Losing’s a lesson for Olympian Phillips

THE best cross-coder the AFLW has seen — former Australian basketballer Erin Phillips — will be using the devastation of losing an Opals quarter-final at the 2016 Olympics as added motivation to beat underdog Geelong in Sunday’s preliminary final and advance to her second AFLW grand final.

The Crows co-captain said every member of the Adelaide squad could draw on memories of losing a winnable game, to ensure it keeps a lid on its favouritism going into the weekend’s match.

“We can reflect, all of us, that we’ve been a part of a game where we should have won, or we shouldn’t have lost,” she said.

“In my last Olympics [Rio in 2016], Australia versus Serbia, we should have won, we didn’t, so we won’t be taking the Cats lightly at all.”

Importantly, Phillips said the players were doing a great job of keeping the lid on expectation.

“I looked at them [at training on Tuesday] and they were business as usual … the maturity of the group has been something that’s blown me away,” the 33-year-old said.

Sunday’s final at Adelaide Oval — with the winner advancing to the grand final on March 31 — will pit the season’s highest-scoring team (Crows, with 58 goals) against the lowest (Geelong with 21).

“[Geelong’s] a very young team, so they’ll come out with an attitude, I believe, of having nothing to lose and giving it a red hot go,” Phillips said.

“For us, every week we’ve been trying to play better than the last week.”

Phillips has enjoyed a stellar third year in the AFLW after a persistent quad strain hampered her in 2018.

She spent the off-season going back to basics and properly repairing her injured quad and the hard work has paid serious dividends with Phillips averaging 22 disposals, four marks, four inside-50s and three tackles across the seven rounds.

On Tuesday night that effort was rewarded with her being named the AFL Coaches Association AFLW Champion Player of the Year.