GWS Giants return to training after dashed finals dream

After being left ‘embarrassed and angry’ after their historic grand final loss to Richmond, the GWS Giants are gaining strength from adversity as they return to training.

• Coniglio elevation another Giant boost
• Stephen Coniglio rejected big-money offers to leave the Giants

It’s 1am on the Sunday before the 2019 AFL grand final.

Stephen Coniglio is furiously running up and down the training field at the GWS Giants’ facilities, begging his injured knee to come good in the darkness.

It’s 4am on the Monday before the decider. Sam Reid is holding his first child, with his wife Elissa giving birth to son Elijah moments earlier.

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The Giants aren’t letting the grand final ruin their future. Picture. Phil Hillyard

It’s 8am, 10am, 4pm, 7pm on any day that week and Phil Davis is either in a hyperbaric chamber, a cryotherapy machine, ice bath or massage table treating the calf he’d injured in the thrilling semi-final win against Collingwood.

It’s 5.05pm on September 28 at the MCG. The scoreboard reads Richmond 114 GWS 25.

Utter dejection.

Coniglio never made it onto the field. He gave up the Wednesday before, and watched in his suit.

“Being on the field with Richmond after the game,” Coniglio identifies as the most profound football moment this year.

“I had a couple of close friends play for them, having chats post grand final about their love for each other, even Dusty (Martin) — he wins the Norm Smith Medal then puts it under his top straight away and just has his premiership medal — little things like that you can’t help but admire.

“It makes you envious, not in a bad way, but you just want that for us.”

Reid, the guy who retired for two years, powered through diabetes, lost a shocking amount of weight but fought back to get to a stage he was never supposed to reach, struggled to comprehend how they’d suffered the third-biggest loss in AFL grand final history.

“I was embarrassed and angry after the game,’ Reid said.

“But the effort to get there, you can’t take that away.

Stephen Coniglio consoles teammates after the heavy grand final defeat.

“My family kept reminding me of just how hard I worked to get there, to overcome the injuries and crap.

“My luck’s got to change, I like to think so anyway. You try to be a good person and good things will happen to you.”

Davis played after passing a last-minute fitness test on the ground moments before kick-off. But after his rival Jack Riewoldt kicked five goals alone in the match, Davis was labelled “a liability” for the Giants by some commentators.

“There were certain markers I had to hit, we were very strategic and objective in what I had to do to play, and I felt really good,’’ Davis said.

“Did I play as well as I wanted to? Probably not. Did I think my body hampered me from doing what I needed to do to be part of a winning team? No.

“I still maintain my decision was the right one. I’m very content with that.”

Giants coach Leon Cameron, having taken the eight-year-old club to its fourth finals series in as many years, knew their first grand final was over by the third quarter as the Tigers romped through his team, also missing co-captain Callan Ward because of injury.

Grand final defeat was hard to take for Jeremy Cameron.

That’s a lot of time in the coaches’ box to think of what to tell young men whose dreams have been crushed so comprehensively.

“The No. 1 thing is you acknowledge the opposition, ‘Well done’,” Cameron said. “I was really proud of how our players handled themselves after the game, clearly as flat as all hell, everyone was mortified as though it’s the end of the world.

“It’s not the end of the world.

“We spoke about it for 10 or 15 minutes afterwards and just said we’ve got to learn from the opposition, take some of the good learnings we had through the month of September.

“But I don’t want the players hooked up on one game. Because if you’re hooked up one game, sometimes you never get over it.

“The key message was ‘Boys, we’re not going to be defined by one game. You’re going to be defined by a period of your career’.

“I don’t want our players going up and down like a yoyo on the basis of win-loss.”

Cameron didn’t need to look far to deal with his own inner turmoil.

The Giants are back on the training track.

A round one date with Geelong awaits.

“I’ve got a 13-year-old boy, Harry, he keeps me in perspective,” Cameron said. “He gets disappointed when we don’t win, there’s a little bit of emotion from him, he’s a kid that just loves his footy and loves the Giants. But then when things happen, about 10 minutes after we’ve lost, he’s like: ‘Ah well, who can we beat next year?’ ‘When’s the draw come out dad?’ ‘Who have we got first?’ Kids always have a wonderful ability, even though they don’t know they’re doing it, to bring you back down to Earth.”

Reid, too, knows about the perspective children provide.

“It was unbelievable week aside from the game,” he said.

“Elissa was due on grand final day, the 28th, but she hit 36 weeks just before the finals so we knew she could give birth anytime from then.

“They were close games, she had to turn off, didn’t want to go when I wasn’t there.

