Full match coverage and stats<\/a><\/p>\nCoach Chris Fagan said the Lions would be careful with the 37-year-old ahead of next Sunday’s clash against Port Adelaide at the Gabba, but any issue for the important playmaker would likely be minor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He got a little bit spooked by his hamstring early in the game and just got some sort of awareness there and wasn’t quite sure,” Fagan said after the Lions’ sixth straight win, which moved them within striking distance of second spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“In the end, we bought him off the ground late just to protect him a little bit. I don’t expect there to be any damage, but of course he’s getting a little bit older now, so he just wanted to play it carefully.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“That’s the way I’m reading it. If there is an injury there, it’ll probably be a one-week injury. So we’ll wait and see what happens next week. We might give him a rest. We’ll just see how he is.”<\/p>\n
Fagan was proud of his team’s composure on Saturday night, overcoming a slow start and then turning the game in a six-goal third quarter to record a “pretty solid win” on a six-day break.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It leaves them 12-6 and just one game behind second-placed Sydney, with Fagan using the precarious state of the season as motivation with his experienced team, which has played in the past three Grand Finals.<\/p>\n
“Everyone knows the ladder and percentage and all that sort of stuff, so why shy away from it,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We’ve definitely used that as motivation over the last two or three weeks. It’s so tight. We’ve got to stay in the hunt and we want to get that top four spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with your process and you start worrying about the end result, then I think it’s OK to use that as a motivation, and I think our group’s mature enough for me to be able to say that to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“If you had a younger group, maybe you wouldn’t. You just sort of just keep making it week to week. But with an older group, I think you can talk a little bit more about those sorts of things.”<\/p>\n
Fagan chose not to play Oscar Allen against his former team on Saturday night after the key forward returned from a foot fracture, with the ex-Eagles skipper instead lining up against Sydney in the VFL and kicking one goal.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rather than Allen’s eventual return forcing Eric Hipwood out of the team, Fagan forecast the prospect of both playing alongside Logan Morris in a three-pronged tall attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Oscar Allen during a Brisbane training session at Brighton Homes Arena on July 9, 2026. Picture: Getty Images<\/p>\n
“That’s something that we probably try and have a look at over the next few weeks to see if that can work for us,” the dual premiership coach said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It might not be a matter of dropping Eric to bring Oscar in. It might be that we play all of them.<\/p>\n
“Oscar played in the twos simply because he hadn’t played football since round six, and he hasn’t played much football over the last three years, full stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“When he comes back to this ground to play against his old team, I want him to be in peak fitness and peak shape, and I didn’t think that would be fair to him tonight, even though he desperately wanted to play.”<\/p>\n
West Coast coach Andrew McQualter was proud of his team’s ability to challenge Brisbane, making a fast start to lead by 21 points in the opening quarter and keeping the game alive well into the fourth term.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The coach was flat, however, that the team was not being rewarded with wins, insisting the group was desperate to “take a scalp” in the run home after a block of good form against in-form teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“They’re having a real crack, and I’m flat for them that they’re not getting the outcomes that we want,” McQualter said after the Eagles’ sixth straight loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“But the way we competed tonight, we made the game challenging for Brisbane for large periods of the game \u2026 we just couldn’t quite take some opportunities where we had some good looks.<\/p>\n
“We keep talking to our players about [being] in a position now to try and take some scalps. That’s what we’re aiming for, and we fell short again, but I think we build some belief in what we’re doing.”<\/p>\n
Harley Reid was central to Saturday night’s match, starting strongly before suffering an ankle injury when he was cleaned up in a late hit by Noah Answerth in the opening quarter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He slipped dramatically in the Eagles’ dugout and looked to have hurt himself further before returning to the game in the second term and producing a brilliant third quarter, finishing with 23 disposals and 10 clearances.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“They had to do some work to get [his ankle] going again, and it just took a little bit of time, but in the end he was able to come back on and really compete quite well for the rest of the game,” McQualter said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked if Reid was certain to take on Fremantle in next Friday night’s Western Derby, the coach said: “Never 100 per cent confident, because he’s had something. He had to get some work done, so we’re just going to have to see how he pulls\u00a0up. It’s obviously pleasing that he was able to play the game, but the next couple of days we’ll find out.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Cole tackles Dayne Zorko during the R19 match between West Coast and Brisbane at Optus Stadium on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":808742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85,83],"class_list":["post-808741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808741","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=808741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}