Make no mistake sports fans, what you’re witnessing right now is the start of Greater Western Sydney’s reign as one of the league’s perennial contenders. The Giants might not be the best team this year, but by the end of the decade there is little doubt that’ll be their title.

You know you’ve made it when the Melbourne media is pulling for you to play on Friday nights.

GWS deserves a Friday night game and Round 23 is the perfect time, writes @ClarkyHeraldSun https://t.co/R2ZBa4HD1V pic.twitter.com/pWZDPnvcYr — SuperFooty (AFL) (@superfooty) May 23, 2016

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GWS have arrived, for real this time.

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» A Giants final could be moved from Spotless

Last season’s hot start, which saw them reach 7-4 at the halfway mark of the season, gave way to a injury-riddled limp across the finish line – with an inverse record of 4-7. For that to happen this year, a remarkable turn of events would have to come about.

Unfortunately for the 17 other combatants, that remarkable turn of events probably won’t be enough to stop this side – perhaps it could this year. Beyond that, it is abundantly clear after nine rounds that the Greater Western Sydney Giants, the leviathan that we all knew was lurking just beneath the expansionist waves, has surfaced.

In the pre-season, we discussed what made the Giants the clear winner in the expansion side battle. This goes beyond the Giants’ blue-chip talent, and their emerging home ground advantage, and the burgeoning balance of their draft capital.



They’ve shown in the first nine rounds of this year a tactical flexibility that is unparalleled in the AFL.

Here’s just a taste: over the weekend, GWS became the first team in 2016 to break even on the inside 50 count against the Western Bulldogs. They were also the first team to control the ball for more of the game than the tri-colours in 2016 – they busted Footscray’s defensive mechanism.

Part of this is likely to do with the Dogs playing in unfamiliar surrounds, but much of it is to do with the way Greater Western Sydney can attack. They’re a zone-busting prime mover, mixed with an inside meat grinder, that can play a slow, possession-based game in between. If you’re thinking that sounds like everything, you’d be correct.

After a slowish start to this year, the Giants’ offensive scheme has clicked unlike any other in the league: GWS are averaging an insane 129.5 points per game in the past six weeks, which is a clear six goals above the league average, and three goals more than winning teams. Six wins have followed, and the Giants now sit third on the ladder.

But on a more important ladder – ahem – the Giants now sit as the best team in the league. This is my schedule-adjusted percentage ladder, which was first introduced when we caught up with Geelong a couple of weeks ago. At that time, the Cats were narrowly ahead of the Giants, but that is no longer the case.

Schedule adjusted Straight GWS 152.3 148.0 Geelong 142.7 152.0 Sydney 136.1 144.2 Adelaide 130.8 118.4 Western Bulldogs 130.2 133.9 WCE 126.1 129.6 Hawthorn 121.5 102.7 North Melbourne 116.7 130.9 Melbourne 110.6 113.6 Port Adelaide 101.4 100.5 StKilda 97.1 84.9 Collingwood 93.2 94.4 Richmond 86.2 81.6 Fremantle 74.2 68.4 Carlton 73.6 76.7 Gold Coast 67.5 74.5 Brisbane Lions 63.9 62.1 Essendon 61.3 59.7

As it stands, the Giants are playing at a level in keeping with a 16 to 18 win team, which would almost certainly guarantee them a top-four spot, if not a finish in the top two.

Water under the bridge and all that, sure, but based on what we’ve seen in 2016, you’d be a fool to rule a line through this team’s premiership chances as soon as this year.



Home ground advantage

Spotless Stadium, the Giants’ home ground on the site of the Sydney Olympics, some 20 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD, is rapidly emerging as a fortress of the ilk we’ve tended to associate with the Western Australian and South Australian teams in recent years.

In the past two seasons, GWS have won themselves a 10.4 points home field advantage at Spotless, using the methodology outlined here. That is along the lines of the advantage at play for most interstate AFL teams, and is a sign that the Giants have grown out of their expansion-side skin.

