Thursday

We flew out on the hour flight to Adelaide on Thursday afternoon, with a full squad ready for our clash against Port Adelaide. It was great to see Frazer Dale named in the squad, while he is an emergency and is not expected to play, it is fantastic for him to experience such a trip and the preparation for a game interstate.  After we arrived at our hotel, the Crowne Plaza Adelaide, we had a couple of hours before dinner so I went and caught up with a mate I used to play footy with for a coffee at a cafe around the corner. There is always a fair bit of down time on interstate trips so it is good to be able to get out of the room and try and take my mind off footy for an hour or so. Quite a few boys catch up with family and friends on these trips.

We headed to an Italian restaurant for dinner: La Trottoria. This is a tradition when we play in Adelaide and the food is always outstanding. I had a pretty light dinner of barramundi and salad as we load up on carbs pretty hard leading into the game. By the time we walked back to the hotel it was about 8pm and most of the boys went their separate ways. I was keen to head back to my room and try and get some study knocked out the way as I am in the process of completing a Diploma of Finance and have a few assignments pending. Thankfully I was able to get this done before an early night. As you would appreciate it is very quiet on these trips and the boys who grew up in Adelaide love the chance to catch up with family at the hotel.

Friday

I had a really good night's sleep and woke up about 8am to head down to the team breakfast. I had some eggs on toast and some fruit before going to see the trainers to get taped up for our training session that morning. It was great to see so many of our supporters come out to West Adelaide Football Club to see us train, the fans actually lined up and cheered us on as we ran out onto the ground which was pretty cool and something that we are certainly not used to - a guard of honor at training!

It was a quick training session with a few team drills then some work within our lines. After about 40mins on the track we spent time giving autographs to the fans before packing up and heading down to the beach to do some recovery in the cold water. Back at the hotel the boys were all pretty hungry, so we smashed down some chicken and rice then went into a team meeting to go through some final preparations for the Port Adelaide match.

I then retreated to my room for the afternoon and completed one of my finance assignments before our team meal at 7pm. Our pre-game dinners are always pretty much the same - the choice of pasta or rice for carbs then the choice of fish or chicken for protein. Some of the boys caught up with family or friends after dinner, but I went with Heath Scotland for a walk to get a coffee then watched a bit of Sons of Anarchy before falling asleep at about 10pm.

SATURDAY

GAME DAY!!! I was a little restless throughout the night, but managed to get a good 8 hours of sleep in. Everyone was in pretty good spirits at breakfast, Ratts was even cracking a few of his jokes before we each broke off into our separate lines for meetings. Mark Riley and Paul Williams are our midfield coaches so they ran us through a few final instructions for the match and let us know exactly what our roles were.

I then had an appointment with our physio "Turtle", who has been looking after me since I arrived at the club, just to make sure the body was in top notch. At 11am we had a team walk around the city, it was a pretty nice day and it was good to just get the legs moving. Instead of going straight back to the rooms, Kreuze, myself and Paul Bower went down to a coffee shop where I had my first double shot coffee for the day. I generally have about three on gameday to give me that little extra buzz. I came back to my room and watched a bit of the NBA playoffs before heading into our pre-game meal at 1pm. It is important to get a big meal in because we play at 7pm so I had a couple of plates of pasta and another coffee before heading back to my room to start my preparations. Some guys like Robbo or Waitey are pretty chilled before a game, but I go into my shell a bit and like to spend time on my own focusing on the match and getting mentally prepared. We were on the bus by 4.30pm and arrived at AAMI Stadium about half an hour later ready to take on Port Adelaide.