It took seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half minutes to completely dismember Port Adelaide. Seven and half minutes to remind the footballing world that Collingwood’s passage to this year’s grand final is by no means assured. That’s what GWS do. That’s how quickly they can sink a season. They’ll smash you in the contest, run you ragged on the outside, and slice you open like a watermelon.
It doesn’t matter where they play. They’ve won on the road 11 times this year, in 11 different venues. They’ve won in Tasmania, in Canberra, in Ballarat – the lot. They’ve won in the extreme heat and in biting cold. They’ve won running over the top of teams and they’ve won defending sizeable leads.
New coach Adam Kingsley told the board they would be slow out of the blocks. He’s flogged his new players over summer. They were learning a new game plan, a very different one to Leon Cameron’s tenure. Three months into the season, they were a bottom-four team. Inexplicably, they’d lost to West Coast. They were denied victory against Carlton after an absurd umpire dissent call.
But they gradually found their groove, their identity and their swagger. This was a variation on the old Orange Tsunami. It was a two-way tsunami now. Few teams push back harder to defend. But like the great Richmond side of the Hardwick era, a team with Kingsley’s fingerprints all over it, they’re like a great rolling wave when they attack.
What was left in the tank? How long could they keep playing like that? How long could they keep zig zagging across the continent, collecting scalps? Port Adelaide found out pretty quickly on Saturday night. They went goal for goal in an entertaining first quarter. But they were slaughtered at the contest after that, with the clearance count 29 to 12 at the main break.
They rotated Zak Butters, Connor Rozee and Jason Horne-Francis through Stephen Coniglio but he was too slick for all of them. Thirteen of his 30 touches came in the second quarter, and the majority of those came in the decisive seven-and-a-half minute onslaught. If not for a string of Giants behinds, the game would have been over halfway through the second term. Port rallied, and missed some genuine chances to make it really interesting, but the Giants always had them at arm’s length.
For Port Adelaide, it was a disappointing end to a season that promised so much. They won 13 games on the trot. They hosted one of the games of the season against Collingwood. That night, they had the better of Nick Daicos, Darcy Moore and the umpiring. They played in conditions they love. They threw the kitchen sink at the Pies. But they still lost. They were suddenly staring down a Showdown, a trip to Geelong and a stack of injuries. In the end, they limped to the line. Some of their best players were walking laps at training last week. Trent McKenzie toiled admirably, but he looked like a man booked in for corrective surgery.
The Magpies are warm favourites to beat the Giants on Friday night. It will be one of the most one-sided crowds in the history of the game. But in nearly every Collingwood game, there’s a half-hour period where they let their guard down. It’s exhilarating football to watch. It’s also risky. They’re on a high wire without a net. They race ahead of the ball whenever there’s a one-on-one. In other teams it’s called cheating. At Collingwood it’s just smart. But it will be tested like never before against this crack Giants midfield.
These two clubs met in a preliminary final four years ago. It was one of the strangest atmospheres I’ve seen at a football ground. It was trench warfare in the final minutes and the Giants celebrated their win to a 75,000-strong groan, and their heel kicking, Cossack inspired song. A vicious brawl broke out in the Olympic Stand. The knuckleheads were capsicum sprayed, and the Pies lamented a lost season.
It was a very different Giants lineup that day. Jeremy Cameron and Zak Williams were their best players. Toby Greene, Lachie Whitfield, Callan Ward and Coniglio were all unavailable. But that Giants swagger, and that complete indifference to road trips and hostile crowds, remains. Whether they’re playing in front of two men and a dog at the Sydney Showgrounds, or 95,000 Collingwood supporters at the MCG, they don’t waver from that. Collingwood and Brisbane have been circling one another for months. But there’s a Giant obstacle to overcome first.
