The Swans\u2019 victory over Essendon on Sunday night<\/a> locked them into second spot, guaranteeing them two home finals at the SCG.<\/p>\nDespite their strong AFL ladder position, Lewis said the Swans couldn\u2019t win the flag now.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy honest opinion? You put a line through them,\u201d Lewis said on Fox Footy\u2019s On The Couch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think you can come back (from) an instance of this nature and this serious to then push it to the side and become a premiership team in 2026.<\/p>\n
Lyon: ‘It’s a disaster for Sydney’ | 02:41<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re too hard to win, you need everything to go right. But this will be going on in the background \u2026 there\u2019s still this ongoing investigation that\u2019s hanging over the head of everyone that\u2019s involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, from a footballing perspective, 2026 is done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Triple premiership Tiger Jack Riewoldt labelled the situation \u201cdisastrous\u201d for all parties.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo only think 12 hours before the alleged incident has occurred, Dean Cox sat in the bowels of the MCG after what was a pretty poor performance from the Sydney Swans, and spoke about not being lazy and not doing the wrong things, making sure you tick every single box to potentially be there on that last Saturday in September,\u201d Riewoldt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey couldn\u2019t look further from it at the moment.\u201c<\/p>\n
The Swans didn\u2019t fly home after Sunday night\u2019s win over Essendon due to Sydney Airport\u2019s 11pm curfew.<\/p>\n
But triple premiership Lion Jonathan Brown said the Swans should\u2019ve looked at alternative arrangements.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy place is not far from the Pullman and I drove past and saw the Sydney bus out the front this morning,\u201d Brown said on Monday night. \u201cI thought: \u2018Geez, that\u2019s odd. Why wouldn\u2019t they go home last night?\u2019<\/p>\n
Swans statement over alleged incident | 00:56<\/p>\n
\u201cI know there\u2019s curfews at Sydney Airport, but they have to ask themselves a question: Did they do everything they possibly could to get those boys home back in their own bed? That\u2019s one question mark. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then what players are doing going out a couple of weeks before a final series? They only need to look outside their hotel room (at the MCG) to be reminded about what happened on that ground two years ago when they were embarrassed on Grand Final day. That would\u2019ve been motivation enough not to be going out a couple weeks before finals.<\/p>\n
\u201cPremierships are hard to win \u2013 and they\u2019re even harder to win when there\u2019s issues off the field and there\u2019s problems just taking away from what\u2019s going on the field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seven-time All-Australian Nathan Buckley stressed the seriousness of the alleged incident while also outlining the potential ramifications for Sydney and the players involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the other thing is that there\u2019s an alleged victim, or victims, involved in this,\u201d Buckley told On The Couch. \u201cSo while there\u2019s an element on this side of it, there\u2019s a very serious element on the other side that Victoria Police will go and face \u2013 and I\u2019m sure that Sydney and the AFL will fully comply with. That is one side of it, but we can\u2019t speak to that as such. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut the other side of it, on the footy side, it\u2019s a terrible situation for Sydney or those players and the decisions they\u2019ve made, whether legal or otherwise \u2013 we\u2019re talking about the decisions to go out \u2013 that have put their teammates and the club and the game into disrepute.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether legal decisions or illegal decisions, allegedly, that\u2019s going to be something they\u2019ll have to account for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four-time premiership Hawk Jordan Lewis has declared Sydney\u2019s 2026 premiership hopes are over, claiming the team would struggle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-858980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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