AFL 2020: Brisbane Lions midfield jet Jarryd Lyons on overcoming delisting to become a star
Gold Coast had one of the AFL’s best midfield prospects in its midst as it battled for AFL relevancy — and delisted him. Jarryd Lyons opens up on that career setback and becoming a midfield general at Brisbane.
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Jarryd Lyons is on the phone fresh from a Brisbane weights session and his inquisitor is looking for a fresh angle on a story of a battler-made-good.
Do we have to bang on about Gold Coast rejecting him again, he is asked, after his 24-possession, seven clearance masterclass against Richmond.
“Yeah, Cornesey has whipped that horse again,” he says with a chuckle after his bizarre delisting from Gold Coast in late 2019 has been reheated as a storyline this week.
Brisbane’s newest finals thinks for a moment and offers this about a journey from Adelaide to Gold Coast to the Lions that has him within a single victory of a Grand Final he never believed was possible.
“I have been reflecting on it a bit. And I have done it the hard way all my life. All my career I have had so many different coaches. Chris Fagan is number eleven.
“I have been the sub 15 or 20 times, I have been dropped 13 times which is in the top three. So I guess doing it the hard way is the way I played footy. Nothing has ever come easy. I have never been the best runner, I have always had to work on my speed …. But I could always win my own ball.”
Lyons, a 28-year-old who has lived more lows than highs in a decade in football, is another one of Chris Fagan’s ugly ducklings.
Jarryd Lyons not being wanted at Crows or the suns, comes to the Lions , what a player.#AFLFinals
— Paris (@ParisStamatakos) October 2, 2020
Jarryd Lyons extends the lead for the Lions with the sharp finish from a stoppage. #AFLLionsPies pic.twitter.com/XglBMkJ8Xw
— AFL (@AFL) September 4, 2020
For every No.1 pick like Cam Rayner there is an unheralded role-player like Lyons or No.37 rookie selection Oscar McInerney or key back Ryan Lester that is coming up big.
Lyons is aware a procession of coaches underrated him, which is what turned him into such a football journeyman.
But the only person in his life who truly never lost faith was Lyons himself.
Lyons is actually equal fifth on the list of the most dropped players, with Dawson Simpson dropped 16 times.
The bloke in second spot is Lester, left out of Brisbane’s side 14 times to Lyons’ 13.
If you wanted a symbol of Fagan’s coaching success it is the bloke who took Jack Riewoldt to the cleaners and their midfield extractor getting it done despite being dropped a combined 27 times.
He admits he needed to smooth out the rough edges of his game and is thankful he got the time to do it in an AFL system without being thrown onto the scrap heap.
“I guess growing up they call it footy IQ in a way. I didn’t necessarily have speed of legs but I had speed of mind. I could see the game well. But it was always the same reason (I got dropped) in the early days. I just wasn’t fast enough or I just wasn’t spreading enough. It was just aerobic capacity. I couldn’t go.”
In his first five years with Adelaide he played just 32 games as the No.61 draft pick watched top-20 selections as they were handed games on a platter.
Finally he realised it was up to him to break into the senior side.
“Adelaide was a really successful club and I learnt a lot there and they had terrific people like Scott Camporeale who pushed me really hard but I was never gifted a game.
“In my first five or six years we were always finishing high so being that No.61 draft bracket I was never given games and it helped me grow as a person. I think I see the game well but it’s hard until you are playing well. It wasn’t until 2015 that I had a really big off-season and turned it into a big 2016.”
That off-season Adelaide’s extremely modest contract offer meant he snapped up a multi-year offer at Gold Coast.
He responded with a pair of identical seasons in 2017 and 2018 — 90 and 92 ranking point average, 24.6 and 23.8 possessions and off-the-charts clearance numbers.
But as Lyons says, a bone spur in the 2017 season meant he hobbled from stoppage to stoppage in a way that heightened his lack of athleticism.
With Gold Coast keen to hand midfield time to the likes of Jack Bowes and Will Brodie, they told him to consider his options.
Brisbane came calling through Fagan and list manager Dom Ambrosio, offering a two-season deal and a chance to shore up his future.
He still remains bemused the Suns weren’t prepared to persevere with him given he knew he could fix the bone spur.
