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

This year, Bicks has lifted the lid on those stories, taking you inside the four walls at West Lakes, with an aim of giving an insight into football life.

As Adelaide prepares for its Round 24 clash against Sydney, Bickley recalls a special game against the Swans in 1998, including the reveal of a few words from Malcolm Blight that still echo in his ears.

“Good teams don’t go out in straight sets.”

Those eight, stern words from our coach at the time Malcolm Blight echoed through us as we hit the track hard in the week leading up to our Semi Final against Sydney.

We were coming off a heavy loss in the Qualifying Final against Melbourne and Blighty was furious.

So furious, he was preparing us for one of the hardest weeks of training filled with an unusually high amount of contested work for that time of year.

The training Blighty had set out for us was brutal. So much one-on-one, two-on-two-, three-on-three contest work, which was strange given we didn’t want injuries ahead of the final.

Everyone cracked in hard.

His words made us feel like there would be repercussions if we lost the game.

As Captain, I felt the pressure. We needed to perform well and win.

The week leading into the game was tumultuous. Tony Modra was told quite early in the week he was going to be omitted from the team which would take on the Swans.

It was hard because we were all good mates with Tony but it was my job, along with the leaders of the Club at that time - Nigel Smart, Shaun Rehn and Mark Ricciuto - to keep the boys level headed.

I told them to just keep focused on the game ahead, train hard and worry about what we could control.

The weather the day we flew into Sydney and on game day couldn’t have been worse, with a huge storm causing about 80mm of rain and the oval was waterlogged.

I was pretty nervous the day of the game and I didn’t want to let Blighty or our Members and fans down.

We went in with a focus to win, no matter by how much or how, we just needed to win.

The Swans had some solid players in their team including Tony Lockett, Michael O’Loughlin, Wayne Schwass and Matthew Nicks.

It was an absolute slog but we got the job done - a 27-point win!

Peter Vardy was our star. He battled through a bruised heel, started on the wing and ended up kicking six goals, had 19 possessions and 10 clearances!

Roo finished with 24 disposals, while Smart and Darren Jarman collected 19 apiece.

I remember being interviewed after the game by Neil Kerley and he said ‘that was a great win on the road after travelling to Perth, Melbourne and then Sydney, what will the next week look like?’

I remember answering something like this “I think this next week will be all about recovery because we’ve had such a hard week on the track, this was a hard game, so we’ll need to recover well”.

On the way back to the airport, Blighty kept us players on the bus, letting the staff hop off.

I thought he would tell us how important it was going to be to recover with a Preliminary Final the following week.

I was wrong.

Instead, he told us how proud he was of us for grinding out the win.

Then went on to say he believed we got the win because of the hard, contested training we had done during the week.

He said we’d be doing the exact same thing the coming week ahead of the Prelim.

I guess it worked, though, as we went on to win the Prelim and a back-to-back flag.

I’ll never forget those words from Blighty about good teams never going out in straight sets.

Go Crows!