Dermott Brereton: Ivan Drago Giants can KO Rocky Balboa Tigers — even if they lose Grand Final
Hawthorn champion Dermott Brereton worked closely with GWS in their first years and knows just how hard these players have worked to get to where they are now. Don’t be fooled — the Grand Final hasn’t been handed to them.
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Greater Western Sydney is a vastly different team to the one so often criticised for trying to win on talent alone.
The Giants reached their first two preliminary finals that way.
They were better than the opposition that the Premiers — Western Bulldogs in 2016 and Richmond in 2017 — faced on Grand Final day.
And the young Giants of ‘17 were not overawed playing in front of 94,000 mainly Tigers fans at the MCG.
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Their core players haven’t lost their talent, it’s just that this time they have made their way through the final series with raw power and real grunt.
They have bashed and crashed their way to this Grand Final.
In the past four games, they increased their physical output each time they stepped on to the park.
If it increases again, look out.
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If Richmond are the Rocky Balboa of the league, the Giants have stepped back into the ring as Ivan Drago.
With Lachie Whitfield’s return from keyhole surgery last week for appendicitis, the Giants will field six players who were originally selected inside the top 10 in their respective draft years.
Add Jeremy Cameron to that list because of his status pre-draft — 17-year-old access selection — and they have seven top-10 draft picks.
The talent is there, no doubt. But what might surprise a few is six players started as humble rookies.
Don’t just think of the Giants as white-collar workers. They have more than their fair share of players who did it the hard way.
I had the privilege of working with the young Giants forwards in the early years and I was annoyed by the frequent trash talk in the media.
Melbourne media described a group of spoiled brats who had been handed a cushy lifestyle
and an easy entry pass to AFL success.
Rumours suggested they were comfortable with themselves.
Those rumour-mongers didn’t see these kids front up to training to learn each week after 15-goal losses each game. Each week I’d see these kids, see their emotions and see their self-confidence had been walloped.
I’d talk about what they needed to keep doing and how they could train various techniques into their repertoire that would benefit them in the short and long-term.
You could see their spirits rise, see them try the next weekend, and see the team fail again by another big margin.
The next training run, the entire process would start again. And through its unique circumstance, these talented kids have learned resilience.
All the way through were two youngsters who did not like losing. Not that anyone does, but these two hated it with a passion.
And they played with a 1970s mentality that if you played against them and beat them, they would try to do something to you that would make you think twice the next time you played them.
One was named Jeremy and the other was Toby.
I would tell my media mates long before his first suspension that Jeremy Cameron will be no stranger to the tribunal.
And my mates would ask how this first-year kid Toby Greene, playing in the middle for the Giants, so good at finding the footy?
I’d tell them Toby’s a little different to your average 18-year-old. He’s got swagger and he fears nothing. Not a thing.
Those two young men have grown into warriors who happen to have real class as footballers.
I have always had a soft spot for the Tigers. I donated back in the day to the Save Our
Skins Appeal and I have loved watching the Tigers over the past six or seven seasons.
It’s hard not to love a rags-to-riches story.
Inspired by their journey, I bought a Tigers membership a couple of years ago even though they had a habit of exiting in the first week of the finals.
But now they are the competition’s pacesetters.
I have loved seeing these young Giants become men and now they are being rewarded
for all their efforts.
To see young lads grow up and into their dreams is as fulfilling for me as it is for
former Giants football manager Graeme ‘Gubby’ Allan.
Many others contributed to the rise of the Giants, but he has his fingerprints all over this club.
The Tigers are starting as warm favourites.
But, just like in the movie, if Richmond is the Rocky Balboa of this game and ends up beating the GWS as Ivan Drago, it just might take such a beating like Rocky did, that he might never fully recover.
Originally published as Dermott Brereton: Ivan Drago Giants can KO Rocky Balboa Tigers — even if they lose Grand Final