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When the Giants are on, they are sleek, swift, polished and decisive. They are clean to the point of characterless. Their type of greatness is cold, foreign and lacks a little humanity. But it is breathtaking. And if it doesn’t elicit much sympathy, it certainly inspires plenty of awe.
After an odd three-month funk where the Giants appeared everything from disorganised to disinterested, they now, for all intents and purposes, appear to be back.
They were lethal against the Demons, punishing against the Bulldogs. In both games, they got back to attacking in their trademark waves, where they move the ball through the corridor with such pace and fluency that it feels that the ground is ice and they have skates while their opponents are trapped in gumboots.
It starts from a stoppage or a turnover, usually at half-back or the deep wing, and then the ball spills to a man in orange, and then it’s all over. They run in packs, but the pack is more ordered than vicious, everyone spreading at perfect distance, everyone linking with perfect timing.
The story ends, inevitably, with an outnumber inside 50, and an unopposed running goal from 35m out directly in front. The ball sails through the middle of the big sticks, because like a curled finish into the top corner of the net following a beautiful-game chain of Barcelona passes around the edge of the box, it is the only logical endpoint to what preceded it.
(AAP Image/David Moir)
The past two weeks the Giants have had fewer inside 50s than their opponents and won by 35 and 48 points. They are relentlessly clinical, the economy of their movement astounding, the value of their inside 50s double what it might be for most teams.
No one else has the horses that they do to play this breakneck transition offence game. All their midfielders seem to have the same gait – powerful, compact and upright – and their collective running is devastating. If Dylan Shiel isn’t shimmying past jokers then exploding into space, Tom Scully is accelerating past daylight or Josh Kelly is composing himself at the end of the chain for a goal that was always going to be.
The backline, while perhaps not as impenetrable as it once appeared to be, is still loaded with pedigree, and the midfield is unstoppable. The forward line, once a mess of tall bodies, appears to have found itself with reduced height.
With the pace that the Giants play, it does make sense that quicker players around goal would be more useful than the towering behemoths they usually station there. The most interesting question for the Giants going forward will be how they integrate the four-headed hydra of Shane Mumford, Jonathon Patton, Jeremy Cameron and Rory Lobb. Cameron, one suspects, may need to play higher up the ground, and the pressure will be on Lobb to deliver inside 50.
Against the Dogs and Demons, the Giants were the team we always wanted them to be and thought they were. How to explain that bizarre period from Round 6 to Round 19, where the most talented list in the competition only won one game by more than 16 points (against Brisbane absent Dayne Beams), and only three by more than eight?
Injuries and a lack of continuity, perhaps, but the injuries for the Giants have been a touch overstated this year – virtually every week they’ve taken the field they’ve had the most talented line-up in the game.
The more likely culprit is indifference. This is a team that has proven itself to be a ‘flick the switch’ outfit, one that goes through periods of inertia, knowing that when it is required, they can start breathing fire.
Loathsome as it might be, after three months of inertia, the switch appears to have been flicked. And now, with a healthy list and a top two spot awaiting, the AFL looms as their scorched earth.