AFLW champs still searching for ‘respect’
Brisbane coach Craig Starcevich’s anger that his AFLW premiership-defending team is still chasing “respect” is tempered by the motivation it gives the Lions to secure back-to-back flags.
The Lions start their title defence at Springfield on Sunday with a grand final rematch against North Melbourne.
The 17-point win over the Kangaroos in last season’s decider secured the Lions a second premiership in three years.
However, despite the his team’s success, Starcevich said it was a case of the “same old, same old” with predictions of how this season will turn out.
“They’ve already canvassed people across the league and none of them have got us winning again,” the Lions coach said on Thursday.
“I see our players train every day of the week, and I see the grit, the resilience, the attention to detail and all the things that they do, yet we are still striving for the respect of the wider competition.
“It’s great incentive for us to not be touted as that, and in some degree it makes me a little bit angry, but it’s great for us to say ‘just keep proving yourself, just keep banging the door down’.
“We’ve worked so hard for a bit of respect and it’s going to take forever to get it by the looks of it.”
Despite being overlooked as a chance for successive premierships, Starcevich still felt his team was under “pressure”.
“There’s pressure every time we go out and play. There’s pressure this week. There’ll be pressure at training tonight,” he said.
“We’re in sport, we’re trying to win the competition, there are expectations because we’ve been OK, but you’re not trying to relieve pressure, you’re just trying to find a hook to say ‘we need to be respected’, and it’s going take forever, so that’s fine by us.”
Starcevich said the Lions had no choice but to improve if they hoped to make a successful premiership defence
“No one stands still in the sport, and you’ve just got to constantly keep getting better and find different ways and better ways of doing things,” he said.
“How you finished the year before, regardless of the result, you’re always looking for something better, so people will come in, change the look of us and hopefully make us better.”
Those people include returning 36-year-old Kate Lutkins, who has not played for almost two years after missing most of the action in 2022 with a serious knee injury and then falling pregnant last season.
“She’s hungry, ready to go, and it’s almost quite nostalgic to look at the way she’s doing things because it reminds us of how we remember her from a couple of years ago,” Starcevich said.
