ZoBlitz
The Ghost Who Walks
- Moderator
- #26
Lightning Neale sparks dream start for ex-Hawk
Lachie Neale parts the seas to set up Brandon Ryan's first Brisbane goal against his former side
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AFLW 2024 - the Grand Final - Chat, game threads, injury lists, team lineups and more.
Senior Brandon Ryan (2023-)
- Thread starter dlanod
- Start date
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ZoBlitz
The Ghost Who Walks
- Moderator
- #27
Ryan: It's a full circle moment
We chat to Brandon Ryan ahead of his Brisbane Lions debut. The Lions play Hawthorn in Round 11 which is, coincidentally, the club that initially drafted 'Sticks' into the AFL.
ZoBlitz
The Ghost Who Walks
- Moderator
- #28
Brandon Ryan's Unorthodox Journey To Brisbane
Brandon Ryan will play his first game for the Lions on Sunday and the fourth of his AFL career against the side for which he played his third game just 274 days earlier.
And he’ll follow two of the club’s great first-game fairytales as he becomes the 56th Brisbane player to debut in maroon, gold and blue beyond the age of 26
Only Tony Beckett, a product of QAFL club Mayne, and Matt Eagles, winner of the TV show ‘The Recruit’, have been older in their first game at the elite level in Brisbane colors.
Beckett, the first Queenslander to graduate from local ranks, was three months older when he debuted in the Bears’ second game at Carrara against Melbourne in 1987 - and their first ‘home’ win.
Eagles was 28 on debut - a South Australian playing with Yeronga while operating his own landscaping business when in 2016 he applied to the TV show which offered a guaranteed AFL rookie contract to the winner.
The Lions only took Eagles due to contractual obligations, but after playing a key role in the club’s 2017 NEAFL premiership he earned not just a contract extension but four AFL games in 2018 and a further two games in 2020. A legitimate player.
The story of Brendan Ryan is just as good. Having grown up at Barwon Heads, near Geelong, he graduated from local juniors to Geelong West in the Geelong Football League and earned a two-year contract at North Melbourne. But due to injury problems and Covid he did not play a game.
Post-Covid, thinking his AFL dream was over, he joined the Maribyrnong Park Lions in Melbourne’s Eastern District League before he was lured to the Northern Bullants in the VFL by coach Brodie Holland, a former Fremantle and Collingwood player who from 2009-14 had coached Maribyrnong Park.
Among Holland’s Maribyrnong Park products was Luke Ryan, now a 142-game star at Fremantle, where he was club champion and All-Australian in 2020. He is cousin of Brendan Ryan.
One thing led to another, and after Brandon Ryan played seven games with the Bullants last year he was picked up by Hawthorn in the Mid-Season Draft on 31 May.
He played in the AFL side in Rounds 20-21-24, kicking three goals in his second game, he now will face as many 17 ex-clubmates when, in something of a fixturing oddity, Brisbane and Hawthorn meet for the first time at Marvel Stadium on Sunday.
It will be an odd situation, with Ryan playing for Brisbane against Hawthorn, and Jack Gunston, a triple Hawthorn premiership player who played with Brisbane last year, playing for Hawthorn against Brisbane after a late off-season decision by Gunston to return ‘home’ prompted a deal in the last hour of the trade period last October which saw the two players swap clubs.
Gunston, 32, has played six games this year to take his career tally to 248 and returns this week after he was ‘managed’ out of the side that led Port Adelaide until they kicked two goals in the last 33 seconds for a miracle win.
Thirty-one of Ryan’s 2023 Hawthorn clubmates are still there, with only off-season imports Jack Ginnivan (Collingwood), Massimo Dambrosio (Essendon) and Mabior Chol (Gold Coast), draftees Calsher Dear and Nick Watson and pre-season pick-up Ethan Phillips of the Round 10 side new to the club.
Ryan, an athletic 200cm forward who gets his chance after Eric Hipwood’s one-match suspension, has traded his #46 jumper at Hawthorn for the Lions #24, worn 164 times by ex-captain Roger Merrett.
Having seen his #46 at Hawthorn left unallocated this year, Ryan will be eighth player to wear #24 at AFL level for Brisbane. He’ll follow Jamie Duursma (1 game), Merrett, Marcus Picken (25), Llane Spaanderman (3), Joel Patfull (182), Liam Dawson (18) and Marcus Adams (46).
Jumper #24 was worn most often at Fitzroy by Vic Chanter, a 108-game fullback from 1946-52.
A Victorian representative and club champion in 1951, Chanter was Fitzroy vice-captain in 1952 when he played a famous game on Essendon champion John Coleman, named at full forward in in the AFL Team of the Century alongside Leigh Matthews and Haydn Bunton.
In a wet and muddy game at Brunswick Street Oval in Round 10 that year Chanter was the only player ever to hold the 98-game 537-game megachampion goalless.
Ryan will be the 349th Brisbane player all-time and the 129th to play for the club after beginning his AFL career at a rival club. He’ll be just the seventh to play his first Brisbane game against his former club, and the second to do so interstate.
Chemlsford
Draftee
- Sep 10, 2023
- 6
- 22
- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
Was quite disappointed when the Hawks let him go...obviously a stacked forward line at the Lions but how has he been faring?
Dalions
Premium Platinum
- Aug 12, 2016
- 18,404
- 29,976
- AFL Club
- Brisbane Lions
An exchange of third rounders you can have him back.
