Over the next few days Greater Western Sydney’s coaching staff and players face the very real obstacle of veteran forward Steve Johnson being suspended for their preliminary final in a fortnight’s time, and maybe even the grand final too, should the Giants qualify.
Doubtless this is a blow to their short-term chances of success, and yet the echo ringing out from Saturday’s bruising qualifying final win over Sydney is the potential for Johnson’s roughhousing of Josh Kennedy, Lance Franklin and any other Swan who looked at him sideways therein to become a kind of legacy act, pointing the way forward for a fledgling football club.
GWS are resented for this success. One only needs to log on to social media, stick a microphone in front of Melbourne club president or check the opinion pages of Victorian newspapers to know that. The charge the Giants often answer to is that they are, to use a growingly popular term of derision in these expansionist times, “plastic” – a contrived franchise. Handed the best players. Gifted their path to this moment.
Well, not on Saturday they weren’t. On their finals debut the Giants were earthy and spontaneous, callous and calculating. They literally drew blood from a more respected opponent and beat them on the scoreboard too. They were, to put it simply, a hell of a lot better at playing football than Sydney were. They ran in numbers, spread the ball around with skill and cunning, and were ruthless in every department a football side can be bar kicking at goal, which spared Sydney the blushes of outright humiliation.
Johnson was central to this, playing perhaps the best no-goal, five-behind finals game a specialist forward has turned in given such heightened circumstances; a greenhorn club on its finals debut, in unfamiliar surrounds on an unstable surface, against one of the most famously disciplined and professional clubs in the competition. We often speak in wonder of the impact Cyril Rioli has on games outside what can be processed by statistics, but Johnson is comparable – a salt of the earth character with skills from outer space who can turn a game with a mere shake of his hips. Or the point of his shoulder, as was the case here.
On Saturday Johnson ensured that nobody will ever again refer to the Giants as “the kids from GWS” or “upstarts”. When he sized up Sydney ball-magnet Kennedy and crudely ironed him out he gave that game of football its tonal structure. It was a dirty act, it took out a respected “ball player” and it might cost Johnson dearly from a personal standpoint, but it also said that he and his team stood for something, and that if anybody was going to be pushed around, it wasn’t the newcomers.
This GWS move was meant to be a career coda for Johnson – the point at which he aged gracefully and bowed out pragmatically as a quasi-coach before moving upstairs full-time with a clipboard in hand. Yet here, with a preliminary final spot on the line and undaunted by the passing of time and wearying of his legs, he was suddenly Vossian, Hodgian and Lethalsesque – singlehandedly affirming the kind of ruthless qualities premiership sides need.
The Kennedy incident could in the end cost the Giants one of their best players, but what price the Giants’ development of outlaw attitude and team identity in the hours that followed? By the end of the first quarter Johnson was like a one-man army as he ploughed into Franklin. The Giants veteran has a keen sense of the momentum and flow of games because so often, like here, he’s been able to provide it all on his own.
And this was really just the logical extension of what Johnson has done all season for his younger Giants team-mates; shown them and the rest of the competition that talent takes you only so far. In 2016 he’s made the Giants more physically imposing, surer of themselves and perhaps a little arrogant, as opposed to merely precocious. He’s brought talent, sure, but also what Martin Pike added to Brisbane’s golden era sides: the sinking feeling for opponents that they’re up against a gang.
On Saturday it also can’t have escaped Johnson that his opposition featured seven finals debutants who might be rocked watching one of their most experienced and reliable team-mates receiving a pre-meditated shirtfront and being helped from the ground. They’d only be human if they thought twice about whether they themselves were the next in line for punishment. That sense of physical dominance only grew when Shane Mumford slung Swans star Kurt Tippett into the ground, giving him what looked like concussion to go with the broken jaw he’d suffer in another contest.
Of course the common thread between Mumford and Johnson is Geelong, who believed in them both as individuals when nobody else did. Mumford’s contribution to the development of this Giants side is equally monumental as Johnson’s, probably more so. In 2014 and 2015, during times when GWS really struggled, the ruckman was almost all that stood between total annihilation for the Giants. Without him they were a husk, perhaps more reliant on a single player than any club in the league bar Gold Coast with Gary Ablett.
None of this is to say GWS couldn’t have reached this point without the pair. Prior to 2016 they actually weren’t low on spiky characters. Toby Greene, Devon Smith and Dylan Shiel all play like school bullies. But they needed a ringleader – which, as good as Callan Ward and Phil Davis have been, is often not a role that a captain can play and probably not one he should if he’s forcing it.
Johnson has been that catalyst. He’s brought this side out of its shell. He’s been the symbolic stiff-arm to the chest of so many opponents and now, come finals, he’s given Greater Western Sydney the kind of fear factor and momentum that will trouble any opponent they face.
On the weekend a tough, talented and battle-hardened Sydney side were dealt a psychic blow. Premiership sides have lost finals before – the Eagles famously stumbled on the way to the 2006 flag – but they haven’t lost them like this. Sydney were bullied. “The Bloods”, if they can still carry the flame of that mid-2000s sides, were made to bleed.
The question now is whether the Giants, having hoped they’d go all the way with Stevie J, can trust that something close to his potent mix of supreme talent and chutzpah has now spread through an entire football side. The way they’re playing right now, Johnson’s well-timed bump could be the moment that heralded a new dynasty.
