Following on from last Friday’s intra-club hit-out match, the Lions had a shortened 45-minute training session on a hot and humid Monday morning in Brisbane. Speaking with Lions TV, the Lions' High Performance Manager, Damien Austin, explained that:
“We had an 80 minute intra-club (match) on Friday so we were just trying to get the players back into the rhythm of playing games on the weekend and we’ve got our main intra-club on Friday.
“We’re just sort of building up to that and we’ll have a bigger session on Wednesday.”
Austin said the training schedule would remain much the same ahead of this year’s pre-season competition.
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“We’ll still train through – our pre-season, our ethos of doing a bit extra. We transition throughout the JLT to our in-season schedule. We’ll have our lighter sessions, we’ll have our main sessions, we’ll play a main game and those that don’t play will have a harder session on the weekend to get them in the rhythm.”
Austin singled out Harris Andrews as having had a stellar pre-season. The key defender, who recently turned 20, has been at the front of the pack in most of the Lions' running sessions, and has added bulk to his frame over the off-season. Austin has also been impressed by the Club's most recent recruits:
“Some of the young guys that got drafted – Hugh (McCluggage) and Coxy (Cedric Cox) and (Jarrod) Berry - have done really well from just coming out of the draft. They’ve done a lot of training and they’re looking really good.”
The Brisbane Lions will play the Gold Coast Suns in the opening weekend of the JLT competition on February 19. The game will also mark the senior coaching debut of Chris Fagan.
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