One-point results are nothing new to the Brisbane AFL club. In 736 games there have now been 12 of them after Saturday’s last-gasp win over the Adelaide Crows at the Gabba.

The 12 heart-stoppers are split six wins and six losses, six at the Gabba and six elsewhere.

The most important one-point result in club history is undeniably the Brisbane Bears’ one-point qualifying win over Essendon at the Gabba in 1996. 

It was Friday night football at its most frantic … in the 100th year of AFL football the Bears played the first home final and celebrated their first finals win. Just.

The match drew a then record Gabba crowd of 22,003 as Marcus Ashcroft and Alastair Lynch played their 150th AFL game, and Shaun Hart his 100th.

It was a contest to match the occasion. Brisbane led 4-6 to 2-1 at quarter-time and trailed 6-8 to 8-2 at halftime. They should have been in front. Clearly so. By three-quarter time the lead had changed seven times but the home side was 10 points up after the Bombers at one stage had got 13 points clear.

Kicking to the Main Street end, the Bears were quickly out of the blocks in the final stanza. And when Lynch nailed a 50m bullet from the boundary line they were 27 points up. It should have been enough. But four Essendon goals in a row cut the margin to four points at the 23-minute mark.

Twice the visitors registered points from 40m. It was down to two. The crowd chanted ‘Bris-bane” as Essendon surged again.

Matthew Lloyd drove it long to the square where the ball fell to Gavin Wanganeen, who had already booted two final quarter goals.

Danny Dickfos, in a desperate last-ditch lunge, caught Wanganeen in a tackle and did just enough to unsettle his kick. There was a collective sigh as the ball, ballooning off Wanganeen’s boot, hit the right goal post. One point in it.

There was still 14 seconds to play. Andy Gowers took the kick in. It was sailing dangerously close to the boundary line until Matthew Clarke dived full length to knock it out of bounds. From the boundary throw-in the Bears bottled it up. Game over. Job done. Just.

“It was the greatest advertisement for our game you could ever imagine,” said coach John Northey after his side’s 15-11 (101) to 15-10 (100) win.

In a contrast which could barely have been more stark, Brisbane beat Carlton by 97 points in a semi-final at the Gabba seven days later before losing to North Melbourne in an MCG preliminary final .

In a pure football sense the one-point finals win over Essendon will take some beating.

But for sheer drama there is one better.

It was Round 7 of 1988 when the Bears, coming off a nine-point Moorabbin win over St.Kilda in Round 5 and a two-point Carrara win over Fitzroy in Round 6, hosted Footscray, now the Western Bulldogs, at Carrara.

Ultimately, Warwick Capper’s second goal from 15m on the boundary line gave the Bears’ their third cliff-hanger win in a row 10-12 (72) to 9-17 (71). 

But it came only after the scoreboard had twice been a point out at quarter-time breaks, prompting intervention by the goal umpires, and Bulldogs ace Simon Beasley had missed an easier shot than Capper converted amid scenes of chaos after the final siren.

Spectators invaded the playing arena as Beasley prepared to take his kick in what even Bears coach Peter Knights described as ‘a total disaster’.

Footscray General Manager Dennis Galimberti was more pointed, questioning whether the Bears’ security priorities were VIPs or players.

“The Bears have a number of people guarding this pavilion. Perhaps they should divert some of those to crowd control and re-think their priorities,” Galimberti said.

“It is like Ford Knox trying to get inside for a beer, but when an opposition player is having a shot for goal the security go missing. There should have been enough police around Beasley to form a protective barrier and give him a clear shot at goal.”

Knights later appealed for less spectator zest after it was revealed that umpire Bryan Sheehan had threatened to penalize the Bears if any further spectators had run across Beasley’s path.

He was going to award Footscray a 15m penalty that would have put Beasley in the goal square. Beasley, speaking later on Melbourne radio, said Sheehan had offered him ‘three or four minutes’ but he felt comfortable taking his kick. 

Even Knights was on the ground, standing 10m directly behind Beasley in a position which gave him a perfect view.

Beasley, who went on to finish equal second in AFL goal-kicking in 1988, had taken a lunging chest mark in the right forward pocket in a contest with the Bears’ Cameron O’Brien just before siren sounded.

Already with seven of 19 goals kicked in the match without a miss, he was remarkably calm, seemingly oblivious to people running everywhere as U-tube footage of the incident shows.

Immediately after Beasley took his customary drop punt Bears fans jumped deliriously as his kick veered off line. 

But it was several seconds before the result was official as the goal umpire battled to find a clear path through the hoards to see the umpire and signal a behind.

So, while Mitch Hinge, who debuted for the Lions against Adelaide on Saturday, will always be able to tell the story of his debut in a one-win win, it will never match that of Queenslander Matthew Simpson.

A 21-year-old left-footer from Aspley via Mayne, Simpson made his AFL debut in the match at Carrara in which Beasley could have changed the outcome in the most bizarre circumstances.

Simpson went on to play nine AFL games with the Bears in 1988 before being de-listed at the end of the 1989 season. He later played with West Adelaide in the SANFL and was unwittingly involved in a famous incident in the 1991 grand final loss to North Adelaide. 

Simpson was running for the ball towards the boundary line when he was hit over the ear from behind with a clenched fist by North Adelaide's Steven Sims just as he had grabbed the ball and was crossing the boundary line.

The blow knocked Simpson out and he took no further part in the game. 

The incident prompted what is widely reported as four all-in brawls as Sims was targeted by West Adelaide players.

The 12 one-point games in Brisbane Football Club history are:- 

Rd 7 1988 – W - Brisbane 10-12 (72) d Footscray 10-17 (71) – Carrara.
Rd 5 1993 – L – Geelong 18-19 (127) d Brisbane 19-12 (126) – Gabba
Rd 21 1996 – W – Brisbane 10-11 (71) d Fremantle 10-10 (70) – Gabba
PF 1996 – W – Brisbane 15-11 (101) d Essendon 15-10 (100) – Gabba
Rd 22 1998 – W – Brisbane 12-20 (92) d St.Kilda 13-13 (91) – Gabba
Rd 17 2003 – L – Port Adel 15-14 (104) d Brisbane 15-13 (103) – Gabba
Rd 6 2004 – L - St.Kilda 13-14 (92) d Brisbane 14-7 (91) – Docklands
Rd 15 2006 – W – Brisbane 12-13 (85) d North Melb 11-18 (84) – Docklands
Rd 14 2008 – L – Melbourne 14-9 (93) d Brisbane 13-14 (92) – MCG
Rd 11 2010 – L – North Melb 12-18 (90) d Brisbane 13-11 (89) – Docklands
Rd 23 2013 – L – Geelong 15-22 (112) d Brisbane  17-9 (111) – Kardinia Park
Rd 9 2019 – W – Brisbane 13-15 (93) d Adelaide 13-14 (92) – Gabba