Rivalries add so much to footy. While every win is worth four points, all fans know that there are those certain matches where winning just matters a bit more.
We find ourselves heading towards one this weekend.
In the week leading up to the first QClash last year, players and coaches had tried to spice up the rivalry with a few fighting words. While this provided a few headlines, the match still seemed somewhat of a novelty. The lack of any real history between the clubs made it this way. After all, most rivalries take many years to fully develop and really mean something.
With our more experienced side coming up against the competition’s kids, this seemed to be the case. Most Lions fans expected a relatively easy win, even despite the absence of our skipper Jonathan Brown.
But it didn’t go to plan.
QClash 1 has been spoken about at great length since its completion. It’s been said that the Suns ambushed us, that we appeared complacent - even arrogant - and that they wanted the win more than us.
Regardless of the truth of these claims, they snatched a piece of history by winning the match.
The rivalry was a novelty no more.
Speaking as a Lions diehard who brought a Suns fan to the match, it was without doubt one of the most painful experiences of my football supporting years. I kept waiting for what I’d thought was the inevitable comeback to claim the match from our boys, but it never came.
We should’ve won that match. But we can’t change the past.
Our effort in the return match was much closer to what we’d hoped for the first time around, with a vintage display by Simon Black contributing greatly to the strong win.
Still, though, the ledger sits at 1-1. This week is our first chance to be on the right side of that, albeit without Black.
We do have our captain back, though, and after a relatively quiet display against Fremantle, he’ll be raring to go for his first QClash. It’ll also be a chance for our midfield to once again show the explosiveness and skill that was seen in round one against Melbourne, but has gone missing for the most part since then.
We need players to lift. Rockliff, Redden, and Hanley are just a few who were well below par against the Dockers. If they play to their potential, we should win, and win convincingly.
But we are, like the Suns, a developing side. Of course, many footy pundits would put the Suns development potential significantly ahead of ours, as their squad is made up of the champion kids from all over Australia.
Unlike the Suns, we aren’t building a team of champions. We are building a champion team.
It’s been evident in the way we’ve gone about our business over the past year or so. The strategic vision towards 2016 is proof - one of the values leading us forward is ‘united’.
We may not have the silkiest skills in the competition at the moment, nor the big superstar names (with one obvious exception).
But what we do have is spirit, and a great deal of it. If you got down to a training session over the pre-season, you would’ve seen the complete commitment shown by our squad in the Brisbane summer heat. If you follow them on Twitter, you’ll have seen the fun banter and genuine friendship between the guys. And if you saw how much that first victory meant to them collectively, there’s no doubting how tight-knit our group is at all.
This is a side that has gone through some horrible times together, and is starting to come out the other side.
Yes, success may take a while. But the foundations have clearly been put in place. We have evolved in many ways since that first QClash last year, and the future seems much more bright now than it did before.
But the Gold Coast have been heavily criticised too. They’ll want this win more than most. And if we aren’t prepared, they very well could run over the top of us again.
In saying that, I think we’ll win. We’ve reached a stage in our development where we really should be winning these matches. And the chance to be sitting at 2-2 four rounds into the season is something I think most fans would’ve taken at the start of the year.
Who knows what we can do in 2012. The barely-attentive Melbourne media expect us to stay in the bottom three. Some more knowledgeable fans who have watched us play realise we are better than that, and expect us to be on the brink of the eight. Then there are the very optimistic fans who believe a finals challenge is well within reach.
But as the cliché goes, we can only take things one week at a time. And any complacency we show will be pounced upon by the Suns and criticised heavily in the media. We need to get ourselves up for this match. It’s integral to getting our season off to a good start.
It’s even more than that, though. This rivalry now really means something to our club and all us fans. A victory on the weekend will be more significant than four points. It’ll mean the end, at least for a while, of speculation that the Suns are ahead of us. It’ll mean we go into round five against Geelong in a pretty healthy position. It’ll mean validation for our young group, who took until round nine of last year to register even a single win.
And, of course, the opportunity to get one up on our younger brother is pretty enticing.
- Dominic (Member #1117655)
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The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Club
