Patient Gold Coast Suns fans rewarded<\/a><\/p>\nElated Gold Coast fans say “15 years of struggle” are finally paying for the club, as the Suns look towards a QClash match against Brisbane this weekend.<\/p>\n
He likened Hardwick’s presence to Leigh Matthews’s role as Lions coach when the club reached the finals in his first season in charge.<\/p>\n
The Lions made the preliminary finals in 1999, two years before winning the first of three consecutive premierships.<\/p>\n
“Damien Hardwick would make them (Suns players) believe,” Lynch said.<\/p>\n
“It was exactly the same when we had Leigh Matthews in our first finals.<\/p>\n
“He says something and you’re convinced, so they’d have enormous belief, the Suns.”<\/p>\n
The Suns beat the Lions in the most recent Q-clash.<\/p>\n
Playing on the Gold Coast, the Suns thrashed the defending premiers by 66 points in round 20.<\/p>\n
“They’ll (Suns) come up the road thinking they’ve had their first final, first win, and now they face their biggest rivals,” Lynch said.<\/p>\n
“They should come up confident, especially because six weeks ago they rolled them.”<\/p>\n
The Lions fell to Geelong in a 38-point defeat in their qualifying final at the MCG.<\/p>\n
The winner of Saturday night’s encounter will play Collingwood in a preliminary final at the MCG next weekend.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brisbane Lions great Alastair Lynch has hailed the impact of Damien Hardwick at the Gold Coast Suns as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,19057,64,63,55,639,3237,95236,14385,16308,76304,9130,88528,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-138966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-alastair-lynch","10":"tag-au","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-australian-football-league","13":"tag-australianfootballleague","14":"tag-brisbane-lions","15":"tag-chirs-fagan","16":"tag-damien-hardwick","17":"tag-finals","18":"tag-gabba","19":"tag-gold-coast-suns","20":"tag-qclash","21":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}