Adelaide club champion Matt Crouch reminds Bryce Gibbs of Carlton young gun Patrick Cripps
BRYCE Gibbs is still getting used to a new environment at the Adelaide Football Club, but there is one strong note of similarity from the Blues among the Crows.
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BRYCE Gibbs is still getting used to many things at West Lakes.
The Crows’ three-colour jumper for a start.
“I won’t lie,” says Adelaide’s prize recruit from Carlton. “It does feel a bit weird. There’s navy blue (as on the Carlton guernsey), so it is not totally foreign.”
There is coach Don Pyke’s game plan and, as Pyke, put it “the language” the Crows use in setting up their plays.
There are the new team-mates.
“That’s all important to me,” said Gibbs, who joined Adelaide after 231 AFL games at Carlton where he was the No. 1 draft pick in 2006.
“Chemistry (with team-mates) is huge for me. I want it at a level where I know my team-mates back-to-front, inside-out so in the heat of the moment we all know what we are going to do.
“To be all on the same page — and have that flow (naturally) — is super important for me.”
And there is one Crows player who gives Gibbs an instant reminder of Carlton — and it is not lead ruckman Sam Jacobs, another former Blue along with Eddie Betts, who has made it to the Adelaide Football Club list.
Gibbs leaned across — from the interchange bench at Strathalbyn Oval on Sunday during the JLT Community Series clash with Fremantle — to tell Pyke how much of a strong impression All-Australian and Crows club champion Matt Crouch was making on him.
Gibbs compares Crouch with Carlton young gun sensation Patrick Cripps, the Blues’ club champion in 2015, his second AFL season.
“There’s a lot of similarities in the way they have progressed in their early years,” Gibbs noted of Crouch and Cripps. “They are inside-mids, they get a lot of the hard ball, they are professional around the club in the way they train and the way they take their careers.
“Halfway through the second quarter, leaned over to Don Pyke and said, ‘Gee, Matt Crouch can get the ball’.
“I knew that from how I’d watched — and admired — Matt Crouch from afar. But up close, it is impressive — and I look forward to playing a lot of games with him.”
Gibbs, 29, is to continue to make the most of this pre-season — and the most of Adelaide’s wish for flexibility from its players.
“I’m happy to keep playing,” Gibbs said of his pre-season program.
“Minutes with the team are valuable to me. I’m fit and healthy — and I am happy to keep playing.”
After an impressive 27-touch start in Adelaide colours, Gibbs expects to spend less time on the track in Saturday’s internal trial at Football Park — and a “full hit-out” against Port Adelaide in the JLT closer at Alberton Oval on Saturday week.
Gibbs will be part of Pyke’s pleasant headache of working midfield rotations with multiple options that include the Crouch brothers, Matt and Brad, vice-captain Rory Sloane and revitalised pair Curtly Hampton and Cam Ellis-Yolmen.
“Most of my time will be in the midfield,” Gibbs said. “But you’ll also see me out on the wing, at halfback, even at half-forward at times.”
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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