“Sometimes I would do a running session and think about it and have a little cry and then get on with it but when we are all together it is all out on the table.”

Since new year, the Giants have been together non-stop after border closures and COVID outbreaks sent them home from Sydney a week before Christmas before they hit the road on January 1 for stretches in Albury then Adelaide.

It’s been a tumultuous time for the football club as they prepare to perform in 2021. “Our group has been through a lot,” Dal Pos says.

On Sunday afternoon they will begin their season against the Dockers in Fremantle. Each player will wear a black armband and their jumpers will display the number 34 Barclay wore at the Giants.

Emotions will be raw as many sort through the jumbled thoughts that often accompany such loss.

“We are looking forward to honouring her legacy in the upcoming days and we are looking forward to having her number on our back, but that being said we hate it because she could still be here,” Dal Pos said.

“People are very individual about it but when people need to talk about it we talk about it and we also remember Barclay fondly. It’s been hard to talk about her because it means she is not here anymore which is a reminder, but there are numerous, hilarious stories about Barclay that we like to laugh about.

“She went hard in everything she did and sometimes it was a bit wild and we loved her for it.”

Senior coach Alan McConnell, a football lifer who was twice Fitzroy’s interim coach in the ’90s, has been conscious of letting each player find her way through an emotional thicket while trying to prepare them for a strong performance in 2021.

However when COVID-19 emerged on Sydney’s northern beaches midway through December pre-season plans were thrown into chaos.

On December 18, five days before their pre-Christmas break was due to start, Dal Pos awoke to a phone call from the head of women’s Football, Briana Harvey.

As borders shut and parts of NSW went into lockdown, the club decided all players with family outside Sydney should head home immediately to enjoy Santa among loved ones.

Within hours most of the squad had evacuated blissfully unaware how their journey to round one would become a test of resilience few clubs could, or would, endure.

The pace since then has been so frenetic that defender Katherine Smith’s car is still in Yass, having being towed there after she broke down returning to Melbourne, relying on Alyce Parker to double back so she could hitch a lift to Holbrook then Victoria via her brother.

Every day over the Christmas period the leaders met via Zoom as Harvey, McConnell, welfare manager Gail Wykes and others first made arrangements for the team to be in Melbourne, then Sydney before settling on Albury as their base.

“We had a moratorium on Christmas Day, unless absolutely urgent,” McConnell said.

‘Sometimes I would do a running session and think about it and have a little cry.’

Jessica Dal Pos

Thankfully the set-up in Albury was good and stressed players eventually settled. But the skeleton staff who joined them carried a heavy load as many part-timers could not just drop everything and relocate. A practice match loomed, not to mention the season and many players had to have uncomfortable discussions with work.

“The uncertainty and the change created a degree of anxiety,” McConnell said in an understated tone. McConnell estimates that two weeks of the program evaporated and with Albury merely a stopping point before the next stage of the Giants magical mystery tour recommenced nothing was guaranteed.

McConnell used his networks to arrange makeshift support on the Gold Coast, then Melbourne as they became likely destinations but two days out from their departure on January 15 a decision was made to send the group to Adelaide for a practice match against the Crows on January 17. He had not arranged anything in Adelaide.

The Giants arrived in Canberra to fly mid-afternoon but the flight was cancelled so they had to leave the club’s gear at the airport and trudge to a hotel around 8pm to find a bed.

“That was about the 50th thing that had gone wrong so by that stage we were just laughing,” Dal Pos said.

They arrived in Adelaide less than 24 hours before their practice match, having arranged for eight people they had never met to join their staff, no whiteboard or communications to the bench the least of their issues.

When Irishwoman Brid Stack broke her neck in a collision with Adelaide’s Ebony Marinoff they were sent into another spiral, their post-game tribute to Barclay becoming, according to Dal Pos, “super emotional”.

The next day without staff and without a training venue they made certain the AFL was aware support was necessary with Dal Pos admitting that at times only their love of football and care for each other got them through.

“If you want honesty I probably think to myself, ‘God, I’ve had enough of this’ about five times a day, but so does everybody else,” Dal Pos said. “Being together made it better.”

Finally the ball will bounce on Sunday.

“We’ll turn up and have a crack and be playing to win.” McConnell said.

That spirit has kept the Giants going in the most testing of times as they look to honour Barclay’s memory on the field while continuing a discussion off it.

“We want to put forward consistent good footy and on the flipside of that we want mental health to be talked about. It is really important,” Dal Pos said.