GWS Giants are 11th on the AFL ladder. They have the same number of wins as North Melbourne. They have lost to some absolute brumbies. They are still wildly inconsistent from week to week, even from half hour to half hour. But the Giants save their best for the best. They have beaten all the main premiership aspirants. They pegged back a 39-point deficit against Geelong to claim a 12.14 (86) to 11.7 (73) victory on Saturday. If your imagination allows it, and if they deign to turn up, they are not only capable of shaping the final series, but making a deep run themselves.
Cats coach Chris Scott was asked whether he rated the Giants as a contender. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t analysed their season.” To kick off his presser, he had pored over the stats sheet and then crumpled it into a ball. It was as though he was saying “the only statistic that mattered tonight was the number of my players being taken out of Olympic Park in an ambulance”. Tanner Bruhn wrenched his neck, Jack Henry hurt his throat and Jeremy Cameron spent the last quarter in a wheelchair sucking on a green whistle.
All three Cats spent the night in Sydney under medical observation. Cameron had winced his way through the previous week’s game against Brisbane, but was in far better health and touch against the Giants, lining up on one of his best mates Toby Greene and winning a lot of ball drifting across half back.
Geelong were excellent early, and had the Giants defenders pinned like an Australian batter facing Jasprit Bumrah. Every time his backs were on their wrong leg, Giants coach Adam Kingsley would turn to whoever was closest, throw his arms out, and ask “the fuck are we doing?” But as each Cats player was felled, the Giants would turn up the wick a little more.
The Giants have an outstanding record against the Cats, having won five in a row between the sides, and eight of the last 10 encounters. They have an abundance of what Kingsley calls “turn and burn” players – hybrid, power-endurance runners who get better as the game wears on, and who gradually ran the visitors off their feet.
GWS were in a hole two months ago, losing to West Coast, pushed right to the wire by Essendon, riven by injuries and booted off their showgrounds home base by a bunch of woodchoppers and llamas. But they have since put 14 goals on Brisbane in a quarter, belted Melbourne in Alice Springs, worked Fremantle’s locks and then rolled over the top of Geelong. All those teams are capable of winning multiple finals and maybe even premierships this year.
Bereft of rotations, the Cats were shovelling against an avalanche in the final term. Finn Callaghan, who’d had the less-than-welcome company of Oisin Mullin all evening, soccered a ball off the ground which then tracked the curvature of the boundary line, leading to the Callum Brown goal that gave the Giants the lead. A few minutes later he again slipped away from the Cats’ Irish tagger to seal the win.
As always, Kingsley was a model of affability and restraint in the post-match, doing his darndest to play down the result. He knows his side too well to expect them to play like that every week. But he knows that his team is more than just a scalp-taking pest now – they are a team capable of making a long, sustained run.
When the Giants beat Fremantle a week ago, Dockers coach Justin Longmuir said he wouldn’t catastrophise it. A sleepy Saturday afternoon in Canberra is a far cry from the mayhem of Optus Stadium. But he looked on the verge of catastrophising when his team was goalless at half-time against Sydney. He smashed his phone, gathered his thoughts and went to work.
The third quarter must rank as one of the best half hours of footy of recent years. The Dockers had toiled and tottered for an hour without a goal. It took them 45 seconds in the second half and from that point on it was an onslaught. For a while, their only concern was that every time they would kick a goal, Swans key forward Charlie Curnow would quickly reciprocate, before the Dockers stormed away to a commanding 15.21 (111) to 10.13 (73) triumph.
The Dockers’ top of the ladder clash with the Swans could have been an anticlimax, an occasion where two very good teams showed a few tricks, but held back a lot of secrets. Fremantle, off a loss to GWS and a five-day break, could easily have gone at 90%, copped the L, remained confident in their ability to secure two home finals, and had a proper crack at Sydney in September. Instead, both teams treated it like a final, and one team in particular looked every bit a grand finalist.
We keep looking for faults, for soft spots, for precedents that would call into question the Dockers’ credentials. Maybe the answers were there in Canberra against the Giants. Maybe they are in their backline. Maybe they were there in the first half against the Swans. But every time there is a question mark, Longmuir addresses it, and his Dockers answer it.