Gold Coast are 16 points better at home than away, but have a negative average margin at home as well as away – Metricon isn’t a fortress quite yet.

GWS’s advantage will certainly grow this year, given they’ve won their three games at Spotless by 75, 91 and 25 points. However, unlike other interstate sides, the Giants play three of their home games at Manuka Oval in Canberra. While this might be questionable from a short-term fan engagement perspective – they didn’t play at their actual home ground until Round 6 this year – it has worked to their advantage from a footballing point of view: if Manuka is added to Spotless, the Giants have built themselves an 18.2 point per game home field advantage.

That’s huge, and it’s only eight points behind the West Coast Eagles, who’ve acquired the strongest home advantage over this period (26.9 points per game).

Taking care of your own digs has been the formula for interstate contenders in the AFL era, and so that the Giants are building towards this level of outright strength at home sets a solid foundation.

GWS play Sydney, Carlton, Collingwood, West Coast and Fremantle at Spotless, and Richmond at Manuka, for the remainder of this year. As it stands, they’d all be tentatively pencilled as wins, save for the Sydney game in Round 12.

Flexing their muscles

Leon Cameron is an Alastair Clarkson Coaching Academy graduate, spending two seasons at Hawthorn from the end of the 2010 football year to the end of the 2013 football year. Cameron was poached by the Giants as part of a transition plan from inaugural coach Kevin Sheedy, and he’s since signed an extension to that original contract to the end of 2018.



The influence of Clarkson and Hawthorn’s preference for a malleable set of tactics that can adjust to game situation is clear. The Giants can do it all, and their playing stocks mean they can do it all well. Like every other team, it all starts in the midfield.

Cameron has his side playing with a bias to the contest: their hard-running midfield group chases and harasses the opposition in defence, and looks to press hard in straight lines on turnovers. But the Giants are also a very capable zone-defence team, and can most certainly play slow and control the ball when required. They are quite Geelong-like in their desire to vary the pace of play, and dictate to their opponent.

So far this year, the Giants have won the time in possession battle in eight of their nine games – the lone loss coming in their Round 3 defeat at the hands of Sydney. GWS have spent an average of 45.1 per cent of their games in possession of the ball, a league-leading mark, and close to ten per cent longer than the league average.

But in a sign of how hard these guys hit the contest, the Giants have out-tackled their opponents by ratios of up to 2:1 when adjusted for time in possession. In the weekend just passed, GWS laid 83 tackles on the Western Bulldogs – who threw upwards of ten men at the contest in the early stages – despite also winning the time in possession battle by close to 14 minutes. The Bulldogs’ players were effectively tackled almost once every 30 seconds when they had the ball.

When the Giants attack, it tends to be in straight lines. When it comes off, which is often, it’s a sight to behold.

This week's entry into the "holy crap the @GWSGIANTS are good" gif competition is a cracker #AFL pic.twitter.com/OvAgkNfzd5 — Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) May 24, 2016



Those straight-line runners are what make the Giants so deadly, both from clearances and on turnovers. All it takes is for He-Man Callan Ward to bust through the congestion, and one of half a dozen runners will surge the ball down the field. Their spread from stoppages is second to none.

It leaves the opposition with a terrible dilemma: hang back with an extra or two off of a stoppage to clog running lanes, but the Giants will then move into ball control mode and cut you up with precise ball movement. Go toe-to-toe, like the Dogs tried, and you’ll be pounded into submission at the contest, and concede open space.

We all know the story about the Giants’ forward line. Jeremy Cameron was set to become the best forward line player in the competition until Lance Franklin surged back to his best. The Giant has kicked 4.2 goals a game since returning from a four-game suspension, and if he keeps up his current pace he will probably finish second to Franklin in the Coleman race despite playing 80 per cent of the season.

