If you asked Bruce Reville what it’s like to lose an AFL game you’d have to understand it if he took a few moments to answer. Because it’s not something he’s had much experience with.
Two years. 25 games and one premiership into his AFL career, Reville has lost just twice.
And this week he’s celebrating the 22nd and best win of his short career after the Brisbane Lions’ beat Geelong in the AFL grand final at the MCG last Saturday.
An unlikely cult hero, Reville survived a personal torture test to emerge from the shadow of teenagers Levi Ashcroft, Ty Gallop and Sam Marshall as one of the great stories of Queensland football.
In the lead-up to the grand final, as 18-year-old Ashcroft and 19-year-olds Ty Gallop and Sam Marshall grabbed the spotlight, he was content to stay largely anonymous.
He’d played his role in getting the Lions to the grand final, but as coach Chris Fagan pondered the availability of senior pair Lachie Neale and Jarrod Berry the quietly-spoken Reville was unsure whether he’d be selected for the grand final. And if he was, what role he might fill.
It was nothing new. Because 12 months earlier, after an impressive first season at AFL level, he watched the grand final from the grandstand after injury ended his finals hopes.
He’d played 12 of a possible 13 games from Round 8-21 before a stress reaction in his fibula – a pre-cursor to a stress fracture - effectively ended his 2024 campaign.
He missed the last three games of the home-and-away season and although he got back to play two VFL finals he pulled a hamstring in the second, ending any faint chance he may have had of breaking back into the AFL side in September.
This year he found it harder to get game, and had only played six of the first 18. He was recalled for Round 19 against the Bulldogs but was dropped for the bad Round 20 clash with Gold Coast.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing, Because after the Lions’ biggest loss in a Q-Clash he was recalled and played the last four home-and-away games.
But in week one of the finals, as Neale returned from injury, Reville was squeezed out of the side. Again. And when the Lions were badly beaten by Geelong at the MCG he could have been excused for thinking his dream of an AFL premiership was over. Again.
Without him they lost. Again. And with Neale’s season seemingly over he was recalled for his Gabba semi-final final against Gold Coast. He was the starting sub in a commanding win. Likewise against Collingwood in the preliminary final at the MCG.
And then, in what was a massive boost for the Lions but a potential dagger through the heart for Reville, Neale suddenly loomed as a potential grand final inclusion. He’d recovered in three weeks from a calf injury said to be ‘four-six weeks’.
It was headline material across the nation, and Reville would not be human if he didn’t wonder privately what all this meant for him. Especially with talk early in grand final week that Berry, who had dislocated his shoulder in the preliminary final, would be available.
Reville had been the starting sub in the finals wins over Gold Coast and Collingwood, and under the ‘last in – first out’ philosophy that coach Fagan generally sticks to, this put his spot in jeopardy.
Not until Berry selflessly declared himself a non-starter, unwilling to risk letting his teammates down, was Reville’s selection confirmed. And then, in the biggest punt of coach Fagan’s career, he decided on Friday to start with Neale as the sub.
So, although the decision was not made public until an hour before the first bounce, at least Reville went to bed on grand final eve knowing that he would start in the 22.
Did he sleep well? Only he would know. He wouldn’t be the first young player to toss and turn the night before the biggest day of his football life.
But if was to drop into such a deep sleep that he might start dreaming he at least had a readymade script. He could dream about the young boy who not too long before had worked in an abattoir, and later at Bunnings. Himself.
Surely the only player in the AFL who knows how to butcher a cow and drive a forklift, it was how he made ends meet in the last couple of years after he’d moved to Brisbane to follow his football dream.
It’s an extraordinary story. Born in Port Moresby, he’d moved to Cairns with his family as a kid, and then further south to Burrum Heads, a peaceful town on the Fraser Coast, near Hervey Bay, which in the last census in 2021 had a population of 2538.
There he played just about every sport imaginable, but, in the Lions Academy from age 12, he stuck with football and played with Bay Power in Hervey Bay, the Maryborough Bears and the Gympie Cats.
In 2016 he won the Troy Clarke Scholarship, presented by AFLQ in honour of ex-Bears player and long-time AFLQ development manager who did at 44 in 2013.
He was playing at the time with the Maryborough Bears and was a member of the Wide Bay Under-15 Schoolboys Team. He competed for Queensland in the National Diversity Championships, where he played so well he was chosen in the World Team for the National Under16 Championships.
At the end of 2016 he moved to Brisbane, joining QAFL club Sherwood. In 2021, after Covid had effectively put his career on hold for 12 months, he debuted with the Lions VFL side.
In November 2023 he was one of nine players to join the AFL as Category B rookies.
He was a Lions Academy selection in a group which included a cricketer, two basketballers, two Irishmen, the son of an AFL champion, a graduate of the GWS Academy, and an indigenous player from the West Coast Next Generation Academy.
Indhi Kirk, the son of Brett Kirk, a 241-game Sydney premiership player and captain, was an Academy pick to the Swans but never played at the highest level and was recently the first of this group delisted.
St.Kilda’s Gaelic football convert Liam O’Connell has played seven games, and Collingwood’s ex-cricketer Wil Parker has played nine games, including a final this year, but as Carlton’s Rob Monahan, Geelong’s Joe Furphy, Richmond’s Oliver Hayes-Brown, GWS’ Nathan Wardius and West Coast’s Coen Livingstone await their opportunity, Reville has been the clear standout.
And Reville is very definitely the only member of this group who is roundly greeted with a loud ‘Bruce’ chant every time he touches the Sherrin at the Gabba.
"It's unreal," he said recently of a practice that went with him to the MCG on grand final day.
"Before my debut the social media team put a post out. I saw it but didn't think much of it. But from the warm-up they just went crazy and it's just caught on. Not many players get that kind of reaction from the crowd.
"You definitely hear it. You're locked in when you're playing, but for instance, as a sub coming on, that's when you can really hear it, and it just gives you goosebumps."
For a long time the ‘Bruce’ chant was the thing by which Reville was best known. Not any more. Now, having worked as hard as any of the 209 Queenslanders who have played in the AFL, he’s one of 28 to have won a premiership medal. And the only ‘Bruce’.
