Crows Matt and Brad Crouch, with Rory Sloane reign in the rain as Adelaide batters Fremantle at Adelaide Oval
WHEN it is teeming down with rain, some footballers are washed away while others seem to find something special. And on Adelaide Oval against Fremantle the Crouch brothers and Rory Sloane did just that.
WHEN it is teeming down with rain, some footballers are washed away while others seem to grow an inch in height and reveal a bit of extra guts around the contests.
Matt and Brad Crouch (35 and 30 disposals respectively) fall in the latter category and they were irresistible as the Crows made Fremantle look second-rate - maybe third-rate - at a drenched Adelaide Oval on Saturday night.
They held their ground when others lost their feet, judged the flight of the ball and knew it was going to drop shorter than it normally does, and they played with the composure and clout that the Dockers had left back in Western Australia.
The Crouches played their junior football in Beaufort, a pretty little country town in Western Victoria that has been hit by floods at least six times since the turn of the century and regularly makes the national news services when it is under water.
So rain probably wasn’t going to worry them too much.
Another who was outstanding was Rory Sloane (30 disposals, two goals), especially when it was pouring at its heaviest. He played his junior football in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne.
It is a belt of picturesque little towns in where the grounds get muddy and soft during the wettest months and the local players quickly learn to adopt.
Sloane played with the knowledge that work rate and hard running would be rewarded and keeping it simple would work.
But there was also a bit of natural instinct and background that crept in when he and the Crouches looked like the only players handling a dry ball and playing on a dry ground.
All three of them love winning the inside ball and that’s where the game was won as early in the first quarter.
The Dockers were smashed and they looked at their worst when they failed to adjust to conditions.
Two things were never going to work: getting out of trouble with quick and precise chains of handballs and just throwing the ball on the foot and hoping for the best.
When they did that there was invariably a Crows player at the end of it — they kept pressing up — and the ball came straight back into the danger area.
The weather dried up a bit in the second half and Adelaide Oval drains quickly, but by then the game was already shot to pieces.
What the better conditions allowed was for Eddie Betts to thrill the crowd with the highlights that he seems to bring every week and you could tell from his wide grin that he was just as rapt when Wayne Milera and Charlie Cameron kicked their goals.