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In the space of seven days we saw the worst and best of what the Greater Western Sydney Giants have to offer.
The club entered this year as premiership favourites on the back of a phenomenal 2016 season, in which they reached their first finals series.
What’s more, they also won their first ever finals match, against the Sydney Swans, before ultimately going down to the Western Bulldogs in a preliminary final for the ages.
During the off-season, they secured the services of former Richmond star Brett Deledio, who is yet to debut for the club after he suffered a calf injury during pre-season training.
That came on the back of Steve Johnson electing to play on for another year, after he missed the preliminary final loss to the Bulldogs due to a suspension arising from a careless incident involving Josh Kennedy in the qualifying final win over the Swans.
Having gone deep last September, the club had a shorter off-season compared to years past, but still managed to perform admirably during the JLT Community Series.
They scored wins over the West Coast Eagles and North Melbourne on either side of a sloppy 12-point loss to the Swans in Blacktown, and ‘unofficially’ finished as the second-best performed side, only behind St Kilda.
Then came the opening round, which saw the Giants faced with one of the AFL’s toughest assignments, taking on the Adelaide Crows, last year’s highest-scoring team, at the Oval in front of nearly 44,000 pro-Crows fans.
GWS led at quarter-time, but wilted after that to eventually lose by 56 points – their first defeat by more than 50 points since late 2015, and the first time since mid-2014 that they finished a completed round at the bottom of the ladder.
For a club which is well and truly into their ‘no more excuses’ era, the performance attracted a lot of criticism, including Channel Nine’s ‘Footy Classified’, which suggested that coach Leon Cameron was under pressure to keep his job in 2017.
"I think it's his judgement year" – @craighutchy believes Leon Cameron may be under pressure in 2017. #9FootyClassified pic.twitter.com/0V048FfGSw
— Footy Classified (@FootyClassified) March 27, 2017
The defeat was made all the more disappointing given the Crows were missing several key players due to injury, including captain Taylor Walker. Still, they managed to kick the opening round’s highest score, 22.14 (146).
It was a case of ‘here we go again’ after the Giants had also lost their opening round match the previous year, albeit to a Melbourne side that were (and are) nowhere near the same level as the Crows.
Additionally, the Giants were 1-2 after three rounds last year, but they won 15 of their next 19 matches.
And so, after a horror week on and off the field, it remained to be seen how the Giants would bounce back last Saturday when they hosted the Gold Coast Suns in an early-season match at Spotless Stadium.
The ground’s unavailability due to the Sydney Royal Easter Show forces the Giants on the road for over a month, meaning they don’t usually gain access to their Sydney base until roughly a quarter into the season; during this time they play two of their three contracted home games in Canberra.
But with Easter falling later this year, the Giants were able to get an early-season match at the showgrounds, but with a reduced capacity the low-drawing Suns were chosen as their opponents for this particular match.
The Suns had their own incentives to bounce back, after they had fallen just two points short of what would have been their biggest comeback in the AFL when losing to the Brisbane Lions after trailing by 46 points at halftime.
The competitiveness of Rodney Eade’s men in the second half was a stark contrast to the tripe the Giants dished up at the Adelaide Oval.
On that basis you would think that the Suns and their fans would have been confident heading into last Saturday night’s match, while the Giants would have carried some mental scars.
However, the Giants started as hot favourites and they went into the match fired up after one of the most disgraceful defeats in the club’s recent history.
The intensity that was non-existent the previous week returned in the first quarter as the Giants kicked seven goals to one to lead by 38 points at the first change, in addition to Shane Mumford laying a bone-crunching tackle on Jarryd Lyons halfway through it.
It might be a new year at Spotless Stadium but it's the same old Shane Mumford. #NeverSurrender #AFLGIANTSSuns pic.twitter.com/TNUKWFJmkf
— GWS GIANTS (@GWSGIANTS) April 1, 2017
The Suns kicked five majors in a row on either side of halftime to reduce the margin to 22 points several minutes into the third quarter. But the Giants put things beyond doubt from that point, kicking 14 of the last 15 goals of the game to rack up a score of 24.16 (160) and winning margin of 102 points, both club records.
The win was marshaled by 11 goals between Jeremy Cameron and 100-gamer Toby Greene.
Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, the match was played in front of a crowd of just over 8000, though there were several factors behind it including the ground being reconfigured for the Easter Show, the Suns being a low-drawing club, and the recent poor weather in Sydney.
It is hard to believe that this was nearly the same side that was brutally exposed by the Crows in Adelaide six days earlier.
The result also marked a 158-point turnaround from the previous week, and rocketed the club up from last place on the ladder at the start of the round to ninth.
On the other hand, the Suns dropped from tenth to 17th, meaning the sides indirectly swapped places on the ladder.
It now remains to be seen whether the Giants can carry on that momentum for the remainder of the season, or whether they will fall back to old habits.
Their Round 3 match against North Melbourne at Blundstone Arena this Saturday falls exactly five years to the day since they suffered a 129-point thrashing in just their second AFL match, all the way back in 2012.
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Of those who lined up against the Suns last Saturday night, Jeremy Cameron, Phil Davis, Toby Greene, Adam Kennedy, Tom Scully, Dylan Shiel, Devon Smith and Callan Ward all remain from the side that were so badly beaten by the Roos in that aforementioned match five years ago.
That’s over a third of the current side who have been at the club right from the start, when they were easily exposed as prey to the other 17 clubs (well, except for the Gold Coast Suns and Port Adelaide, the two clubs the Giants defeated for their two wins in 2012).
In that match, they were held goalless in the first half and it took them a minute into the third quarter to kick their first major for the match. They eventually managed eight goals, of which half were kicked by Cameron, who earned the AFL Rising Star nomination for his effort.
It will be a much more fearful GWS side that makes the trip south to Hobart for the first time since, and it’s doubtful that a defeat of that magnitude will occur.
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