“When you look back you laugh a little bit. I have no ill feelings. I had surgery at the end of 2017 and it was the best thing I could have done. I just don’t think Gold Coast trusted me as a player. But Brisbane did. I knew I had done the work and they put their faith in me and it’s nice to repay them, I guess.”
Has he crossed paths with Stewart Dew to chat about his exit?
“Um, I haven’t spoken to Dewey directly in two years. I wouldn’t have any hard feelings. He has probably lost out more than I have...”
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Lyons still nearly stayed despite the Brisbane interest and says he and manager Winston Rous have talked this year about how his career might have been over by now if he did.
“You never know how it could have ended up. I was willing to stay. I was about to stay. It was only going to be two years at Brisbane, the third year was locked in and we did some work on the third year when the door opened up to being delisted but at the time Brisbane had only just finished 15th and Gold Coast had finished 17th. But getting three years was massive. I knew I would have three years to prove myself, I wasn’t on a knife edge for another year not knowing what was going to happen.
“I knew Lachie Neale really well after playing with him in the SANFL when I was at the Crows and of course my brother (Corey) was here which was even bigger for me.”
Lyons’ line-in-the-sand moment came early in the 2019 season and eventually cemented his relationship with coach Fagan.
“My first game here was all right and then I played three really bad ones in a row and I said to Fages, “If you want to drop me I would understand”.
“But he said that hadn’t even crossed his mind and we played Gold Coast the next week. I came out and had my best game of the season and had 28 possessions and two goals and since that day I have never looked back. I went on to play the next 20 games and I think after that I thought,” I am happy, I belong here and I am in for the long haul”.
Like all Brisbane players he has his own unique relationship with Fagan, one only strengthened by Lyon’s elevation into the leadership group this year.
“Asked about Fagan’s secret to success, he says: “I think to be an AFL coach you need to be a little bit weird in some sort of way”.
“But he is a footy nut, he loves his footy, he loves the game and he’s very calm as a person. He’s just easy to approach and talk to, he is a lot older than any other coach I have had so he has life experience, he loves talking about life and you as a person rather than just you as a footballer and it’s rubbed off. The whole staff is like that now and as a playing group it’s about playing footy and living your life and enjoying it.”
But what about the weirdness?
“Oh gee, where do I start,” says Lyon.
“You can be having a conversation with him and you walk away and he’s just thinking. Or you walk past his office and he’s just sitting on a chair not doing anything, just looking into the air and thinking. He’s a massive thinker. He always has an angle and he’s always trying to get better.”
The pair have spent countless hours with Neale scheming about the centre-square strategies that helped beat Richmond.
As Lyons says, it isn’t about losing stoppages, it’s how you lose them.
Force an opponent to kick over your fingers and it creates dirty ball that Harris Andrews and co. can intercept.
Allow them to storm forward out of a stoppage with room to move and it spells doom for the back six.
Finally Lyons is where he always dreamt he might be with his AFL career, playing consistent footy at a successful club and with a contract for next season.
A trigger clause he will tick off midway through next season will hand him an extension to 2022.
But more to the point, he is in a side capable of something special.
“This is a team that I see as being very capable for a long time. You can smell it and I think the way we played on Friday night showed it as well.”
Why Andrews is destined to be next skipper
— Kyle Pollard
It’s a well-earned players’ day off when Harris Andrews calls for a chat.
In a season of stops and starts and hubs and quarantine, these days are golden for the team. No training, no media, no expectations that footy should be front of mind.
A rare moment of being that person you want to be outside of existing as a footballer.
And it’s a day – rightfully – that most players cherish as an escape from the footy machine.
“Nah mate, not a problem at all, happy to have a chat,” the Lions defender replies to an apology for disturbing the peace.
We’re here to discuss the coaches and the way they’re getting the best out of this young Lions squad aiming to break a 17-year premiership drought. But as the conversation carries on, Andrews the Leader becomes the obvious talking point.
He speaks with passion and enthusiasm about the theories behind learning, about growth mindset and embracing failures to reinforce success.
He sounds like a 300-gamer.
In reality, he plays just his 113th match next weekend in a prelim final against Geelong or Collingwood.
“I suppose I know I might come across as more mature than the average 23-year-old,” he says.
