Port Adelaide star Robbie Gray is finally getting the credit he deserves
FORMER St Kilda and North Melbourne onballer Nick Dal Santo says Port Adelaide star Robbie Gray has established himself as an elite player in the AFL and footy fans outside SA are finally recognising his talent
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NICK Dal Santo reckons it wasn’t that long ago Victorian footy fans would go to watch their team play against Port Adelaide and walk away saying ‘gee that Robbie Gray’s a good player isn’t he?’
“It would take them to see what he does to their direct interest being their club to say ‘oh wow this guy really is good’,” Dal Santo said.
It’s almost become a running joke - how many times can senior coach Ken Hinkley be asked how good is Robbie Gray and how many different ways can he respond.
“He’s a good player isn’t he? Good player,” Hinkley said dryly in Round 19 last year when Gray kicked the miracle goal to beat St Kilda.
But if it takes rival supporters to see his brilliance with their own eyes to fully grasp it, then Carlton got a good dose at the MCG last weekend.
The 18th-ranked Blues could smell an upset against the Power only for Gray to kick three vintage first-half goals and turn the game.
The first was a snap from the boundary, the second a set-shot from a juggling mark and the third was just ridiculous.
Gray came charging out of the forward 50m to trap a loose ball just as the net was closing in on him.
He was surrounded by five Carlton defenders and about to walk into a Bermuda Triangle when he ran one way and all five Blues went the other, and he kicked the goal on the run.
After 191 AFL games, three All-Australians and club best-and-fairests, Gray no longer inexplicably flies under the radar in footy-mad Victoria and is getting the respect that he deserves.
“He’s now in that conversation when you speak about the best small forwards in the game, people always mention him,” Dal Santo said.
“It’s not an oversight anymore, people don’t say ‘oh sorry I forgot about Robbie Gray’, that doesn’t happen anymore.”
But from an opposition viewpoint, that was never questioned.
“When you do an opposition report you go through the generic stuff like ball movement and then you focus on some threats and areas you don’t want to get caught out in,” said Dal Santo who played 322 games for St Kilda and North Melbourne.
“And when you spoke about Port Adelaide it was always about Robbie Gray.”
But Gray doesn’t seek the limelight, the recognition or to raise his profile.
The 30-year-old is softly spoken, he does barely any media, doesn’t feature in brand advertising on TV, doesn’t pop up on regular footy talk shows or use social media.
But he is happy to put his name to a cause like SA Health as an ambassador to raise awareness of cancer.
And therein lies one of the incredible things about Gray’s season this year, that he is in arguably career-best form after fighting cancer last October and having chemotherapy.
Yet Gray turned up to pre-season training from day one with a new look, his head shaved from his treatment, but with the same gritty determination and workrate that saw him not miss a single session.
He was on a modified training program in December but it was still described by fitness staff as a “significant workload” for any player approaching Christmas, and that he was a dream to work with because he knows his body inside-out.
“Funnily enough this has been a lot better than last pre-season, I’ve done a lot more training and am feeling better,” Gray said in February.
“This time last year I was struggling a bit and ended up playing only a half of a JLT Game, but this year I’ve done a lot more match practice and once all that stuff (treatment) was out of the way I was keen to get back into things.”
Gray’s running times were on par with anything he’d done in the past and Hinkley said his little champion was as fit as he’d ever seen him, and it rolled into the home-and-away season.
He had to sit out the Round 1 win over Fremantle after being suspended for a bump on West Coast’s Jeremy McGovern in the JLT Series but exploded after that.
In 13 games this season he’s averaged 22.3 disposals, 1.8 goals, 4.5 clearances and 3.8 tackles. Last year - his third All-Australian season - those numbers were 18.9, 2.0, 2.8 and 2.5.
But numbers don’t tell the full story.
His game-breaking influence has seemingly gone to another level, so much so that one Adelaide footy scribe in May jokingly Tweeted “Am convinced Port would be 0-8 if R. Gray hadn’t played a game this season”.
Ollie Wines and Tom Jonas have been very good too but Gray has turned games in a way few other can this season.
How many players in the competition can have 39 disposals and 10 clearances in the midfield against Essendon then kick six goals including five in a quarter as a permanent forward a fortnight later against the Crows?
He kicked four goals including the clutch one to put Port Adelaide in front against Hawthorn in Launceston in Round 11, he had 32 disposals and a goal against Geelong in Round 5, his three goals stole momentum against Carlton in Round 15 and his toughness and smarts took total control with 28 and 3 against the Western Bulldogs in Round 14.
Gray is now doing it so often that Port Adelaide coaches have almost given up trying to describe who he is and what he does.
“I would just be another person pouring on the superlatives to what he brings to our footy team and he’s got some special talent and we certainly need that,” Port’s midfield coach Michael Voss said last month.
“He’s had a really good pre-season and his body is in really good shape, he’s had to overcome a few things and the way he’s come out and played, his form has been outstanding.”
But Voss only gets his hands on Gray some of the time, to be exact, 41 per cent of game time this season. The other 59 per cent he’s been in the forward line where he’s kicked 24.9.
Last year the split was 28 per cent midfield, 72 per cent forward and Gray kicked 47.29.
The two years before that the split was more midfield at 69 and 67 per cent time on the ball.
At training during the week Gray attends the forward line meetings but will meet with Voss in his own time if he knows he’s going to be required in the engine room, but the forwardline for now is home.
“I like him forward,” Dal Santo said.
“We always speak about these young kids who come into the league starting in the midfield and ‘but we’d love to get him into the midfield’.
“I reckon we’re now starting to see players like Robbie Gray whose best position is forward and they can turn the game more when they’re there.
“Port has this luxury with enough others to go into the midfield and if everything was equal I would assume Kenny Hinkley would want Robbie to play forward and stay forward.”
That’s where he’ll be at Adelaide Oval this afternoon when Port Adelaide hosts St Kilda, almost 12 months to the day (July 29) to the corresponding game last year when the Ryder-to-Gray masterpiece unfolded with 10 seconds on the clock.
For Hinkley that night words didn’t really seem enough to describe the sheer brilliance of that goal. The understanding between ruckman and midfielder, the pace to run away from everyone at the stoppage, the poise to aim for goal and the skill to put it through.
There’ve been a couple of Gray freakshows since and after his five-goal match-winning quarter in the Showdown this year, Hinkley was asked where he rates.
Again, Hinkley did his best to answer the question but in the end it was “simple”.
“He’s in the top lot, everyone knows that, you don’t do what Robbie’s done three-time best-and-fairest, All-Australians, Showdown Medals, he’s a great player, simple,” Hinkley said.
And now it’s not just South Australia but an entire nation that knows it.
Watch Nick Dal Santo on The Weekend Lowdown, Thursdays at 6.30pm on FOX FOOTY, channel 504 on Foxtel.
Originally published as Port Adelaide star Robbie Gray is finally getting the credit he deserves
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