The league's most expensive player will rub shoulders with its youngest on Friday night but don't expect North Melbourne rookie Kayne Turner to flinch.
Turner is not only the youngest player on an AFL list this year, he is also a schoolboy. And unlike Sydney's Luke Parker, who also played in a final as a teenager in his first season, he is no man child. At 180cm and 70kg, Turner would make even Lewis Jetta look big, however he is an example of why you should not judge a book by its cover.
Even as a junior, Turner would often be conceding weight to his peers but that would not stop him from running at the ball with such gusto his coaches often feared for his safety.
"Sometimes you would wince at how hard he would attack it. That's not just going for a ground ball but running back with the flight and leaving himself open at times," said Turner's former coach at his Under 18 TAC Cup club Murray Bushrangers, Darren Ogier.
"He certainly does make you put your heart in your mouth at times but he just continues to bounce up. What does Dennis Cometti say? 'Like a cork in the ocean', he just keeps bouncing up."
Turner was not a decorated junior and only entered the AFL's talent identification pathway late in the piece. Before that he had been a 16-year-old playing for Kiewa-Sandy Creek, near Wodonga on the Victorian side of the border with NSW.
"He came from nowhere. He came from a minor league as well. He hadn't been involved in any talent pathway, he hadn't played any representative footy before, he was virtually unknown," said Ogier, who played 23 games for Carlton, North Melbourne and Sydney in the late 1980s.
He came onto the Bushrangers' radar via their talent manager Andrew Carson, who is now a recruiting officer with North Melbourne.
Turner did not make an instant impression with the Bushrangers but they were impressed by his appetite to learn, which translated to his game. "His testing and training wasn't setting the world on fire, he was still coming to grips with the intensity of it all but each week he got that little bit better and showed more and more glimpses he would certainly step up and play TAC Cup," Ogier said.
Towards the end of the season, Carson said, "he was one of the first ones picked".
"Wherever you put him on the ground he had an impact," Carson said. "Despite his size and physical stature, his tenacity and ability to compete saw him shine through."
Turner more than held his own in the semi-final against Geelong, particularly in the dying minutes when he made two crucial interventions, though taking on football royalty like Franklin and Adam Goodes with a grand final berth on the line is another step up.
"He'll be nervous and in awe of them to some degree but on the whole his will to get the job done will hold him in good stead," Ogier said. "He'll do what he can to have an impact for his team."
