The 2015 AFL Grand Final was an Australian rules football match contested between the Hawthorn Football Club and the West Coast Eagles at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 3 October 2015. It was the 120th annual Grand Final of the Australian Football League (formerly the Victorian Football League), staged to determine the premiers for the 2015 AFL season. The match, attended by 98,632 spectators, was won by Hawthorn by a margin of 46 points, marking the club's third consecutive premiership and thirteenth VFL/AFL premiership victory overall. Hawthorn's Cyril Rioli was awarded the Norm Smith Medal as the best player on the ground.
Background
With the Fremantle Dockers and West Coast Eagles finishing first and second respectively on the AFL ladder at the conclusion of the home and away season (and both subsequently winning their qualifying finals to set up two home preliminary finals in Perth for the first time), it was widely anticipated during much of the latter part of the season that the 2015 Grand Final would be contested as a western derby between the two Western Australian teams for the first time at the MCG.
experienced an average start to the year, with a record of 4–4 after eight matches (including losses to non-finals teams , and ), but would lose just twice more for the remainder of the regular season to finish in the top three for the fifth consecutive year. The team then lost its Qualifying Final to at Domain Stadium by 32 points, but rebounded to defeat and (in Perth) in their Semi and Preliminary Finals, by 74 and 27 points respectively, to qualify for its fourth consecutive AFL Grand Final.
West Coast entered the season low on expectations after finishing ninth the previous year and losing key defenders Eric Mackenzie and Mitch Brown to knee injuries early on. Losing two of their first three games, to the Western Bulldogs and Fremantle, the Eagles finished the season with a record of 16–5–1 to finish in the top two for the first time since 2006. The Eagles received the week off after beating Hawthorn in the Qualifying Final by 32 points, and subsequently defeated by 25 points in the Preliminary Final to progress to their first Grand Final since 2006.
Hawthorn and West Coast also met once during the home-and-away season, in round 19, also at West Coast's home ground Domain Stadium, with Hawthorn winning by 14 points.
The Grand Final was held on the first Saturday in October, rather than its traditional date on the last Saturday of September, because the 2015 Cricket World Cup delayed access to some AFL grounds early in the season. The game was held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), as is traditional. The MCG serves as Hawthorn's main home ground for the home and away season, and media commentators suggested that Hawthorn would have an advantage playing there over West Coast who had only played there once during the season compared to Hawthorn's 11 matches. It was the second time that the two sides had met in a Grand Final; the first was in 1991, a contest which Hawthorn won by a margin of 53 points.
The 2015 AFL Grand Final was the last AFL match to utilise substitutions until the 2021 season; the AFL reverting to a four-man interchange bench from the 2016 AFL season onwards. The last AFL substitution occurred in the 27 minute mark of the match's 3rd quarter, with Matt Suckling replacing David Hale.
Media coverage
The match was televised by the Seven Network. The match commentary was conducted by Bruce McAvaney and Dennis Cometti for the Seven Network, marking the duo's seventh grand final appearance together as commentators since 2008 and their eleventh overall. Individually, it was Cometti's seventeenth grand final and McAvaney's fifteenth.
The match was shown on Seven's main channel and also their high-definition channel, 7mate. A total of 2,640,000 people across the two channels watched the match, making the Grand Final the most viewed television broadcast of the day.
Pre-match entertainment
Similar to previous grand finals, the 2015 AFL Grand Final provided both pre-match and post-match entertainment. On 7 September 2015, it was announced that English singer Ellie Goulding, Canadian musician Bryan Adams and American musician Chris Isaak would be performing on the day. On 17 September 2015, the league announced that Australian singer Kate Ceberano would perform the national anthem, while musician Mike Brady would perform his famous football song, "Up There Cazaly".