Default Fans

The Players’ View – Daniel & Sarah Merrett

Brisbane’s Daniel Merrett and wife Sarah open up about moving homes with a toddler and taking in a young Lion for the 2016 season, in an exclusive piece for aflplayers.com.au, brought to you by realestateVIEW.com.au.

Daniel and Sarah Merrett don’t seem like your everyday couple.

Vibrant and chatty, the pair give the impression they’re best friends as well as being a married couple.

The Merrett’s bounce off each other during conversation, each telling their own stories with contributions from the other. They’re good hosts too and are more than happy to lend their time despite Dan being so ill he couldn’t play for the Lions the upcoming weekend.

Nestled in their Hawthorne home in Brisbane’s inner-east with daughter Matilda, the Merrett’s try to keep things simple while their toddler wreaks havoc around the home – especially when moving house not too long ago.

“She was six months and had just started to crawl, so that was a nightmare,” Sarah tells Aflplayers.com.au.

“Yeah we had her caged. Just so we could get stuff done. It was definitely a handful,” Dan chimes in. “Caged!? She had a playpen,” Sarah laughs. “It’s always evolving with a toddler around. There’s like a one metre high grime across the whole house from her sticky fingers.”

Nearly 200 AFL games into an AFL career, Dan is a Brisbane Lion through and through. At 31 years old, he knows the next chapter is equally as important and has dipped his toe in other areas, including regular radio appearances.

He’s also now the elder statesmen of the Brisbane side and duly took in young key forward Josh Schache when the club asked if they could become the Victorian-born youngster’s host family for the 2016 season.

“We have often been asked by the club to have draftee kids or people moving from interstate and we never had space to be able to do that, we tried a couple of times,” Sarah says.

Dan agrees, “we tried but the boys were stuck in single beds, sharing a bathroom and if they had their girlfriends come over, they had to share a single bed or sleep in two separate single beds.”

Schache has his own space in the Merrett household, with a full self-contained complex located downstairs but he still visits if he needs something to eat every now and again.

Sarah sometimes hides little chocolates downstairs as a surprise for him – even if he doesn’t always eat it – and she admits to enjoying the gossip when the young Brisbane boys come around to visit Schache.

During the day, Sarah’s parents come around while holidaying in Brisbane and even the Lions’ welfare manager Craig Lambert stopped by – you’d struggle to find a more passionate Lions’ person than Lambert and he was full of praise for the Merrett’s.

He might be the rough and tough, cult-hero on the field but Dan Merrett couldn’t be further from it after the final siren sounds.

*Visit realestateview.com.au/justlikeyou to WIN $1,000 and tickets to the 2016 AFL Players’ MVP Awards or one of 75 Footy Prize Packs.

Click here to see Adam Oxley and Ben Kennedy’s video from The Players’ View series.

Click here to see Jack Riewoldt’s video from The Players’ View series.