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The Adelaide Crows are exciting in the same way that a train arriving on time is exciting. Functionality is cool, and the Crows have coolness in them. Fire, though, doesn’t come as naturally.
That’s not to say that the league’s third best contested ball side is soft – they’re just clean. Almost too clean. When they’re on, football looks like a simulation. Their forward line is the equivalent of a spaced floor in basketball, threats everywhere creating a serious gravitational pull. They just don’t have the point guard to send the opposition to hell often enough.
Rory Sloane looked like he could be that player for a little while. Not Stephen Curry or Chris Paul, but maybe Kyle Lowry. Then the music stopped, and we remembered that Sloane is not a top ten player in the league. He’s a lot closer to Luke Shuey than Dustin Martin.
When Adelaide’s midfield gets on top, when their clearance game is firing, they become football’s most brilliant force, looking like the team from the first six rounds that was the AFL’s best impression of the 2007 New England Patriots.
But those times are gone. The Crows haven’t had a statement victory since crushing Richmond in Round 6, with more than a few statement losses since then. If they played Richmond next week – in Melbourne, Adelaide, or your favourite neutral venue – give me the Tigers.
The Tigers, for their talent deficit against the other top sides (a deficit which is overstated – they have two of the game’s five best players), are relentless. The Crows relent. They have periods, and sometimes entire games, where their midfield is shown up as cripplingly human, and the delivery to (arguably) football’s most potent forward line dries up.
(AAP Image/Julian Smith)
The Carlton game – gutsy victory for some, overwhelmingly underwhelming for others – was instructive. With Carlton a few beats off early, the Crows punished them with their class and finishing. When Carlton started throwing haymakers, the Crows kind of just stood there, and then eventually held on.
Some games the final siren creeps up on you, an inevitable exclamation mark to victory. Others it seems like an arbitrary end point – the place where the game was designed to stop just so everyone could go home. Adelaide’s 89-77 win felt like the latter.
It was not emphatic, and little has been for the Crows in the past couple of months. They’ve beaten bad sides, but they failed their big test against Geelong, and failed against Melbourne and Hawthorn in games that weren’t supposed to be tests.
The Crows still have moments of pure genius that only GWS can match. Their forwards are so dynamic and full of class that impossible is never far away. Taylor Walker might be the best week-to-week watch in the league, a strange, fascinating mixture of Picasso and Wolverine. His wheeling-around forward-half passes, those 50-metre searing strikes that curl into heaven, are football’s most precious gift.
Saturday at the MCG was a stage for Tex’s brilliance, Carlton’s grit, and not much else. The Blues largely controlled the game, but Adelaide’s cleanliness and poise were more decisive than Carlton’s endeavour.
In finals, being clean becomes secondary to being fierce. And you can’t help but feel that on the ferocity spectrum, at the point of attack, from the centre bounce out, Adelaide sits a touch too far removed from a rejuvenated Sydney, a healthy GWS and Melbourne, a switched on Geelong, and an emotionally sound Richmond.
The nature of Adelaide’s semi-final exit last season against the Swans remains telling. Sydney’s midfield was overwhelming and unforgiving that night. The Crows forwards never had a chance to impose themselves on the match, and on the evidence of the past two months, they may not have the chance to do so when September comes this year.