“But for me I know how lucky I am to be playing a game that I love for a living and I think part of that maturity is just making sure I do things right and help other people to do the same.”
It’s the reason that whenever anybody within the Brisbane footy fraternity talks about the club’s next captain, the answer is never anything but Harris Andrews.
And it’s the reason he earned the nickname ‘Dad’ when he lived with teammates Hugh McCluggage and Jarrod Berry after they moved from Victoria as 18-year-olds.
“Yeah it was just a little nickname the boys came up with,” he says.
“They moved up here and I sort of took them under my wing and they started calling me that.”
It’s nothing to headline a story off. A little in-joke between mates in a Brisbane share house. But it does speak to the character of a skinny kid who has arguably become the best defender in the game, that teammates just two years his junior saw him as a father figure.
Already a two-time All Australian and the seventh-most capped player to pull on a Lions guernsey from the 22 that ran out against Richmond, the Queensland product could be forgiven for focusing squarely on what’s happening on the field.
But it’s that maturity again that already has him planning for a life after playing.
A life, he hopes, that will be all about coaching.
“I was doing a commerce degree and it wasn’t really working out for me,” he says.
“So I went to (general manager of football) David Noble and we discussed what I wanted to do after footy. I said I wanted to be a coach so we settled on doing an education degree.
“It’s slow going, having to play footy full time, but you just work your way through it
“Uni’s a good break from the footy club for a lot of the boys. Before COVID hit you’d go into campus and go to the lectures and it made you feel like a student rather than a footballer for a while.
“I’m lucky that I’ve got my mates from school around, not having moved away from home. But for the boys who moved up here from Victoria or South Australia or wherever, it’s a chance to broaden your social group and get out of that footy bubble. Even on our days off the playing group spends a lot of time together so to have that extra social side to it is a really good thing mentally. I think it really benefits them.”
For every question asked, and every answer offered, the overwhelming feeling that comes back is one of team betterment – rarely does the conversation swing in a way that makes it about the individual.
Asked recently about when he was at his happiest in life, it was that selflessness that has the Lions so high on his captaincy potential that shined through.
“After a good team win,” he said.
“The last couple of years it’s been enjoyable to watch the young players come in and get their first wins or playing good games and developing.”
A 23-year-old. Already talking about how much he loves seeing the ‘young players’ come through.
It’s a development mentality that’s been forged by his own journey to the AFL.
One full of hurdles, of some self-doubt, and of having to adapt to make it to the big time.
And it all started, oddly enough, in Fitzroy.
MOVING BACKWARDS TO GO FORWARD
DUSTIN Fletcher, Matthew Scarlett, Alex Rance, Stephen Silvagni.
The great key defenders of the AFL generation. Their dads – Ken, John, Murray and Sergio – all brilliant footballers in their own right at the highest level.
Then there’s Wayne Andrews. The sales manager.
“If dad was ever any good at footy he hasn’t told me,” Andrews laughs.
While he might not be able to lay claim to being responsible for the footy skills of his son, it was Wayne who instilled a love of the game as he raised an Aussie rules mad family in rugby league heartland.
But the journey started in traditional Lions territory.
“Yeah that’s right, born in Fitzroy,” Andrews says.
“Bit of a coincidence. We moved around a bit early on in life. Dad was a Victorian, mum was a Queenslander, and we came up to Brisbane when I was four.
“Dad was a passionate Essendon supporter. He tells the story of taking mum to one of her first footy matches early on in their relationship and she took a book with her so she didn’t get bored.
“She’s definitely a bit more invested in the game now. And dad’s definitely with the Lions but he keeps tabs on what’s happening at the Bombers.”
Much of Andrews’ interest in the development of others could be traced back to his own path.
Dedicated to the game from an early age thanks to his dad’s passion, Andrews never made a state team through the under 12s, the 14s or the 16s, as he played his early footy with the Aspley Hornets and through his school’s AFL program at Padua College.
“It was a great school to go to,” he says.
“But I think the footy program at the time was probably more of an excuse for the rugby boys to get in and bash people around a little bit.”
It was a difficult, almost uncharted path to making a career out of the game.
“We see kids and their families who have come through the system and it is almost ordained, they have been conditioned for the journey,” Wayne told The Courier-Mail last year.
“But the way it happened to Harris was different, so everything has been a delight.”
