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This is the Friday night match you’ve been looking for.
This is the best game of last season reprised to open a remarkably important round of football, with the Giants hosting the Dogs at their home away from home. Let’s go.
Last year’s preliminary final between GWS and the Western Bulldogs was the best game of 2016 and one of the best games of the decade to date. It was tense, close, tense, fast, tense, and chock full of individual brilliance. The Dogs won the day, and the seeds of a promising potential rivalry were sown.
It’s not there yet. One game does not a rivalry make, but given the demographics of both teams, the stark contrast in their respective club narratives – the prince and the pauper, but for sports – and the tasty football style match up, there’s a high chance something develops. The road to rivalry continues tonight.
Unfortunately the teams will not be returning to the scene of last year’s epic. Tonight’s game is being hosted UNSW Canberra Oval, otherwise known as Manuka Oval, due to the Sydney Royal Easter Show’s pre-eminence over football at this time of year. It’s a shame, but that is the reality of things for now.
We covered the Giants earlier this week, noting their past four outings have resulted in four wins with a percentage of 180. To date they’re yet to match the flashy high scoring Adelaide Crows on the watchability index, although no team has looked as impressive as Adelaide has in five rounds for some time. The Giants are primed, and at their home-away-from-home they start as strong favourites.
We also covered the Dogs recently, prior to their Good Friday game against North Melbourne. The ‘Scrays eked over the line and followed it up with one of the most bizarre games of football I’ve seen against the Lions. They came from 38 points down halfway through the second quarter to win by 32, a 70-point turnaround almost exclusively driven by goal-kicking accuracy. Brisbane booted 12.3 to the Dogs 5.13 in the first half before running away with 12.7 (Dogs) to 2.3 (Lions) in the second half.
Nothing materially changed during the long break. The Dogs were slack on defence in the first half, creating plenty of time and space for the Lions to engineer goals over the back of play and from the Dogs defensive goal square. Coach Luke Beveridge seemed to tighten that up in the second half and the easy goals evaporated. Football is fun.
Given we’re mostly caught up on both teams, let’s get to the fun stuff.
This is going to be an unusual game at the book ends, with the Giants rolling with a line-up that is sans a traditional stopping key defender. Co-captain Phil Davis has a minor hamstring complaint, leading the Giants, who already had seven defensive-half players in their 22 last weekend against the Sydney Swans, to stick with Adam Tomlinson, Nick Haynes and Aidan Corr as their stoppers.
Tomlinson and Corr are the tallest at 194 centimetres, with Haynes standing at 192 centimetres. It meshes brilliantly against this Dogs line-up as it is selected – with Tom Boyd the only marking key forward and the Dogs going all-in on their mid-sized forwards, this looms as a fascinating area of the ground all night. Is there an ISO cam in the house?
In the Giants forward half four tall forwards await four tall defenders. Half backs Robert Murphy and Jason Johannisen will be busy keeping Steve Johnson, Devon Smith and Toby Greene quiet while also playing their respective attacking roles. Most of the forward pressure will come from the Giants’ talls, if there are any, which could make for a high pace game in GWS forward half.
As ever, though, the midfield battle will dictate the extent to which this comes into play – and, friends, this midfield battle looms as one of the best match-ups we could hope for in the 2017 AFL.
The Western Bulldogs have modified their scheme this year, playing with fewer numbers over the ball and instead stationing men a handball away waiting to spread. The Dogs rely on their big three inside ball winners – Tom Liberatore (13.4 contested possessions, 10 tackles and 5.4 clearances per game), Luke Dahlhaus (13, 5.2 and three) and Marcus Bontempelli (12.4, six and three) – to extract the ball and set the play for the rest of the team’s midfield. Last year it was a simpler ‘see ball, get ball’ mindset.
The Giants have operated in a similar fashion, although as we discussed on Wednesday, that appears to be driven by injury and absence rather than a playing style per se. GWS has turned the keys over to Dylan Shiel, Callan Ward and Josh Kelly through the middle and is getting a power of help from Shane Mumford.
Liberatore appears to have been designated as an attack dog by Beveridge and his brains trust – it’ll be interesting to see who he’s trained on at the opening bounce. The Giants can get drive from any number of sources, and they have ball winners across the ground – their ground ball win differential is +22.8 per game, almost double the second place Crows (+13.6). By contrast, the Dogs are running at -3.8 per game, down from +11.7 per game last year.
Both teams have depth questions – the Dogs due to form and the Giants due to inexperience. The Giants have six players with less than 50 AFL games under their belts, including Tim Taranto, their first pick from last year’s draft, who replaces Davis. The Dogs made two changes, omitting Shane Biggs and effectively resting Boyd, and bringing in Bailey for his first game of the year and Caleb Daniel after he was dropped in round three.
It is hard to go past the Giants, who are on form and on pedigree. We said the same thing about last year’s preliminary final. I expect a close one, if only because with these Dogs we never quite know what we’re going to get.
Greater Western Sydney will win this game, and for the football world’s collective benefit let’s say by a mere six points. The Giants Friday night football debut is historic, and let’s hope it will be a game to remember.
That’s my Friday night forecast, what’s yours?