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Sport Nation
FWC on Sport Nation guideThursday Fallout: Looming Lions send ominous warning
SEN • June 26th, 2026 9:51 am
Cleaner. Tougher. Hungrier.
That’s what Sydney coach Dean Cox said about Chris Fagan’s Brisbane Lions after Thursday night’s Gabba rout.
A comprehensive 43-point Lions win over the league’s second-placed Swans is a fair way to remind people that you’ve still got a serious role to play in season 2026.
So surely we’re not writing them off. We can’t after that.
The back-to-back reigning premiers have stuttered, stopped, started again, looked great, looked poor, and now this.
And this sort of form is hard to contain.
David King, the best analyst in footy, was taken by what the Lions produced in their masterful display.
“That was a complete performance,” King said on SEN’s Fireball.
“It was hard not to be taken by it. I thought they were a fair way off in the previous few weeks and we asked if they still have one surge in them.
“I expected it a couple of weeks ago against Fremantle and when that didn’t come we thought ‘are we reading the last rites here?’.
“But they’ve had the pow-wow in the bye week, clearly they’ve invested defensively. What they did in that first half of football was quite frightening in terms of shutting the Swans down totally.
“The Swans didn’t score at all out of the back half. That only has happened once in 10 years.”
Just as we were narrowing the premiership race down to a few, Kane Cornes reckons this result blows that theory up.
“Doesn’t it throw a spanner in the works for the rest of the season,” said Cornes.
“The Lions are just looming. They bye came at the perfect time for them and there was a swagger about them last night.”
Will and Levi Ashcroft were excellent around stoppage and in transition, combining for 54 disposals, 24 contested possessions, 16 clearances, 16 score involvements and 13 inside 50s.
Josh Dunkley was as industrious as ever, Lachie Neale did his usual business, Cam Rayner found form with three snags and Zac Bailey was good again, setting the tone with some early aggression on Jake Lloyd.
In this kind of mood the Lions will be hard to beat. But we probably need to see it again to truly believe in a three-peat.
The Swans have been on the downtick for the past seven matches.
While they’ve been winning with a 5-2 run in that time, four of those wins were in single digits either side of the 114-point Richmond smashing.
But they got up and did the work early in the year and are still placed nicely with a 12-3 record.
This loss doesn’t derail them but it certainly suggests they’ve got plenty to improve on if they want to be at the MCG on September 26.
We need some Chad Warner acknowledgement too. What a game. 28 touches and four goals. If his teammates follow on in the coming weeks then they’ll be ok.
Andrew Slevison
