You had a right to be feeling a bit sceptical about GWS heading into Opening Round.
A team coming off one of the most brutal cases of September heartbreak in a generation had sleepwalked its way through a supremely lacklustre pre-season, were without its talismanic reigning Coleman Medallist in Jesse Hogan and best midfielder in Tom Green, and were coming up against an opposition in Collingwood probably only matched by Hawthorn in this off-season’s hype stakes.
All the signs pointed the Magpies’ way; they were, as it turned out, erroneously placed.
Who needs Jesse Hogan when Aaron Cadman and Max Gruzewski crash packs, fly for everything, and bring the footy to ground for the smalls to feast?
Who needs Tom Green when Finn Callaghan breaks out as a legitimate superstar of the game – and one that might just prove himself worthy of, say, $17 million over 10 years – with an absolutely electrifying outside midfielder performance to make the Pies look old, slow and washed?
And who needs anything else when Sam Taylor, whose status as the AFL’s unquestioned premier key back hit a wall amid injuries in 2025, proves harder to get through than a Western Australian border during COVID with quite possibly the most dominant key defender performance we’ll see all season?
The Giants went into this match without two of their biggest stars, and with a third vital cog in Kieren Briggs managing half a quarter before being poleaxed in a brutal friendly fire incident.
That they won speaks volumes of the character, quality and discipline that has summed up this team under Adam Kingsley – and leaves Craig McRae and the Pies, who threw their lot into this era late last year with some ambitious moves, with plenty of questions to answer.
Let’s start in the midfield. On paper, it’s even money – the Pies even, with a 40-36 clearances advantage, a 12-8 edge out of the centre and with a hefty 20 extra contested possessions, seem to have the edge.
The key, though, is ball movement: only one side, during their time in possession, had control over how fast the play went, where it was headed and where the dangerous space was.
Case in point: this final-quarter goal that proved it was the Giants’ day, and summed up just how they’d put the Magpies to the sword.
You can count four Giants players whose specific role in the chain is outsprinting their direct opponent back towards goal: Darcy Jones starts it all with zip away from a contest on the wing and a decisive handball inboard, keeps running, handballs even further ahead to Callaghan, who reaches the ball quicker more forcefully than Steele Sidebottom – write your ships passing in the night metaphor here – and from his knock-on onwards, Tobby Bedford and Gruzewski have both burned clear into attack, using one another to force an overlap situation and leave Xavier O’Halloran in a paddock of space near the goalsquare.
Perhaps an even greater example of the damage they wrought on the Pies’ structure with sheer pace – and exposed some stars in the process – was this Jones goal in the third term.
Josh Daicos was about best afield in the Pies’ pre-season win over Richmond; playing nominally at half-back, he moved without much care in an opponent, sliding out and around the back of contests and driving the ball into attack with neat foot skills.
Here, though, his hunger for the footy gets exposed: drawn in briefly with the ball entering Giants hands with O’Halloran, he lets his direct opponent – Jones – sprint past him goalside, where – for reasons only McRae knows – there is no defensive cover at all.
It’s the easiest thing in the world for him to cruise from 75 metres out to 25 and snap through a team-lifting goal, unchecked throughout his entire run.
You could tell how brutal this style was on the Pies’ by the casualty ward at the end.
Nick Daicos, the fittest 22-year old you’ll come across, was a non-factor in the second half, having worked so hard in th first to outrun his tagger in Bedford that the effects of cramp were obvious to see.
Bobby Hill, too, succumbed late; Sidebottom and Scott Pendlebury avoided that fate, but their football mortality has scarcely loomed larger, so lethargic did the Giants – and Callaghan especially – make those champions look when it was their turn to defend.
The Pies were once the best team in the league – and the best in recent memory – at scoring from defensive half; the Giants outdid them by eight goals on Sunday.
Under more pressure, the Giants still had avenues galore to goal; thanks mainly to the efforts of Cadman and Gruzewski, who did everything you could ask of a key forward short of taking the match by the throat with a bag of goals.
Kingsley won’t care one iota about Cadman’s stat line – five disposals and two behinds – when he’s doing things like this: flying into a pack from a rear position to spoil the taller, stronger Darcy Cameron, allowing a teammate in Callum Brown to pounce at ground level and snap through a corker.
As for losing Briggs, perhaps the most telling sequence of events from this game was that, twice in a matter of minutes shortly after their ruckman went down, the Giants banged on two goals from centre bounces.
Back-up Lachie Keeffe does excellently to deny the purer ruck in Cameron a clear run and jump at the ball; he legally holds his space under the bounce, forces a neutral Cameron hitout, and from there, the Giants take control.
It’s Pendlebury opposed to Callaghan at the bounce; within 15 seconds, the Giant has had three disposals, sprinted inside 50, and finished with a lovely left-foot goal on the run… with Pendlebury able to do nothing more than jog in his slipstream, some 20 metres away at the end.
Preventing the Pies from doing likewise – after all, their modus operandi under McRae has been similarly electric ball movement – was down to two factors.
One: the Giants swarmed the Pies wherever possible, particularly on the counterattack – a pressure factor of 214 in the third term was a primary reason why, for 20 inside 50s, the 2023 premiers failed to score a single goal.
Throughout the day, the Pies went at 67 per cent disposal efficiency. The Giants? 76.6 per cent. And the gap in pressure on the ball-carrier – and only one team having the speed to execute it at every turn – was palpable.
Nick Daicos, the Pies’ most dangerous ball-user, still had plenty of the footy to half time: but just 65 metres gained was remarkable. Reduced to chip kicks backwards or dinky handpasses, the creative machine that is the superstar at his best was almost completely reined in by an intelligent tagging job from Bedford, whose mission was to curb the impact of his touches rather than the volume.
Astonishingly, by game’s end just one Magpie had fewer metres gained than Daicos’ 88 – Tim Membrey, who had as dirty a club debut as you could ask for.
And two: Sam Taylor. The standout player on the ground by the length of the straight.
Taylor is an extraordinary footballer: he seems wiry for a key back, and that definitely contributes to his exemplary speed off the mark and in getting to contests to provide a timely fist or intercept mark.
But he’s strong as well: strong enough to regularly outmark and outpoint the outclassed Brody Mihocek (that’s a lot of outs, eh?), or Tim Membrey, or Dan McStay, or whoever he decided to be on at every given time.
It felt like every time the Pies went inside 50, they kicked it straight to him, a combination of both the Giants’ excellent upfield pressure forcing predictable kicks into attack, and Taylor’s almost psychic reading of the play.
He kicked a goal, too, the Giants’ first of the season, just to cap off the day he had. If three Brownlow votes aren’t in the offing, then we might as well just stop even considering the defenders for any votes at all.
Only time will tell whether the return of Green and Hogan sees the Giants rein in their ultra-aggression and speed, confident in their ability to match rivals for the hard ball and take more reliable contested grabs in attack.
Then again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; maybe it will be up to those two stars to fit into this plan. It’s a handy little headache for Kingsley to work with.
This is a hungry team we’re seeing before us; one that seems to know its best chance at a flag hasn’t quite gone yet, but could ebb away at any time.
As for the Pies, the season is long and a poor start doesn’t have to signify anything; but there were worrying signs at ENGIE Stadium for a team with all chips in.