For many that have been following the Gold Coast SUNS’ journey, the Western Bulldogs’ rampaging last quarter at Metricon Stadium on Thursday evening brought back memories of Cairns in 2015.

On that occasion, the SUNS led by 26-points at three-quarter time before conceding 10 final-quarter goals to go down by 22 points, with the final JLT Series game sharing a similar narrative.

But after last night’s 21-point loss to the reigning premiers, SUNS midfielder Michael Barlow vowed such a lapse wouldn’t happen again, as the focus now shifts to the club’s round one clash against Brisbane and the continued evolution of the game plan.

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“I think evidently we can’t have patches in the game where we leak, probably 10 goals in the last quarter,” Barlow told SUNS TV after the game.

“If you do that in any game across the AFL season, you’re going to get nutted. It’s happened now and it’s not going to happen again.”

Whilst it’s easy to be disappointed by Thursday’s result, the fact remains premiership points weren’t up for grabs and the SUNS will take plenty of positives from their performance against one of the best teams in the competition.

“We get caught up a bit on the result, but at the end of the day we’ve got to have a bit of foresight and understand that probably across the three weeks of the JLT we’ve had 10 really pleasing quarters to two disappointing quarters,” Barlow said.

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“It’s not an ideal timing having that really poor quarter but you’ve got to acknowledge it was against the best as well and we more than held our own for three quarters of the game.

“We’ll have a good look at it and it will give us some good things to come out of it and moving into the real season. The mentality of the group is not to get caught up on it too much, understand what we did really well and just learn a little bit from that last quarter. A bit about the game situation and take control of the game when were in control of it.”