For many long-time champions, it provides one last tilt at ending their playing days with a dream result on grand final day.
Kayne Pettifer was no different. Some weeks before the Bombers 2023 Goulburn Valley league finals campaign started, he had set his sights on adding a fourth premiership to his list of achievements in his last season of top-level senior football.
No-one would have argued Pettifer did not deserve the dream finish, but what he got was vastly different.
His last game was in the first round of Kyabram’s four-week finals series, reported and suspended for five weeks — effectively ending his glittering AFL and country football playing days.
In typical Pettifer fashion, he went down fighting, appealing the suspension and taking the matter to the highest level in a last-ditch effort to be involved in the club’s grand final with Echuca.
And while it was no fairytale ending for Pettifer, he had a typically positive outlook on the outcome when he stood in front of the Kyabram Football Netball Club playing and supporter stocks at the club’s Wilf Cox Community Centre presentation night on Friday, October 6.
Footballers talking about themselves in the third person is not new; in fact, at one Melbourne-based sports radio station, there is an award for the ‘’best third-person congratulator’’.
Rarely, however, have I experienced anyone doing it as gracefully and with as much humour as the retiring Kyabram champion, who often refers to himself as the “Train’’ — a self-adopted moniker from his AFL playing days with Richmond.
“You think you can play for ever, but it gets to the stage when you are lucky one of your best mates is coaching,” Pettifer said, referring to his relationship with retiring coach Paul Newman and the 2023 season, which saw him end his career with 15 games and 20 goals.
“I wouldn’t change it for the world, though,” he said, bringing the crowd into spontaneous applause by announcing his company would be the major sponsor of the netball component of the club next year — a nod to his sister Sara, a former Kyabram netball champion.
“This club has been amazing to me over the 25 years. I did a pre-season with Dodger Ryan as a 16-year-old, which set me up, and when I lost Dad in 2009, being at Kyabram helped me get through a really tough time.
“What this club has done for me and my family, I can’t thank the club enough.”
He was joined on stage by his mother, Sally, who supported the highly emotional forward during his farewell speech.
“Those three premierships are the greatest moments of my career,” he said.
“I can’t wait for the reunions that are coming up.”
He ended his speech by bringing teammate Josh Dillon to the stage and anointed him as the player to carry his famous number 10 into battle next season.
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