Brisbane’s year-long quest for redemption after crushing grand final defeat to North Melbourne
Brisbane’s loss in last year’s grand final was one of their worst in the club’s AFLW history. Go inside the game plan changes and impromptu mid-season meeting that got the Lions back on track for another tilt.
Redemption was front of mind for the Brisbane Lions from the moment the siren sounded on the 2024 AFLW grand final.
That disappointing 30-point loss to North Melbourne last November hit like a gut punch to a club that had rarely been so soundly beaten at any point over the nine years of its high-achieving program.
“It feels like forever ago that game,” Brisbane midfielder Ally Anderson told Code Sports ahead of Saturday’s decider.
“When you think about it, it does stay on your mind a little bit.
“It’s a long way back up (to the grand final). Even from the start of the season, when we had a bit of a rocky start and there we people who probably wrote us off – to be in the grand final again shows that we just keep coming.”
Brisbane has worn many guises over its 10 AFLW seasons – many of them by necessity.
In the early years of expansion much of the Lions’ talent was perennially pillaged by rival clubs yet Craig Starcevich’s side would routinely refresh on the fly and return to the pointy end of the season.
But this time the wheels of change were self-imposed.
“We reviewed the grand final last year,” skipper Bre Koenen told Code Sports.
“So we have been building on our game plan and the way we want to play and the way we want to win since that moment.”
The buzzword internally became “method”. The Lions stripped things back and got to work adding more modes to their game. They wanted to have an answer for any potential game state.
Up by five points with a minute to go? This is how to play it. Need two goals before halftime? This is the switch to flip. Fast, slow, contested, uncontested – the Lions needed to be able to do it all and at a moment’s notice.
The concept itself was not a novel one. But unlike in the AFL, where a 24-round regular season gives teams some breathing room to tweak things on the fly, the opportunity cost is much, much steeper in the shortened AFLW.
However the Lions knew they could not tread water, lest they return to the final Saturday in November and be shown up by the Kangaroos once again. And so they bit the bullet and started the metamorphosis.
“It was definitely hard in the early days,” Koenen said.
“Obviously when you are trying to tinker with how you want to play and have a few more methods up your sleeve for when you are challenged, that was always going to be hard.”
If there was any group that could successfully retool on the fly, it was Brisbane.
Senior coach Starcevich and head of women’s football Bree Brock had long made a point to empower the players to think for themselves on the football field.
Gone are the days when they would wait to hear from the runner before making a change. Now, the messenger is often sent back to the bench with a simple “yep, we know. We already did that.”
But there were growing pains.
The Lions started the campaign loss, win, loss, win, loss. At 2-3, the question was being asked: Has Brisbane fallen off?
“When you are in the moment and you’ve lost a few games … we had a couple of times where we would come together as a group and ask, ‘what is going on?’” Anderson recalled.
“It was frustrating because we had done more touch than we had ever done, we had done more skills (work) than we had ever done and it just wasn’t working. So we started wondering, were we overdoing it? Were we getting in our heads? What was the why?
“I remember being in that moment and not feeling great about having a few losses and not performing how we wanted to perform. But I also remember thinking: ‘In four weeks we are going to look back at this and be like oh, that was nothing’.
“We just knew to trust the process. We knew how to peak, we knew how to build into the season. So we always knew that we would get to this point, even though in the moment it maybe didn’t feel that way.”
A pivotal moment came in the days after the Round 5 loss to North Melbourne, when the midfield group got together for an impromptu heart-to-heart.
“We had a mids group meeting just to share how we were all going and it was really like a pour your heart out type thing,” Anderson said.
“We realised we were all feeling the same way but nobody had been communicating it. So it was really nice to just come together as a group and be on the same page.”
That catharsis bled its way through the playing group and, seven days after that loss to the Kangaroos, the Lions travelled to Melbourne and defeated the Western Bulldogs by 25 points.
That sparked a string of nine-straight wins that has delivered them into a fourth consecutive AFLW grand final.
“We dealt with adversity and outside noise in those first five rounds,” Koenen said.
“To be resilient enough to bounce back and find a way, now we are really confident going into the biggest game of the year.
“It gives our group a lot of belief going into a grand final against a team that hasn’t been beaten for 26 games.”
North Melbourne is writing history each week its storeyed winning run continues. But so his Brisbane, who is preparing to play in a staggering seventh AFLW grand final in 10 seasons.
Koenen has been there for all of them. She says it never has nor will get old.
“Credit to the two clubs – North obviously are doing something very well, the same as us,” the skipper said.
“I think for us it comes down to the people behind us. The staff – Craig, Bree and Greeny (high performance manager Matthew Green) – who have been here from the start and built the program up from literally nothing.
“Honestly I would never have dreamt in my wildest dreams all those years ago that we would be coming into our seventh grand final out of 10.
“Being in this situation you probably don’t fully appreciate how good it is and what we are going through until it’s done but we are trying to be as present as possible.
“I was talking to my mum about it and she was saying just how far me, Shannon (Campbell) and Ally have come. We have been here since the get-go. Just how much we have grown up as people and humans off the field as well as on it.
“I don’t know what I would be doing without footy but I’m bloody glad I can call this a job.”
More Coverage
Originally published as Brisbane’s year-long quest for redemption after crushing grand final defeat to North Melbourne
Blues’ ruthless call likely to cause pregnancy policy rethink
