They’re the little girl with the little curl. When they’re bad, the Brisbane Lions are horrid. When they’re good, they’re unstoppable. There’s a familiar pattern to how this plays out. They need a wound, a spur, a thrashing. They need a blast from the coach, usually delivered via the press conference. They need a game at the Gabba or the MCG, not a snoozer at the Docklands, or Carrara or the Sydney Showgrounds. And most of all, they need to know that they’ll be eliminated if they lose.
They need to be fully invested, right from the opening minute. There’s usually an early pressure act that they celebrate collectively – a smother, a lunging spoil, the type of thing that had been entirely absent the week before. There’s usually a high pressure rating, a measure that is as inexplicable as the score review system, but which is always a good indication of what side of the bed the Lions have woken up on.
They then zero in on their ball movement. No team moves the ball with such precision and assuredness. Last week against Sydney they were constantly rushed, constantly forced down the line. Against Adelaide in the semi-final, the footy was darting around the Gabba like a soccer ball. The longer the game went on, and the more the margin stretched, the more audacious they were with their kicks. At one stage in the first half, Darcy Wilmot gathered a loose ball and neither advanced nor retreated. He just stood there for about 15 seconds, assessing his options, lighting a pipe, before rifling one of those trademark, line-piercing 25-metre bullets.
Once the effort and the ball movement is locked in, the cherry-on-top players get their swagger on. Against the Crows, Charlie Cameron was whirring around the forward 50, darting into pockets of space, and terrorising the poor buggers charged with shutting him down. Zac Bailey was executing his signature move – motoring around the boundary line at full pelt before cutting inward to reduce his angle and curl a goal in. And Kai Lohmann and Cam Rayner, who like Cameron were barely sighted against Sydney, were magnificent right from the opening bounce.
Following the Sydney loss, both Chris Fagan and Adam Simpson mentioned the slow reaction times of Brisbane’s midfielders, who were sluggish, reactive and on their heels all afternoon. Sam Draper was well beaten by Brodie Grundy last week and the Lions were slaughtered at centre stoppages as a result. Against Adelaide, he thwacked the ball forward repeatedly, and his midfielders were running downhill all night as a result.
Adelaide had a 20-minute patch in the second term where they matched the Lions, and asked some uncomfortable questions of their defence. But that was about it. Izak Rankine was given a lot of leeway by Luke Beveridge in the elimination final against Western Bulldogs, and helped tilt the game in the final quarter. This time he had Josh Dunkley in his back pocket, who blanketed him and exposed him running the other way. The Crows were beaten in the air, on the ground and in the clinches. They were too lairy up front and bereft of options to stem Brisbane’s firepower. The nine-goal margin in the 21.18 (144) to 13.13 (91) result probably flattered them.
They farewelled Taylor Walker. This isn’t the time or place to relitigate the slurs that marred his career. But he will be remembered as a popular Adelaide player and one of the best kicks of a football we have ever seen. A Walker kick had its own sound, its own special thump that registered two tiers up, and there was no better example of this than his second goal from well outside 50. When Cameron kicked his fifth late in the game, Walker’s son blocked his ears to blunt the onslaught of John Denver.
After 106 games in four years, one can still never be quite sure whether the good Brisbane or the bad Brisbane will turn up on any given day. But all they need is a runway of a few weeks. All they need is a kick up the backside, a big occasion, a packed MCG and a cutthroat final. They played some of their best football against Hawthorn in August, have a good record against them in the Fagan era, and relish playing on their home ground. A lot is made of the coach’s little hooks – to run towards the fire, to dance on ice, to charge the opposition Braveheart style. All of them are another way of saying “embrace risk”. But all of them are dependent on the little girl with the little curl.
