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Spent a long time in the Friday night wilderness? HQ has you covered. Fresh off a raucous prime time debut, the Giants travel to Etihad Stadium to face the rock ‘em sock ‘em Saints.
And just like last weekend’s barn burner against the Dogs, the Giants face a team that possesses a kryptonite of sorts for their Superman football stylings. Want to beat the GWS juggernaut? Throw bodies at them until they can take no more. Luke Beveridge gave this a shot, and it almost worked.
This is the first time the Saints have been called upon to play under the Friday night lights since Round 3 2015. A 749-day absence generated by the league’s rule of thumb for Friday night blowouts: in the event of a prime-time blowout, you are banished from the slot for at least ten times as many days as the margin of your loss – and the Saints lost by 74 points to the Pies in their last appearance.
If that really is the rule, see you again at the tail end of 2019, Carlton.
We’ll get to the game itself in a moment. Given this is the first time we’ve seen the Saints on this stage this year, let’s get forensic on where the team finds itself in 2017 – it’s fascinating.
St Kilda’s 3-3 record is about right for what has been thus far. They’re scoring just under 97 points per game, conceding 91, and have a strength of schedule that pegs their fixture to date as the 13th hardest. Losses to Melbourne, West Coast (away) and Geelong, and wins against Brisbane, Collingwood and Hawthorn suggest St Kilda is an average, mid-table team.
Coach Alan Richardson and his match committee still seem to be working out their best line-up, with changes through the middle of the ground every week due to injury and form. Another has been rung this week, with Nathan Wright returning to the team as a result of an ankle injury to Mav Weller. More on the Giants changes below, because they’re doozies.
St Kilda’s football is still fundamentally about pressuring the opposition, swarming and moving quickly from defence to attack. They want to control the ball and the pace of play, to wear the opposition down and grind their way to quality scoring opportunities. They harass, chase, tackle and swarm, and they move quickly once the ball is in hand.
To underscore this, the Saints have held the ball for 8.7 minutes more than their opponents in wins, and 12.8 minutes less than their opponents in losses. Their ability to score per minute of possession has actually been stronger in losses (2.0 points) than wins (1.88 points, though this is affected by their Round 4 abomination against the Pies).
Under the hood their ball movement has a clear bias for short kicks and handballs to running players. The Saints are averaging just 65 turnovers per game in the season to date, second to the Dogs. They’re doing well when we take into account rates of disposal, with a turnover for every 5.9 disposals so far, which is third behind the Suns and Dogs. Stats on short versus long kicks would be revealing, but the eye test says St Kilda like to play the chip game.
When it works, it’s great. In wins the Saints have averaged 103 uncontested marks per game; in losses this drops to 68.3. The 34.7 differential is the second biggest in the game behind Melbourne, who have an even stronger bias to the kick-mark game.
This is a similar issue in defence, but in reverse. In wins the Saints have restricted their opponents’ ability to move outside of their swarming structures. In losses this falls away. The Saints have seen their opponents rack up uncontested possessions at a rate of knots in losses: 298 per game, ranked 18th in the competition. In wins this has been a more circumspect 243 – still above average but not significantly so.
The question tonight, then, is: can the Saints stop the Giants outside game? At face value, no – now the Giants are rolling, not even the 22 roadblocks erected in Canberra last weekend were strong enough – but there’s more to this game than meets the eye.
Indeed St Kilda’s harassing style is the one kind of game GWS don’t want to play. There’s a reason why coach Beveridge tossed out his refreshed 2017 game plan last week when faced with the proposition of toppling the Giants.
It’s cliché, but to be in the game the Saints will need to deliver a four-quarter effort. As Cam Rose pointed out earlier this week, the Saints have been blown away in a quarter of football in each of their three losses. Their margin conceded in these quarters has gone a long way to deciding the final margin.
GWS are close to fielding their strongest side of the year, with the return of Phil Davis from a one-week hamstring injury (I didn’t know they existed anymore), and Stephen Coniglio playing his first game of the year. Four-game 2015 draft pick Harrison Himmelberg has been bought in just to remind us that there are quality players lurking in the bowels of Giant HQ.
With the tall Nick Haynes out, the Giants will go to market with a fairly small defence once again. How this meshes with the Saints tall forward line will be an interesting side plot to this game. Conversely it will be the land of the giants in the GWS forward line, with three genuine tall forwards and three genuine tall defenders going to work.
GWS should expect to win the midfield battle by some margin with Coniglio running point once more. It means Josh Kelly can be released from his greater inside workload and Tom Scully can revert to his best role as a gut running winger. A full strength GWS midfield is a scary proposition for the best teams in the competition, lest a rising team capable of lapses of poor play.
You can see where I’m heading with this. The Giants have their first-choice six-man midfield in place for the first time this year, playing under the Etihad roof with the entire AFL world watching. This should be a relatively comfortable victory. We will know early on – if the Saints are able to exert their pressure game on the Giants, and the Giants look rattled, it will be a much closer run thing.
GWS will win this evening, to the tune of six goals. St Kilda are a developing team facing one of the biggest tests they’ll face in 2017. We’ll be looking for a competitive display, but a loss of this magnitude – or even a couple of goals larger – should not lead us to change our view on their bright medium-term prospects.
That’s my Friday night forecast. What’s yours?