Jonathon Patton is a constant threat, even if his numbers suggest he’s middling at best, and the fleet of medium-sized forward half threats has been made omnipotent through the addition of Steve Johnson. Rory Lobb has lopped his way into many people’s hearts with his contested marking prowess.

But like most great sides in the new pace and space era, the Giants have an army of excellent ball users and decision makers populating their back line. Heath Shaw’s transformation from petulant has-been to distributor in chief has more than justified the price the Giants paid (former 13th pick Taylor Adams) the Pies to secure him. Shaw’s stat line from the weekend just gone was a like a controversial stand up comic… you’re left saying to yourself “really? He went there?”, but then laugh when you consider the reality of what just happened: 36 kicks, 100 per cent efficiency, and a paltry 1125 metres gained.

Joel Patfull is another veteran whom the Giants paid a seemingly high price for – pick 21 in 2014 to Brisbane – but like Shaw is a remarkably good user of the ball and decision maker. The duo are assisted in the defensive stakes by Phil Davis, who came from the Crows when the Giants entered the competition, to make up an incredibly solid rebounding back line group.

Stacked at every line

This is where the imminent reality starts to hit home: the Giants are stuffed with blue-chip stocks at nearly every position, and are set up for a run at multiple premierships in the next six or seven years.



The Giants, remarkably, entered the year with the second youngest list in the competition – ahead of just the Brisbane Lions, who’ve not kept a player they’ve drafted past the age of 24 since 1972.

Their age profile, per the wonky graph blog The Arc, is heavily tilted towards the 21 to 23 bracket – the bracket that points to a side that is still three or four years away from prime age and contention, not a side leading the league in schedule-adjusted percentage one-third of the way through the year.

I don’t need to rattle off the names, because you know them all. You don’t even need to dig far beneath the surface; the Giants are absolutely loaded with high-quality talent taken at the top of the draft, or identified as part of their initial recruiting zones during their expansion years.

The astute addition of veterans in areas of need, like Shaw, was in part enabled by the manner in which the Giants went about building their list. The list they managed to build in the early years would look comically, almost unfairly, loaded were it not for trades. Can you imagine Tom Boyd, Adam Treloar, Taylor Adams, Dom Tyson, Josh Bruce and Tomas Bugg fitting into this side now? That’s not to mention the depth players that the Giants have traded away for draft picks or handy pieces in this time.

To make matters even scarier, the Giants have a bunch of talented youngsters lurking in their NEAFL side. Adam Tomlinson can’t crack the team despite laying waste to the league – including a 52 possession effort over the weekend – and Jack Steele would probably win a spot in the Hawthorn midfield right now. Jacob Hopper, an academy product, has stormed onto the AFL scene and has already been compared to a young Patrick Dangerfield.

There’s another gaggle of academy players due to emerge this year too, and the Giants planned ahead: they currently have two extra first round picks and an extra second rounder with which to secure them.

Is it any wonder the Melbourne clubs are freaking the hell out?

There are weaknesses, as there are for any club, and they mostly come down to depth. However, unlike last year, the Giants have developed viable back-up options for key positions: Lobb is a more than adequate secondary ruckman to Shane Mumford – wow we didn’t even talk about Mummy – while Nick Haynes or Tomlinson would be able to step up in the absence of Phil Davis.



The Giants are still a middling travelling side, although as we discussed last week that doesn’t seem to hold back the West Coast Eagles. It will be a matter of time until the Giants click into gear outside of the comforts of New South Wales.

There’s undoubtedly going to be list management pressures to navigate through too, although this will be ameliorated by the introduction of the AFL’s new collective bargaining agreement at the conclusion of this season, which will likely give clubs a heap more salary cap space to play with.

Let’s not dwell on those now though, because the rise of the Giants is an overwhelmingly positive development for the AFL.

As I closed with last week, AFL fans everywhere should begin to accustom themselves to seeing a lot more of the orange and grey in the years ahead.

The people of Western Sydney have lucked their way into half a decade of excellent Australian Rules football.

The Giants Dynasty is upon us.