Swans fear worst after ‘devastating’ Mills injury mars epic victory over Lions

September 5, 2026 — 8:13pm

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The pride and jubilation that followed Sydney’s extraordinary upset victory over the Brisbane Lions has been tempered by what is expected to be confirmed as a serious knee injury to Swans skipper Callum Mills.

Sydney coach Dean Cox said Mills, who was helped off the field midway through the first quarter of the qualifying final, had suffered a bad knee injury and while he did not specify that it was a torn anterior cruciate ligament, this was virtually confirmed by the coach.

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Typically, the scans that follow ACL injuries confirm the suspicions of club medicos. If he has ruptured the ACL, Mills will miss most, and potentially all, of the 2027 season.

“Obviously, not expecting great news on Callum,” said Cox, who was proud of his team’s stirring victory in the face of suspensions to five key players.

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“And we’ll in the next couple of days find out the extent of that, which is devastating for him and the footy club. We’ll do whatever we can to support him through whatever it is that he will go through.

“There’s that and for the maturity of the group, to see what happened – it didn’t look great from the outset – and to rally and stay on task and focus on what they had to do was a credit to them.”

Asked to confirm that it was an ACL rupture, Cox said: “It’s a knee, yeah. So we’re not sure exactly the full extent of it. It doesn’t look good, and we’ll work out exactly what it is in the next day or two.”

Cox said the players had been galvanised to perform in this final, in which the Swans kicked an explosive six goals to one opening burst and built momentum throughout the game, as Logan McDonald, Charlie Curnow and Tom Papley booted a staggering 16 goals between them.

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McDonald said Sydney’s players did not speak about Mills’ injury after he went off. Such is his importance to the side that they did not have to mention it – the mere sight of Mills on the big screen giving Swans fans a thumbs-up from the bench was enough.

“We’ll get around him this week,” McDonald said. “He’s always so selfless. Nothing’s about him. He’s just put the club first straight away. We’ll put our arms around him because he means so much to us as a player.”

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The fact they got the job done with Mills off the field for more than three quarters was proof, Papley said, that Sydney’s tactical plan under Cox did not rely on individuals – whether that was their skipper or the sidelined “Pullman Five”.

“I always believed. Not once did I think we couldn’t win,” he said. “We always believed inside the four walls. It didn’t matter who was out because our system doesn’t require talent. It’s hard work.

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“Our system, sometimes it might look flashy, and it’s a lot of talent, but the backbone of it – 80 per cent of it, 90 percent of it – is hard work and desire and pressure and doing your bit for the team.

“We won today without Millsy, so that adds to the win as well. It is what it is. We’ll regroup, we’ve got a couple of weeks to work out who comes in for Millsy, but we’ll get to work.”

Added Cox: “The story’s not finished yet for our season.”

Meanwhile, Brisbane Lions coach Chris Fagan took aim at his players for not heeding his warnings about underestimating the undermanned Swans.

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“I’m not sure my players believe me,” Fagan said. “To be honest with you, I tried very hard this week to convince our players it was going to be a tough game. We’re going to the SCG, it’s Sydney’s home ground. But somewhere back in the deep recesses of their mind, I just wonder whether they really thought it was going to be as hard as what it was.

“Did you really think that Sydney were going to be that good, or did you think it was going to be maybe a walk in the park? Because that’s how it had been painted by all and sundry that’s following football. And probably quite rightly so.

“But you can never underestimate the human spirit and that’s what Sydney displayed plenty of tonight. They showed human spirit, backs against the walls, playing against a team that’s been in pretty good form and gave us a football lesson. They won because they were tougher, harder, they ran harder, they used the ball well. They were excellent and they should be really proud of their effort and I’m sure they will be. We’re not. We’ve got work to do.”

Crisis-torn Swans produce one of the great AFL finals upsets over Lions

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Vince Rugari

Many questions have been asked in relation to the Sydney Swans since that fateful Monday morning at the Pullman Hotel in East Melbourne three weeks ago.

Here’s one nobody bothered to ask: what happens if they actually win?

Nobody bothered to ask because, before Saturday, the idea was preposterous. Outside of the Swans themselves, nobody genuinely thought they could win this game. Not a qualifying final against two-time reigning premiers Brisbane, who have lost only one game since May. Not without five of their best players. Not after everything that’s happened in the last month.