Having booted 80 goals in a season as a 16-year-old key forward for the Aspley Hornets Colts, a call from the club’s footy manager, Mark Perkins, to Lions Academy boss, Luke Curran, offered Andrews the chance to try out for Brisbane’s elite system.
“I tell the story when he got invited along to a Lions talent identification day there was about 80 kids and on the day they would cull it by half, and those that made it would be invited back the following weekend,” Wayne said.
“He was just hoping that he would make that 40 cut and Wendy and I thought if he got through that cut, how exciting that would be for him.”
But even then it was a rocky road.
Playing predominantly as a forward, Andrews learned quickly that size wasn’t everything anymore.
“When you’re at those really junior levels and you’ve got that height over the other kids playing forward it all comes pretty easily, you don’t have to do too much,” Andrews says.
“But yeah I was probably not performing at my best and they decided to try me down back.
“It wasn’t a light bulb moment or anything when I moved into defence. It wasn’t sort of a natural thing where it instantly clicked. But I think my strength is my ability to read the game and read the play and get into the right positions.
“Which probably makes up for my lack of speed.”
Whether he thought it or not, Andrews was a natural in defence. So much so that North Melbourne bid their pick 36 in the 2014 draft to get him – only for Brisbane to match with pick 61.
It was one of the most sensible moves the club could have made.
And while Padua College is still very much a rugby codes school, they’ve thrown everything into their groundbreaking involvement in the AIC school’s Australian Football term – and their famous alumni is inspiring a new generation of Queenslanders to take up the game.
HAPPY TO BE UNFASHIONABLE
TYPICALLY, Andrews has no interest in individual awards for defenders - even though he’d win plenty of them.
He admits to enjoying Danny Frawley’s Golden Fist trophy, but ultimately he thinks every key defender is on the same page.
“It was a tragedy what happened to Danny and it was a massive loss for the game. I used to love the Golden Fist and getting tagged on Twitter whenever I got a nomination. It was a lot of fun,” Andrews says.
“But yeah at the same time, you know the forwards have the Coleman, the midfielders sort of have the Brownlow and the defenders don’t really have anything. But I’m OK with that.
“I think we like that we don’t have anything, you know. I think a lot of defenders sort of take pride in the fact we’re not acknowledged, that we’re unfashionable and out of the spotlight.
“It’s almost a badge of honour.”
For Andrews, individual awards have nothing on that ultimate prize.
A prize that was within reach last year before a straight sets exit at the hands of the Tigers and the Giants.
“We were shattered to lose two in a row last year after putting ourselves in a really good position,” he says.
“But it’s not something that you shy away from. Even pre-season ‘Fages’ and the boys acknowledged it, we went over it, we didn’t just put it to one side and forget it ever happened.
“Again it’s that growth mindset. You learn from the things that don’t go as well as you’d hoped and hopefully turn it around the next time you have that same opportunity.”
So far, so good. The Lions flipped the switch on the Tigers, and now wait patiently to see who’ll they take on to earn that prized spot in an historic Gabba Grand Final.
“We’ll just stick to plan, try to keep things as normal as possible,” he says with the air of a captain.
“A few of the boys might watch the game (Cats v Magpies) together but ultimately we’ll do our own thing and not get caught up in it.
“And then we’ll just hope Geelong and Collingwood bash each other up a little bit.”
Lions young gun’s message to Fitzroy supporters
— Kyle Pollard
HUGH McCluggage wasn’t even born when Fitzroy played its last game in the AFL.
On that gut-wrenching September day in 1996, when a part of Aussie rules history was unceremoniously torn from the league, the McCluggage family was still a year and a half from welcoming their boy into the world.
But that hasn’t stopped the rising star from feeling the weight of history every time he pulls on the guernsey.
“I know every time I pull on the jumper I’m really proud to do so because I know there’s a lot of past Brisbane and Fitzroy players that would have done the same thing,” McCluggage said.
“The support up here in Brisbane is great, especially now we’re going a bit better, but we like to acknowledge that Fitzroy history too.”
Nine out of the 22 players who stomped proudly on to the Gabba for the Lions on Friday night came into this world after Fitzroy had left it.
It was an indignant end for a proud club.
