PLAYING your first game for a season in a final – as Zac Williams and Tyson Goldsack are set to do on Saturday – is nothing new, but it has still been a rare occurrence, particularly in the AFL era.

Greater Western Sydney playmaker Williams has overcome an achilles problem and will face Sydney in their twilight elimination final at the SCG on Saturday, while Collingwood veteran Goldsack will return for the qualifying final against West Coast in Perth later that night after making a rapid recovery from a knee reconstruction.

They are poised to become the first players in eight years to kick out the cobwebs in September.

Just four players have achieved the feat in the past 27 years, and 68 in history.

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Williams will be just the second player from a non-Victorian club to do it after Brisbane's Richard Hadley back in 2003, while Goldsack is set to be the first Magpie since Noel Lovell's preliminary final debut against Geelong in 1981, and the eighth Pie overall.

Hawthorn playmaker Grant Birchall is also an outside chance to add his name to the list if he makes it back for his first game since round 15 last year.

And, of course, there's always the possibility of the odd surprise selection, as was the case in the most recent instance back in 2010 when the Western Bulldogs picked teenage small forward Andrew Hooper for his debut in a cut-throat semi-final against Sydney at the MCG.

It was the second successive week the Dogs had plucked a player from obscurity, after selecting Tim Callan for his first game of the season in their qualifying final against Collingwood.

Both Hooper and Callan were dropped the following week.

Hooper is among 32 players to have debuted in a final, five of which have been in Grand Finals (the most recent being Collingwood's Keith Batchelor in the 1952 loss to Geelong).

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The finals debutants include Hawthorn great Dermott Brereton, who bagged five goals as an 18-year-old in the 1982 first semi-final against North Melbourne; Paul Spargo – the father of Melbourne youngster Charlie Spargo – who first stripped for North Melbourne in the 1985 first semi-final against Footscray; and 34-year-old George Rawle in Essendon's victory over Fitzroy in the 1923 Grand Final.

Just four players have done it in their only League season, including Richmond's one-game wonder Billy James, who was a hero in the Tigers' first premiership in 1920, and Hawthorn's Michael Cooke, who kicked four goals on debut in the 1975 second semi-final but was stat-less in the Grand Final loss to North Melbourne.

Twelve of these Johnny-come-latelies contributed to premierships.

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Melbourne’s Cordner brothers – ruckmen Don and Denis – were an exceptional case.

Don Cordner was just 19 in 1941 when he debuted in the second semi-final before becoming a premiership player a fortnight later. Seven years later, his younger brother Denis' only two games in 1948 were the drawn Grand Final against Essendon and the Demons' upset victory in the replay the next week.

Their unlucky teammate Doug Heywood had played his first games for the 1948 season in the preliminary final and the drawn Grand Final before being dropped for the replay.)

In another quirk, the late Hawthorn backman David O'Halloran's last two games were Grand Final losses to Essendon – in 1984 and 1985. 

Players whose only games in a season were finals (1990-2017)

*Last game
**Played in a premiership
***Debut

Information supplied by AFL historians Col Hutchinson, Stephen Rodgers and Stephen Williamson.