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Round 7 was not kind to the GWS Giants, suffering a 135-point demolishing at the hands of a ruthless Adelaide Crows outfit.
To rub salt into the wound, the game was played in front of a paltry crowd of just 5830 people at Skoda Stadium.
It would be easy to dig the heels when the Giants are down, but fans need to take a step back to find some perspective on the situation.
Firstly, the team has improved on the field compared with last season. They are averaging 80 points per game this season, more than Melbourne, Western Bulldogs and Brisbane.
The Giants are playing a more attacking brand of football and, while it does not always come off, they have become better to watch. Last year they averaged just 58 points.
The downside of a more attacking game plan is that the Giants inevitably give up more goals. Opposition sides are averaging 140 points per game against the Giants this season, up from 125 points in 2012. The Giants coaching staff will need to find the right balance between attacking and defensive play.
The match against Adelaide was ugly by any measure; a desperate opponent combined with a young team who faced a tough interstate match the week before was the perfect storm for a one-sided affair.
Treating that match as an outlier, which is reasonable based on the first six games this season, the Giants had a percentage of 64.4 per cent heading into the Adelaide match. By comparison, they had a percentage of 46.2 per cent last year (and only 42.2 per cent over the first six games).
Some fans may choose to disregard that, after all a percentage of 64 per cent is still pretty terrible, but to do so would miss the fact that it still represents a noticeable improvement.
In the first few seasons for the Giants and Gold Coast Suns, percentage will arguably be a better indicator of improvement than wins or losses. That might seem counterintuitive because for most fans we only care about wins, but these are not normal teams and percentage is usually the best measure of overall competitiveness.
The Giants improvement is also broadly consistent with the Suns experience last season. Though for the Suns most of the improvement was made on the defensive side, since the actually scored fewer points than in their debut season.
Time will tell whether the Adelaide game was unusual or becomes the norm. But for now the Giants have improved and are tracking fairly similar to the Suns who, in their third season, sit just one game outside the eight.
Secondly, the team was right to choose rookies rather than experienced players.
Many argue that the Giants would be better served by drafting or trading for more experienced players rather than playing a team largely comprised of teenagers. I agree that they would have been better in the short-term but it would have come at the expense of any long-term success.
What these analysts suggest is that the Giants should have followed the Fremantle strategy of expansion. The Dockers entered the 1995 season with a team that had a few youngsters but a lot of rejected players and state league players.
It allowed the Dockers to win eight games in their first season, but they had to wait until 2003 before making the top eight. If given the opportunity I suspect most Dockers supporters would prefer a few winless seasons if it meant they were challenging for the flag in 2000.
Despite what some analysts believe, there was no possible way for GWS to put together a competitive team in their first season. The league is too professional now and the talent in the second-tier competitions is not as high as when West Coast, Brisbane, Adelaide, Fremantle and Port Adelaide entered the competition.
It takes years to develop a squad that can play together consistently and maintain their defensive and offensive structures. While in a more professional league there are fewer upsets and opportunities for the best sides to have an off day. Consequently, it was never going to happen in one season, regardless of how many rejected players they could obtain.
Furthermore, the Giants approach will likely prove to be more successful in the long-run than the approach taken by the Suns. A quick comparison of each team’s first two seasons indicates that there is very little difference between the two teams, which is important because the Suns performances have been supported by arguably the best player in the game.
The Suns older players such as Gary Ablett Jnr and Nathan Bock will be a mere shadow of their former selves by the time the Suns are ready to compete for a flag. By comparison, Giants players such as Callan Ward, Tom Scully and Phil Davis will be in the middle of their prime when the Giants are ready.
As football analysts and fans we tend to overreact to any new piece of information. A good game by the Giants means that they doing great, while a poor performance indicates that they are hopeless and the sky is falling down.
The reality is that neither view is correct. The Giants are developing at a similar pace to the Suns last season. As a young team their form fluctuates widely, which is entirely expected. The Suns received a lot of attention over their poor performances last season, which now look fairly silly in hindsight. We should heed these lessons and not make the same mistakes again.
The AFL viewed GWS as a 30-year project and it simply does not make sense to judge the experiment on a week-to-week basis. While many doubt that the Giants can establish themselves in western Sydney, I see Western Sydney as an untapped area where most people follow no sport.
In my opinion, all codes can develop, flourish and co-inhabit the Western Sydney area and I hope they do.
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