Revelation that Lions barely hit the track before Anzac Day belting - but it won't be the case this week
Brisbane veteran Dayne Zorko says an off day for the Lions against an “absolute benchmark” of the competition contributed to his side’s biggest loss of the year in Round 7.
Zorko and teammates were handed a large reality check when beaten by the GWS Giants to the tune of 54 points on Anzac Day, with a nine-goal to two second half a major disappointment.
Brisbane has only beaten one top eight team this year and has losses against fellow contenders Carlton, Collingwood, Geelong and now GWS.
Zorko was quick to hand praise to Adam Kingsley’s men on Monday morning.
“I thought upon reflection, that's the absolute benchmark of the competition at the moment,” Zorko told SENQ Breakfast of the Giants.
“They were fantastic. I don’t want to take anything away from GWS. Their ability to not only win their own ball but then spread extremely hard and make us defend for most of the night, for me, that was one of the best performances I’ve seen this year.
“That’s where we want to be and we’ve got a lot of work to get there.”
Brisbane’s effort came under scrutiny in the immediate aftermath and Chris Fagan was stumped as to the unreliability of his team when speaking to reporters post-match.
The Lions were belted in contested footy, outworked by a GWS outfit that was able to take uncontested marks at will, and also allowed the Giants to the outside on far too many occasions.
GWS also took 17 bounces to Brisbane’s one. The handball-happy Giants were too slick, with Zorko acknowledging his side lacked solutions on game day.
“We didn’t have the answers for it. We back our defence, as we do every week, and our offensive power. But their ability to win the ball on the inside and spread from contest was first class the other night,” he continued.
“We have a lot to learn from that… whether we’ll try new things, probably not. We need to stick to what we do really well which is our contest work, which the last month of football, barring the other night, has been pretty good.
“We know our system can work and will work, but we were off the other night.”
Zorko also revealed the Lions barely hit the training track in the leadup to last week’s smashing, which came about off a five-day break.
But that won’t be the case with a 10-day break heading into the Q-Clash against Gold Coast in Round 8.
“Given we haven’t really got moving since Thursday night, I’m expecting two bigger sessions this week,” Zorko explained.
“We didn’t really train much last week, I think we only had a 25-minute session and a really light captain’s run.
“We’ll try and get as much training in as possible this week and try and do all our injury prevention stuff and get ourselves in really good physical and mental state.
“We’ll have Wednesday off as normal and shuffle our week around accordingly… it’s a long time when you’ve had a bad result on the weekend.”
Brisbane faces the Gold Coast Suns at 7:10pm AEST on Sunday night.