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As soon as the Swans suspended the ‘Pullman Five’, a line was drawn through the club’s name by virtually the entire AFL industry. Their odds blew out with bookmakers and they sunk to the bottom of everyone’s finals power rankings.

Their own chairman, Andrew Pridham, seemed to think they were as good as done: their season had been “torpedoed”, in his words, when those season-ending bans were meted out to Isaac Heeney, Nick Blakey, Chad Warner, Riley Bice and James Jordon for breaching club standards. Even their own fans seemed to agree, with only 37,261 turning up at the SCG on Saturday afternoon. It was the Swans’ lowest finals crowd at home in more than a decade.

Perhaps the Lions believed it, too. Because only that could explain the way they turned up, as if they expected the Swans to simply roll over and accept their assigned fate.

They did not.

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And now, after Sydney’s stirring 53-point victory, one of the great AFL finals upsets, we are in uncharted territory: this crisis-torn football club is somehow just one win away from a grand final appearance, having absorbed every bit of angst and scrutiny directed their way and channelled it to their advantage.

“I’d be writing them off at your peril,” Alastair Clarkson said here two weeks ago in what proved to be one of his final utterances as North Melbourne coach. Prophetic words.

The Lions simply could not handle Sydney’s hunger, intent and efficiency, which overwhelmed Brisbane’s most celebrated names and punched massive holes in their much-vaunted defence. The Swans kicked six of the first seven goals of the match to leave the visitors stunned; that margin remained intact for practically the whole afternoon and proved to be the difference. They prevailed 21.15 (141) to 13.10 (88).

Every time Brisbane tried to reel them in, the swarming Swans had a response of some kind that kept alive the belief that was sustaining them. They simply wanted it more, whereas the Lions, having tasted the ultimate success twice before, resembled a champion boxer who got old overnight. Lachie Neale, the pre-eminent example, had just 18 disposals and two clearances, none of them important. Brisbane have overcome bad finals defeats before, but this one was a doozy.

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Tom Papley started the day under an injury cloud after appearing to tweak his calf in the warm-up. He finished it with five goals, each of them somehow worth more than six points because of the energy he generated with his celebrations. Two came in a blitz at the end of the third quarter which pushed Sydney’s lead to a scarcely believable 46 points at three-quarter time, capped by Errol Gulden’s sensational individual effort from the centre bounce.

Logan McDonald produced the game of his career, bagging six goals. His first was the first of the match, and came at the end of a chain which featured a one-handed grab in the middle by Charlie Curnow over Darcy Gardiner. The last came from a set shot on the boundary in the dying moments. (Curnow also booted five.)

Almost everything went right for the Swans. Almost. Something went very wrong midway through the opening term, when captain Callum Mills twisted his knee in ominous fashion as he tried to corral Will Ashcroft on the boundary line.

Confirmation that he would take no further part in the game suitably arrived, via the club’s X account, with a crying emoji at the end of the sentence as punctuation. Coach Dean Cox spoke about what losing the skipper to the team after the game.

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“To lose your captain early, to rally, execute the roles they wanted to play at. I couldn’t be prouder,” Cox told Kayo Sports.

“We’ve worked hard on this game style for 10 months and we want to make sure that anyone that comes into the team can execute their role and do what is required, when it is required and they did that in spades.”

That Sydney still won without him, and after seeing his shattered visage on the big screen, further underlined the value of this performance. But a crueller twist of fate was hard to imagine. Mills had risen to the moment as the Pullman scandal had demanded, leading admirably with both his words in press conferences and his actions on the field. He also missed Sydney’s last grand final appearance through injury in 2024; this was his first consistent season of football in three years.

In the absence of the five banned players, for all sorts of reasons, Mills was one of Sydney’s most important players.

Whatever they do next, they will almost certainly have to do in his absence. But you’d be crazy to put a limit on what that could be.

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More:

AFL 2026

Sydney Swans

Brisbane Lions

Vince Rugari is a sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.

Jake Niall is a Walkley award-winning sports journalist and chief AFL writer for The Age.Connect via X or email.

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