entirely.

It is hard to imagine an 18-5 team flying under the radar, but that is exactly what Sydney has done so far this season, right up until the Pullman Hotel scandal.

While the AFL world was consumed by Fremantle's leap from a cute team to a bona fide premiership threat and Brisbane's bid to threepeat, Sydney quietly ticked along in the background to the best home-and-away season in its history.

What Sydney couldn't recoup in terms of talent in the absence of Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner and Nick Blakey — arguably three of its top six players by any metric — it made up for with sheer, unadulterated hard work against Brisbane.

That is not to say the Swans are a team bereft of star power in the absence of the suspended five.

In Charlie Curnow, Sydney still has the AFL's most terrifying key forward, in the metronomic Brodie Grundy, it still has arguably the best big man on his day in the non-Max Gawn division, in Errol Gulden, it has a Rolls-Royce of a midfielder capable of being the lead actor in any team's engine room, and in the incandescent Tom Papley, it has a small forward that is able to bend the energy of a match like no other.

It is no surprise that all of these guys, as well as many others, were excellent in the win over Brisbane.

"The two weeks of training up to that point, we trained the house down," Papley told Nine's Sunday Footy Show of the lead-up to the Lions game.

"That's the best we've trained all season. The drills we did were all about pressure and closing space and chasing and tackling and surging the ball forward and we trained so well and came together on game day.

"I'm so proud of the boys. It was amazing.

"The job's not done yet, but the desire and passion we played with … inside the four walls we believed and that's what we kept doing.

Sydney has played in, and won, bigger games in its history. It will continue to do so going forward as well.

But with the context of everything that has happened in the lead-up to this one, and then the Callum Mills injury sprinkled over the top as an additional bit of nightmare fuel, Sydney will have to go a long way to find a performance it is prouder of.

The Swans still face an uphill task to win this year's flag, even with a home preliminary final to come in a fortnight.

As the Swans have experienced in their past four grand final appearances since their last premiership in 2012, even the best-laid plans with a perfect lead-up can go up in smoke on the final day of the season.

But for one day at least, the Swans showed everyone just exactly what "Bloods" culture is supposed to look like.