I CAN see it vividly. As we walked onto Brisbane’s Brighton Homes Arena for our on-field warm-up before the AFLW Grand Final, the premiership cup stood proudly on its mount, just waiting for someone to claim it.
The hardest part about seeing the cup pre-game was knowing we were so close to victory yet, in many ways, we were still so far from it.
Winning a flag is hard, but arguably the greatest challenge is actually getting there and being ready for it.
We’d made the Grand Final the previous season, just seven months earlier against Adelaide at Adelaide Oval, but at that stage we weren’t ready to win a premiership. We didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, and we hadn’t ticked every box both as players and as a club, and because of that we’d merely hoped to win. The result reflected that.
I only know that now – not because we’ve won a flag, but because of the incredible feeling we generated as a team leading into this Grand Final.
For us, it wasn’t about winning the silverware – we simply wanted to play for each other and enjoy one last chance to play together with that particular group.
Our last training session on the Thursday night was the best we’ve ever had as a club. It’s hard to describe the feeling that night without getting goosebumps. I can remember every detail. It was an open training session in superb weather, and we even had a DJ in attendance – it was basically a footy festival at Gosch’s Paddock.
It was also a celebration of our women’s program and how much it had grown, not only on the field but also off it. Record membership meant we had a tremendous supporter base behind us. It filled us with so much joy to see everyone watching us go through our paces before the big one.
It was Grand Final week, but we weren’t overawed. For the first time we embraced it. It gave us energy. Our hearts were completely full. The group was relaxed yet intensely focused. We were running free, let loose by our mindset: to simply control what we could control.
You don’t create that kind of atmosphere without putting in the work. That training session and our subsequent performance in the Grand Final were the culmination of everything we’d done as a club to improve over seven seasons. As our wonderful captain Daisy Pearce highlighted in her speech at our best and fairest count, all those near-misses had – to the credit of our players, coaches and club – been transformed into valuable learnings we could implement in moments like the many hundreds we were about to face at Springfield.
From day one of pre-season, we’d worked tirelessly on additions and changes to our game plan that had let us down in the season six Grand Final. We demanded excellence and had honest conversations with one another all year, and when we didn’t meet the required standards, the team had the self-awareness to address it quickly and confidently without hesitation.
We’d invested more time into our relationships as people and friends first. We’d done the extras to nail our roles on game day. Most of all, we’d played Grand Final-like contests all year … at training.
We had one-v-one battles on the track every week and, honestly, it was like a war zone. Bodies were flying everywhere because we would do anything to win the battle against our own teammates. At the end of every session our scores would be tallied and recorded and put on display at the end of the week. If you needed to improve, you knew about it – and so did everyone else.
Our staff and officials also played their roles to a T. They put in as much “Demon Spirit” as we did on the field – and we felt it. We were all connected by one thing: the desire to be the best we could be for one another.
Come Grand Final day, with a Ted Lasso ‘Believe’ sticker in our meeting room and the freedom of mind to play ‘Paper, Scissors, Rock’ as a team before assembling for the national anthem, I knew – we knew – we were in for a red-hot crack at it. That instinct proved correct.
Now, after enjoying the most amazing experience with our friends, family and the club, we can begin to turn our attention to what’s next for us as a group. After all, the quest for the premiership cup never ever holds any guarantees – the moment you think that, you’ve already lost.
We’ll start at the bottom of the mountain again, along with the other 17 clubs. But at least now we know what it takes to reach the top, and the feeling we need to recreate if we’re to make it back there.
