Lloyd’s log – Wednesday

Wednesday July 3:

I got a bit of a longer sleep-in today with breakfast being at 8am rather than 7am. There’s not too much on today with the game being tomorrow, I think the coaches just want us to get our heads right leading into tomorrow.

After breakfast at the hotel, we headed down to a local yoga studio that is just up Bridge Rd, about a kilometre from where we are staying.

It was only the second time some of the boys had done yoga, so there were a few laughs but I think it’s something good that the coaches organise for us.

Yoga isn’t really something we’d normally do to prepare for games, but I know that a lot of AFL clubs do it and this competition is about being as professional as possible.

After yoga we went down the local park where the coaches took a bit of a step back, and myself and some of the other boys just ran through some stationary skills.

With the match being tomorrow, we don’t want to do anything too strenuous, but we still need to keep busy by doing a few basic ball skills. We ended up getting kicked off the park a bit earlier than we had planned so we again went to the pool to do our recovery.

Then we headed back to the hotel for lunch and a team meeting.

Our coach Jason Saddington ran through some of the key-match ups for the game and outlined a few of the Tassie boy we will need to keep an eye on. He also wants us to have a think about what our roles will be for tomorrow.

Now we have the afternoon off to do basically whatever we want until tonight. I think a few of the boys are thinking of going to the movies, so we might do that.

It’s a good chance for the boys to just relax a little bit because the last few days have been very full on with training and team meetings.

Saddo thinks we are as physically ready as we need to be for the game so now we just need to mentally prepare.

In the afternoon a few of my closer friends on the team went into the city, and did a bit of shopping. A lot of the boys are from the country and don’t have access to shops like in Melbourne.

We did that for a few hours, and then we just kept hydrating and stayed off our legs for a few hours like the coaches wanted.

Everyone met up for dinner at 6pm, which was just a bit more carb loading like we’ve been doing all week, then our last team meeting.

Saddo just wanted us to have a think about what we were going to do on game day, and went around and got everyone to stand up and make a pledge to the team on what role they would play tomorrow.

My pledge was to hunt the footy a bit more, just stick to the basics and not make it too difficult and also display good leadership in my midfield role.

We also watched some highlight of our team from the carnival just to see how good we can be when we played good structured football.