It’s a cruel game, this.
It would be fair to say that the Giants were the better team for three quarters of the Qualifying Final against the Swans.
It would be fair to say GWS would be feeling pretty flat, after early misses came back to haunt them, as they always seem to do.
And it would be fair to say that when you start playing to save a game, you know you’re in trouble.
At three-quarter time of this game, it seemed as though we had a game on our hands. That game pitted the GWS Giants against Isaac Heeney and some cameos by other Sydney players. However, as the last quarter got underway, it soon became apparent that Heeney was to be left alone no longer.
In a pulsating quarter of finals footy – tough, hard, uncompromising* – it was the Swans pushing the hardest in the last five minutes to draw level and then take the lead, with Joel Amartey finally finding some space to slot a goal and have an impact after being absolutely smashed by Jack Buckley and Sam Taylor all game long to that point.
Yes, footy can be cruel, but it is a four quarter game. If you are playing three quarters of attacking footy and then going conservative, you deserve to lose. If you hang in there for three quarters and produce some excellence in the last, then you deserve to win. The final score is the only thing that matters. Excuses and your feelings don’t.
In the end, the Swans came home hard and the Giants wilted at the SCG, as Sydney rallied against GWS, who had never lost against Sydney in a final, and were 23-0 under Adam Kingsley when leading at three-quarter time. The Swans did their best Han Solo impersonation – don’t tell them the odds – and went all out.
And a home Preliminary Final is the reward.
They’ll be hard to stop from here.
There is so much to get through in this one – in such a tight contest there were winners and losers for both teams at different points of the game. Let’s jump into The Mongrel’s Big Questions and deep dive on one of the games of the year.
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