Premiership medal is the one Neale wants

LACHIE Neale would gladly swap his Brownlow Medal for a premiership.

But the Lions star will have to wait at least another year for his AFL flag after Brisbane’s weekend preliminary final loss to Geelong at the Gabba.

“I’d rather be celebrating 22 medals than one,” Neale said yesterday less than 24 hours after being named the 2020 Brownlow Medal winner.

“I have an enormous amount of respect for this medal, don’t get me wrong, but if I could do both would be an ideal world.

“I want to win a premiership. They’re very hard to get to, grand finals, and even harder to win. I want a premiership, and I want it bad.” that

Neale said he would use the Lions’ 40-point loss to Geelong as motivation to go further next season.

“I won’t dwell on it and feel sorry for myself. We didn’t deserve to win that game the way we played,” he said.

“We weren’t good enough but it’ll certainly drive me ... to hopefully win a prelim next year and get to the big dance.

“That’s what we play for. I feel like we’ve got the group at the moment that are hungry for that. They’re talented enough. We’ve just got to do that hard work to try to put ourselves in that position.”

Neale, who polled 31 votes from 17 matches to win the game’s highest individual honour, said the highlight of his season was Brisbane’s 15point qualifying final win over Richmond at the Gabba.

“Winning a home final, it hasn’t been done in a while at Brisbane,” he said.

“It was disappointing that we couldn’t get it done on Saturday night (against Geelong) but we can take some real lessons and learnings from that game, and hopefully we can improve on that and go a couple further next year.”

As for improvement in his own game, Neale said wanted to better his goalkicking accuracy next year.

“I missed a lot of shots this year,” said the 27-year-old midfielder, who kicked 14 goals and 13 behinds this season.

“I usually go through a bit of a process after each season to work that (where he needs to improve) over a period of time, rather than making a rash statement straight away.

“I’ll sit down with ‘Fages’ (Lions coach Chris Fagan) and Dale Tapping, our midfield coach, and map out my off season and pre season.”