Is a third flag now a formality for the Adelaide Crows after dominant preliminary final victory against Geelong?
ON Friday night’s viewing, it is very clear Adelaide’s time has come again, writes Michelangelo Rucci in his analysis of the preliminary final.
- Match report: Scintillating Crows steamroll the Cats
- Colour: A memorable night for Adelaide fans
- Coach’s verdict: Pyke says ‘we can still improve’
- Match ratings: Who were Adelaide’s key players?
- SuperFooty: All the latest on Richmond vs the Giants
FINALLY, Malcolm Blight’s footy gods are smiling on the Adelaide Football Club again.
After 6936 days — the second-longest wait in current AFL tallies — the Crows are back on the grand final ticket.
Not since Adelaide blitzed the Western Bulldogs by 68 points in the 1998 preliminary final at the MCG has Adelaide cleared the last hurdle with such ease and so much conviction to leave the thought that the AFL premiership trophy is already a Crows’ possession.
Captain Taylor Walker can go to the MCG on Saturday with a well-prepared acceptance speech tucked in his socks.
After losing four of four preliminary finals since ’98, the Crows are better, better-prepared and better equipped to win an AFL premiership than any of the Adelaide teams that in the past 19 years have tried to put a big silver cup in the trophy cabinet at West Lakes.
The markers are of elite status: Stronger in defence with “team defence”. More potent in attack with diversity a menacing trait of the Crows forwards. And so much tougher in a midfield that has indeed learned to win the hard ball and move it quickly — and has grown beyond a reliance on Rory Sloane with the true emergence of the Crouch brothers.
It is a lineball call on who was more relieved by Adelaide’s sledgehammer start: Crows coach Don Pyke or AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan. Adelaide’s 48-point lead seven minutes into the second term gave Pyke a definitive answer to how he had avoided his players becoming stale on a 15-day break. And McLachlan no longer has to wonder if his pre-finals bye is an anchor that sinks qualifying final winners who enter the preliminary final with just one game in 26 days.
On a strategic note, Pyke dealt with the heavy losses of rebounding defender Brodie Smith (knee) and young forward Mitch McGovern (left hamstring) with the simplest and most-effective answers.
He just plugged the gaps — big gaps — with one-for-one replacements with David Mackay and Andy Otten, who are remarkable stories themselves.
Mackay, who would have to live on another planet to ignore the brutal critics in the Crows fan base, moved to defence rather than Paul Seedsman. And keeping the Collingwood recruit on midfield-attacking duties was the smart call for the way Seedsman made delivered to his strengths with his goalkicking rather than his goal defending.
Otten, after being tested by knee injuries and the rise of a new group of young defenders at West Lakes, again slipped into McGovern’s role by the goalface.
If, as expected, McGovern remains on the injury list and Otten remains in the 22, his image on the platform at the MCG next Saturday collecting an AFL premiership medal would test the hardest men to avoid shedding a tear.
Otten’s story of persistence does confirm the footy gods do work in mysterious ways to test young men in their dreams to be a premiership player.
Pyke has built an unbreakable team system. Players roll in and out, but the machine rolls on with the most impressive balance of attack and defence seen since 2007 when Geelong took the AFL game away from the man-on-man, dour and low-scoring game that made then AFL boss Andrew Demetriou cringe at Sydney’s premiership-winning “boring” style.
Adelaide is now the darling of the AFL guardians who want to turn back the clock to a high-scoring era.
Not a darling of the pro-Crow crowd that filled the Oval last night was the once-loved but now unpopular (in Adelaide fans’ eyes) Patrick Dangerfield.
Two years after he left Adelaide to a standing ovation as the Crows club champion with the Malcolm Blight Medal, Dangerfield invoked the loudest jeering heard at Adelaide Oval since the Bodyline Ashes Test series in January 1933.
There would have been residents in Medindie who would have thought they were under the flight path of the sonic boom jets each time the Crows crowd jeered Dangerfield. And the echo from Geelong was heard 90 seconds before half-time when Dangerfield was hit by his friend Sloane and put flat on his back in a daze without — most inexplicably — a free kick.
Adelaide returns to the MCG for its first grand final since 1998 to face on Saturday either Richmond, the VFL club with the longest absence from the “big dance”, or GWS, the AFL-created franchise seeking credibility as the Crows did when the footy gods finally smiled on Blight.
On Friday night’s viewing, it is very clear Adelaide’s time has come again. Dare it be said, the Crows are unbeatable.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au