“It was 10pm on Sunday after the semi-final, I’d had only two hours sleep the night before so I was heading to bed, Elissa was in the shower and said ‘I think my water’s broken’.

Pre-season fitness tests are always tough.

The squad is focused and ready to make amends for their grand final defeat.

“I thought it must just be the shower water but sure enough, her water had broken. Her mum was up to help and said ‘I’ve just taken half a sleeping tablet’. I told her she was in for a long night then.

“Elijah was born at 3.38am.”

His son is not a driving motivator on grand final day, but every day. As is the backs-against-the-wall nature of being a Giant.

“We’re tough, we cop a lot, we’ve got hard skin on the outside and we take any challenge put at us head on,” Reid said.

“Being here from the start, training on a baseball field, how united we were as a whole club and how tough everyone is, those are the two words to describe us; tough, and united.”

And so begins 2020. The campaign to go one better than this year, starting with the round one zinger against Geelong on March 21 at Giants Stadium.

The marker of new beginnings was laid down three weeks ago at an outdoor dinner overlooking the rolling hills of California’s Napa Valley.

Phil Davis with coach Leon Cameron. Picture. Phil Hillyard

Members of the leadership group and some senior players met over a nice 2016 cabernet franc, awaiting their main course, when Davis and Ward rose and clinked on their glasses.

The inaugural co-captains of the Giants were honoured to have held the title, enjoyed every minute, but now the time was right for Coniglio to take over as their sole leader.

“I called mum and dad straight after, told them I was going to be captain,’ Coniglio said. “They’ve been there through a lot so that moment afterwards, calling them, was a very special moment for me and my family.”

The wider team was officially told on their first day back to training last Monday.

And they did discuss the grand final for 10 minutes in a closed meeting.

“It’s not a taboo subject,” Davis said.

“There are no scars here.

“But we should have done better for the fans. That’s one thing I’ve reflected on. Fans will always say ‘We’re proud of you’, but there’s a responsibility we have to our fans, and what we did in the last three quarters didn’t marry up to what I would have liked to have given them.

“The momentum of sport can get you.

“The thing that’s most disappointing is the margin in the end; that hurts me quite a bit.

“I understand Richmond were the better team. But I don’t think they were that much better than us.

“Leon addressed it straight away in the dressing room, he just said: ‘Today wasn’t good enough, however let’s not detract from the year we’ve had and the steps we took forward’. It was spot on.

Jeremy Cameron leads players during a run. Picture. Phil Hillyard

“As soon as you say ‘We’ve got to get better’, in that moment I feel like it changes the trajectory of what you’re dealing with.

“Since 2016 we’ve expected to be successful. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the greatest success yet, winning a premiership, but we’ve won a lot of games in the past five years.

“It was an extremely successful season bar the last three quarters, that’s how I view it.

“I feel rejuvenated and refreshed, ready to chase one more win when it matters.”

Coniglio told friends during grand final week: “I’m going to miss out on a flag here”. Immediately after the semi-final win, he flew back with his teammates.

“I reckon we got back to Sydney about 11pm, I called up a good friend of mine and said ‘Let’s work out’,” Coniglio said.

“So we came here and worked out til about 1.30am, and I just said ‘I need to play’. I needed to train on the Wednesday, Leon left it up to me, I was probably a week or two short. I didn’t think I was physically capable of contributing enough to winning a game.”

Now under Coniglio, winning “that” game is the Giants’ unequivocal mission.

“There aren’t too many things to change, we’re a good club, it’s about where’s that 5 to 10 per cent that we’re missing out on, that’s the big question we’ve got to ask ourselves,” Coniglio said.

Stephen Coniglio and Toby Greene.

GWS are looking to bounce back.

“I want to win.

“I just want success.

“We’ve come close so many times.

“We’ve got to a stage where we’re winning the majority of games, but we still haven’t won anything. That really burns, and motivates you to get better as an individual and as a team.

“As a leader, wanting to have those tougher conversations or responsibilities to make an impact, that’s where I’m at now.

“We’re blessed to have established a really good culture. I want us to be great, we’re not great yet.

“Until we’re holding up that silverware — we’re judged on winning, and that’s what I’ll be asking my players to do.”

As much as the grand final won’t haunt his players, Cameron said it also gives them no edge over their 17 rivals next season.

“We’re not entitled to that grand final spot next year, no one is,” Cameron said.

“We all start on zero.

“And we, the Giants, clearly need to make up a bit of ground to compete with some of these fantastic teams we’re playing against.

“If I was sitting here having won two flags, that would mean we’ve ended up on top.

“We haven’t ended up on top —– yet.”

Originally published as GWS Giants return to training after dashed finals dream