A composed Darren Crocker sat in front of the media yesterday after the 2023 AFLW Grand Final and with a clear tone of disappointment in his voice, reflected on what went wrong for his Kangaroos side.

“I think the whole day was Brisbane just took their opportunities more than we did,” the Kangaroos coach said. “We controlled large parts of the game, we controlled the front half game, inside 50s were heavily weighted our way, but it just felt like that a few times when they went forward they took their opportunities.

“Obviously Dakota Davidson took those nice marks in the last quarter, a kick out of a stoppage that went out and dribbled through. So in tight games and Grand Finals like that, to be able to take your opportunities is a pretty important factor.”

He acknowledged that his overwhelming feeling at that moment.

“It’s got to be disappointment,” he said. “We spoke about climbing the mountain, we’ve taken so many steps forward. Even at three quarter time to be in a position to win that game, win our first ever AFLW Premiership, we were right there but just couldn’t finish the job.

“So it’s disappointment but also I just said to the girls don’t be disheartened by it because we’ve learnt so much about ourselves and we’ve come so far this year. But the sun will come up tomorrow and we’ll take one step in front of the next and we’ll lick our wounds and we’ll get on with it and hopefully be back bigger and better next year.”

He lost one of his most crucial players Jenna Bruton to injury early, and admitted that was a hard loss for his side to take.

“Oh it’s a huge loss for us,” he said. Someone like Jenna Bruton is pretty hard to replace, I won’t use that as an excuse but she’s a very, very good player. She’s an important player to us, we value her contribution unbelievably so to lose her it was disappointing for Jenna in particular because I know how much she got herself up having had an injury earlier in the season and got herself right and worked her way back into some good footy and she’s just come off an excellent game the week before in the Preliminary Final.

“So to lose her was really disappointing for her because she would have loved to have been out there to make a contribution and difficult for us to be able to cover.”

At the crucial final break when the game was in the balance, Crocker said that his message to his team was that they wanted to continue to play North Melbourne football.

“I thought the third quarter was really, really strong for us and we wanted to play another North quarter in the last and our vision was right in front of our noses at that stage,” he said. “We’d put ourselves in a really good, strong position and there was a couple of things we spoke about that we needed to continue to do.

“Unfortunately Brisbane came, they took a couple of opportunities early, scoreboard pressure then makes you have to change a few things and especially at that stage it wasn’t a really high scoring contest. I think it was four goals each and then they got their noses in front so then we had to try and push to win the game and that opened us up a little bit defensively later in the game.”