Sent more than 4000km away from home to play their final match in Perth, 22,574 footy fans said goodbye to a team that had been in the VFL/AFL for more than 100 years.
Adding salt to the nostalgic wound, it was an 86-point loss to Fremantle – a team that had been in the league for one year.
The week before, the Lions farewelled the MCG with a 151-point drubbing at the hands of Richmond.
From all of us @brisbanelions fans in lockdown in Melbourne we say an enormous thanks to our magnificent players for that win last night. You are making us Vics very happy.@HarrisAndrews31 @MitchRobinson05 @CharlesRanger23 @lachieneale @DayneZorko #Uncaged #GoLions @EricHipwood pic.twitter.com/8jWmW43RwN
— David Leydon (@DavidLeydon1) October 2, 2020
David Leydon, now vice president of Fitzroy FC in the VAFA, said both the result and the fear of the unknown in the merger with Brisbane left a shattering impact on Lions diehards.
“I had my young fella on my shoulders and I looked over at my mother and aunty and they had tears streaming down their cheeks. My dad didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where life was going to lead after that day,” Leydon said.
“It was a particularly hard day, it wasn’t easy to get through. It took me a long time to revisit that day even in my own mind. There was nothing good about it. And then to watch the Perth game … it was difficult
“I’ve never been able to watch those two games back.”
And for those Fitzroy fans, that controversial merger felt more like the takeover they feared in the first two seasons – until Leigh Matthews took over in 1999 and forced the club to acknowledge its history.
“There was a great fear. To be honest it probably didn’t go overly well in the first couple of years of the merger,” Leydon said.
“Leigh Matthews gave the club a gentle reminder that if they played their cards right there were 10,000 ready-made Fitzroy supporters in Melbourne that would support them.”
The club upped their involvement. They shared their premierships with the Victorian masses at Brunswick St Oval, and paid homage to the Fitzroy greats with murals at the Gabba and with markings on the lockers denoting the players who had notched a century of games for the ‘Roys.
But even then it wasn’t until a home and away match in 2003 that Leydon and his family felt like the Fitzroy Lions and the Brisbane Lions were one and the same.
“I vividly remember it and it wasn’t the first premiership, it was after that. We won the first two premierships, and it was great and we were there and we were yelling our guts out,” he said.
“But the moment that really turned it around was Round 19 of 2003. We played Collingwood at the MCG and it was one of the first heritage guernsey rounds and they wore the old Fitzroy guernsey, with the maroon and blue and the white FFC.
“The moment that changed it was at the end of the game with Jonathan Brown and Michael Voss running around and tapping the heart and pointing to the FFC logo. I’ve got tingles going up and down my spine just thinking about it now. That for me was the final piece of the puzzle.”
McCluggage said it’s a relationship the current players endeavour to embrace.
“We try to delve into that history as much as we can with the Fitzroy connection and unfortunately this year we haven’t been able to go down to Victoria. But when we do we try to have members days and involve all those Melbourne fans as much as we can,” he said.
An Allansford native, McCluggage would have been zoned to Fitzroy had he been born a few decades earlier, joining the likes of Bernie Harris from Terang, Ken Hinkley at Camperdown, and Warrnambool’s Brian Brown – father of three-time premiership forward Jonathan – as south-west Victorians who started their careers with the Lions.
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“I know when I head back to Warrnambool I get to meet a few ex-Fitzroy players. There’s a lot of Lions and Fitzroy supporters down there that I enjoy having a chat to every time I go home so we definitely have them in our minds up here even when we can’t get back down there,” he said.
“I just want them to know that appreciation we have for that support.
“When we do get back, come up to us and say g’day because we love speaking about it, speaking of that history, and especially the Fitzroy history because I get a real kick out of it hearing about that.”
And for the Fitzroy diehard, who has ridden every bump and felt every low that this historic club has gone through over the past 30 years, the acknowledgment from his Brisbane players as Melbourne continues through the grind of a joy-sapping lockdown means the world.
“You’ve done us proud all season. Keep doing us proud on prelim final day,” Leydon said.
“Don’t get too far ahead of yourselves, one game at a time, one minute at a time.
“And we’re with you all the way.”
Originally published as AFL 2020: Brisbane Lions midfield jet Jarryd Lyons on overcoming delisting to become a star