Brisbane coach Chris Fagan conceded his Lions are “going backwards” after falling by 78 points to the Giants in a historic “slaughter” on Sunday.
GWS, which kicked an all-time club-high 26.10 (166), booted 14 unanswered goals in the third quarter — the highest-scoring third term in VFL/AFL history — to make it back-to-back blowout losses for the premiers.
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GWS’ 14.2 (86) third quarter is now equal-fourth highest quarter score in history.
The result leaves 6-5 Brisbane — which entered the round 10th for points against but seems set to fall further — languishing in eighth on the ladder, with a daunting matchup against ladder-leading Fremantle next on the menu.
“This is just an amazing performance from the Giants, and the Lions … they won’t believe what they’re putting out here at the moment,” Gerard Healy said in the third quarter on the Fox Footy broadcast.
“There’s just no urgency, no desperation — they’re getting slaughtered.”
Probed for his thoughts on what went wrong in the premiership quarter, Fagan said Brisbane was “smashed everywhere” and admitted “nothing we tried worked”.
“It was a tight game until half-time. Both teams had their moments. I certainly didn’t see it coming at half-time,” Fagan told reporters in Sydney of the avalanche.
“When it did, nothing we tried worked. They played an unbelievable third quarter. I mean, when you look at the scores, we lost the first quarter by six, and even for the second quarter, we win the last quarter, but we lose the third quarter by 83 points.
“We got smashed everywhere – at the contest, ball movement. We couldn’t stop it. They just controlled the game, unfortunately.”
GWS kicked three goals from its defensive half, seven goals from turnovers, and six from stoppage.
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Fagan said third quarters “have been a problem” for the Lions over the past three weeks.
“We had a good lead against Carlton a few weeks ago and squandered a fair bit of that in the third quarter. Geelong got us in the third quarter last week, and it happened again today,” he said.
“So, we need to have a talk to the group and work out what’s happening there. I mean, we tried putting a player behind the ball. We tried a whole lot of things.
“But when you can’t win the footy and you can’t get possession of it, this game’s pretty hard to play.
“And that’s been the pattern for the last three weeks in third quarters. We’ve just been beaten in the contest and in the clearance.”
Fagan, who added that his players’ body language “wasn’t good” and admitted his side was “going backwards”, did take some solace in the fact that his side has been here before.
“I’ll take a little bit of heart from the fact that a couple of years ago, the Giants beat us up in a similar fashion in Canberra. And we got written off, fair enough,” he said.
“We should get written off tonight too, but we’re able to respond to that and make finals and go on to win a premiership.
“So, this is one moment in time. It’s not a great moment. It’s not the whole lot of my coaching career at the Brisbane Lions. I can assure you of that. But it is a moment that we can sort of choose whether we get better from it or we continue to go backwards.
“Because at the moment, we’re going backwards, and we’re nowhere near a premiership fancy at all. We’re just battling to find our form at the moment. And that’s been the case for the last two and a half games.”
Lynch dissects GWS’ historic 3rd quarter | 01:40
Dual premiership coach Fagan also revealed the message he relayed to his side post-match in the rooms.
“Along similar lines to what I’m saying to you. I felt like I needed to talk to them straight away,” he said.
“I always believe when you have a bad performance like this, you’ve just got to stick together and keep everyone on the same page, and that’s what the conversation was all about.
“I’m always an optimist. As I said, we’ve had some bad losses before, but we’ve been able to turn ourselves around from that. So I’m hoping that the work we do this week will help us do that.
“There’s no guarantee, as I said, we’ve got a pretty good opponent coming towards us and we’ve got to improve enormously, not just a little bit, enormously, to be competitive against them.
“But I’ve seen this group do it before, so I maintain some optimism about that.”