Two-time Adelaide Premiership Captain Mark Bickley has plenty of never-before-told stories, following a 13-year AFL career playing with the Crows, spanning across 272 games, and three years within the coaching ranks.

This year, Bicks will be lifting the lid on those stories with his Crows family, taking you inside the four walls at West Lakes, with an aim of giving an insight into football life.

Take a read of Bicks’ inaugural tell all, in which he reveals how a pre-game mix up spurred the team on during a clash against Brisbane in 1992.

We’ve had plenty of great battles with Brisbane across our 33-year journey in the AFL.

But there’s one that will always stick in my mind - not so much because of our win - but because of a little misadventure pre-game.

It was Round 21, 1992, our second year in the AFL and only the third time we were facing off against the Brisbane Bears, as they were then known.

Graham Cornes was our coach and Robert Walls, who was known as a bit of a hard man, was Brisbane’s.

We travelled north for the game, which was set to be hosted at Carrara, the ground now known as People First Stadium on the Gold Coast.

We were sitting ninth on the ladder, while the Bears were in bottom place.

Already feeling pumped and keen to notch another win, we stepped off the bus and walked into a portable hut, which was set up like a changeroom.

Both our ‘changeroom’ and Brisbane’s looked exactly the same, so unbeknown to us, we walked straight into theirs.

As we walked in, there was a whiteboard which featured all of us players listed on it with a one-line comment about us - and that comment was not very nice.

Our team included the likes of Scott Hodges, who kicked a bag of five that day, Darel Hart, Tony Modra, in just his eighth game for the Club, Tony McGuinness and Matthew Liptak, just to name a few.

I can remember the things written next to Wayne Weidemann’s name were pretty nasty, he was in the firing line, and responded pretty well, collecting three Brownlow votes.

We were all pretty annoyed about it, being sledged by the bottom team didn’t feel that great.

From that moment on, we all had a bit of a chip on our shoulders and Graham made sure we used what they said about us as extra motivation.

Sure enough, we got the result we wanted, winning 17.8 (110) to 11.11 (77), in front of 4603 fans.

Looking back at that Brisbane Bears side, it featured a 17-year-old Michael Voss, Marcus Ashcroft, Matthew Campbell, Richard Champion, Martin Leslie and Matthew Rendell. 

It’s interesting comparing that game to our last one we played against Brisbane - Round 22, 2023.

Brisbane won that game at the Gabba by just six points in front of a 30,107-strong crowd.

I spoke to Mark Mickan this week, who Captained the Bears before returning home to play for us and lined up in that 1992 game against his old Club, and we had a bit of a laugh about the day.

It’s always good chatting with Mark and going down memory lane together.

I’m glad we won that game and proved Brisbane we were much better than what they thought of us.

This weekend, we go again. Go Crows!