Agony, ecstasy, then... a blur. A long blur. Fifteen minutes, give or take.
Before the Central Coast Mariners even had a chance to compute that they had just completed the greatest season in Australian soccer history, they were swarmed. More than 21,000 fans - an all-time ground record - had packed into Gosford’s Industree Group Stadium, specifically for this exact moment, and some of them just couldn’t help themselves.
Nobody condones pitch invasions, but ... maybe this was good?
Mariners fans invade the pitch after the grand final.Credit: x
“Like, I wouldn’t recommend running on the field,” said Mariners star Josh Nisbet. “But it was a pretty special moment.”
Ryan Edmondson, the super-sub who changed the match, remembers crying at the full-time whistle.
“Next minute I had about 20 people laid on top of me,” he said.
“Everything from then on is just a blur. I can’t imagine I’m going to remember much of it. But I know that we won it, and that’s the most important thing.”
That they all succumbed to the polite requests from the announcer and cleared out relatively quickly to allow the trophy presentation to unfold suggests it was probably the most well-mannered pitch invasion ever, which would be classic Mariners.
On the presumption that nobody in there got hurt or did anything idiotic, the scenes immediately following the Mariners’ come-from-behind 3-1 win over Melbourne on Saturday night can be classified as priceless for the A-League - the visual representation of a team and a community so closely intertwined that, much like the individuals in the mosh pit on the pitch, it’s hard to tell them apart from a distance.
This was the........