IT WAS not quite a Power outage nor a late Sunrise, as Yartapuulti and Gold Coast were forced to split the points in a frantic Round 8 AFL Women’s draw. It was the first draw of the 2023 season, with the Power coming from behind early to hit the front and look home with six minutes to go, before Gold Coast hit the line hard, tie scores and both teams finished on 7.3 (45) at Alberton Oval.

The result dashed the Suns’ chances of making top four – barring a near-impossible set of results – but Gold Coast coach Cam Joyce was able to still take positives from the game.

“Six minutes to go we’re two goals down, they’ve got a howling breeze, looks pretty unlikely,” Joyce said. “But what I was really pleased about is that our girls are never beaten. They’ve shown that for the year, and to give us actually a chance to tie the game and then the ability to have a centre bounce and try and win the game, I thought was a real positive for us.”

On the other side of the coin, Yartapuulti coach Lauren Arnell described the mood as “obviously flat” given the circumstances leading up to the final siren.

“Girls worked so hard, that was pretty gutsy,” Arnell said. “Draw’s a draw isn’t it? A little bit flat and some pride in some of the progress that we keep making but you’d like to think we won that game.”

Arnell said while there’s “no doubt” losing is worse and she was happy to still take two points from the encounter, conceding a goal in the final two minutes hurt.

“(We) gave ourselves every opportunity to win the game and then with two and a half minutes to go, credit to the Suns, they’re a top eight team for a reason,” she said. “They were able to execute pretty well to bring themselves back into the game.

“Same side of that is we were able to execute pretty well after quarter time to give ourselves every opportunity to win. A little bit of inexperience and lack of composure at different points of the game not just late, meant that it’s a draw.”

Once the ball was locked in Yartapuulti’s forward 50, Gold Coast switched into game preservation mode, determined to take the draw over the loss, and still grab two points which would help with a finals push.

“We obviously we tried to stack numbers around the footy and all that sort of stuff, and bring our forwards up and make it really difficult knowing there was only a minute left,” Joyce said. “It felt like the longest minute in the world, a minute 50 seconds, 30 seconds, four or five forward 50 stoppages for them but I thought Yartapuulti were terrific today.”

Coming away from the game, Arnell said while there were moments late that certain players would like back, she said there were just as many early in the game that Yartapuulti would review and learn from.

“If we’re going to ask everyone to be in on winning, we can’t be pinning a draw or a loss on one and so, there’s some big moments late,” Arnell said.

“I think also we look at our first quarter and our midfield were pretty good after quarter time but there’s a lot of moments in that first quarter that you can point to as well. Key message is that we’re all in this together and we’ve got to learn from some big key moments that hurt us and we’ll do that during the week.