Sydney’s 90-point loss to Adelaide at the SCG wasn’t as big as the 112-point drubbing they copped at the hands of Port Adelaide late last year.
It didn’t come on a stage anywhere near as big as the 60-point smashing Brisbane doled out to the Swans in last year’s grand final, nor Geelong’s 81-point massacre in the 2022 decider, nor the 63-point hiding they copped from Hawthorn on the last Saturday in September back in 2014.
But it’s hard to recall a greater, more complete humiliation of perhaps the proudest club in the land than what the Crows produced on Saturday night. For no one more than Dean Cox, who in his 12th game in charge was on the receiving end of a loss of a magnitude it took John Longmire 289 games to cop.
Coming off the back of a disastrous loss to Melbourne last week that demanded a statement in response, it has become clear this isn’t just a team broken by a crippling weight of injuries, or the sting of grand final disasters past. This isn’t a young, developing team being outmuscled by stronger rivals in the manner of their brief stint in the wilderness under Longmire in 2019 and 2020, for which performances like this can be justified.
“They were sort of a bit of a rabble, just hearing them on the ground,” are the words of Crows defender Wayne Milera, speaking to the ABC post-match.
And he was bang on: this is a rabble, plain and simple.
A mess moving the ball forward to the point where the purpose of their inside 50s in the first half seemed to be to try and get Mark Keane to break the intercept marks record. He’d end the night with eight, incidentally, only denied a historic high by a dwindling supply in the second half.
All at sea defensively, to allow a Crows outfit whose strength all year has been marking talls ahead of the ball to bang on goal after goal streaming within range and letting fly with an embarrassing lack of pressure; and no longer can their frailty down back be blamed on Tom McCartin’s shift forward.
Outside a four-goal spurt to start the third quarter, that with the benefit of hindsight looks suspiciously like the result of an already-home Adelaide briefly taking their foot off the throat, this was an even greater massacre than it looked, too.
Symbolically, the sound of Swans fans loudly cheering an Angus Sheldrick behind late in the second quarter, amid a run of 12 consecutive Crows goals to end the half 65 points ahead, could not have been more meaningful.
The Crows, to be sure, were brilliant – in their manic intensity as much as their sublime skill.
A pressure factor of 208 for the night told the tale of a Swans team under siege from start to finish, not given a moment’s peace or even a spare second to reset and stop the onslaught. With only five marks in the entire second quarter at the height of the carnage, even chipping the ball around the back half to soak up some of the heat was beyond them.
But defensively, the Swans played right into their hands from start to finish. The pressure of Ben Keays’ tackle in the above goal was superb, Isaac Cumming’s quicksilver snap a delight – but none of it happens if Matt Roberts doesn’t inexplicably spoil to the worst possible spot, into the central corridor and further towards goal, leaving poor Brodie Grundy needing to do the roving.
The skill from Josh Rachele to perfectly cross into the path of a running Keays for a goal late in the third quarter was quite simply outrageous – but the Swans’ lack of structure behind the ball is damning.
Where is the sweeper sitting behind the play for exactly this kind of fast break? Why, for that matter, is key defender Joel Hamling in no-man’s land jogging through the centre circle, having seemingly followed Taylor Walker up the ground yet neither committed to marking him nor put himself in any position to stop the Crows doing as they pleased?
And perhaps the grandaddy of them all, the Crows’ 21st goal of the night: Keays casually strolling through three Swans deep inside 50, the only one actually going for a loose ball spinning towards the goal line, and soccering through another.
Yet again, it’s left to poor Grundy – who, incidentally, was about the sole Swan to put in the hard yards all night and not just for 15 minutes in the third term – to do all the work, first as the only one to go for an intercept mark, and then at ground level as the only one to try and do anything to stop Keays.
The whole night was simultaneously a celebration of the Crows’ fearsome power when at their best, and a damning indictment on the Swans’ inability to do a damn thing to stop them.
Case in point: Izak Rankine shrugging not one but two tackles hemmed into the boundary line, one of them from the Swans’ own superstar in Isaac Heeney, and dishing swiftly for an Alex Neal-Bullen goal.
Rankine is brilliant, but his escape here shouldn’t have been possible. An AFL standard side with AFL standard defensive intent does not stand for that.
Littered throughout proceedings at the SCG are the corpses of missed Sydney tackles: this one from Riley Bice to led Rachele slip away from an early goal is probably what got him subbed out at half time, a dramatic fall from grace for a mature-ager who was one of the stories of the early part of the year.
A lack of desperation? The Swans have you covered there, too – with the team 37 points down and in dire straits, I can’t really explain Matt Roberts’ unwillingness to put in a dive to try and stop this kick trickling through for a goal, leaving it to Tom McCartin to do his best to bail him out and fail.
It would have been one thing had Adelaide beaten them with their strengths: only Hawthorn take more marks inside 50 than the Crows this year, mostly via Riley Thilthorpe and Darcy Fogarty (and Taylor Walker too, I guess) ruling the skies in attack.
Yet that trio took just one mark each in attack on Saturday night, and the team just five – an equal number to the Swans, actually. That’s far and away their lowest of the season.
Instead, the Crows rarely even bothered looking to hit up leading players, because virtually everyone running towards goal had such little pressure on them that it would have been silly to not take out the middle man and have a ping – and with a scoreline of 21.5 at full time, it was bravery that paid dividends time and time again.
On the other hand, whenever the Swans moved it forward, there was little rhyme and less reason – again, with the exception of 10 minutes in the third quarter that yielded four of their five goals.
Chad Warner finished the night with seven inside 50s, normally an amount that would make an opposition coach nervous: yet Keane probably has a Sherrin-shaped bruise on his nipple from the amount of times the Swans’ most damaging midfielder hit him lace out with aimless bombs that were never going to yield anything but pain.
Keane’s 15 intercept possessions were followed on the ground by Josh Worrell with eight. Sydney’s best? Grundy, with eight of his own. That should embarrass every single Swans defender, and the entire coaching staff.
Goodness knows how Joel Amartey and Callum Mills, who found themselves suspended for this match with acts of pure idiocy over the last fortnight, were feeling watching their teammates get so comprehensively pulled apart on their own turf. Mills in particular has plenty of trust he needs to re-earn after a disastrous 18 months that began with a serious shoulder injury on the Swans’ Mad Monday in 2023.
Youth can’t be blamed for the disasterclass, either; even if it wasn’t all the established names turning it over, or being exposed for defensive howlers, or finding themselves woefully out of position.
Taylor Adams, who effectively pushed a club great in Luke Parker out of the team and eventually Sydney last year, and on Saturday night ensured Caiden Cleary was demoted to sub, had 11 disposals and gained just 49 metres for the night. At 31, having already suffered the ignominy of a late-season dropping last year, is he anything more than a list-clogger in the shape the Swans are currently in?
Peter Ladhams is younger, but he’s certainly not a viable key forward nor anything better than a passable second ruckman; sure, he’s only there because Amartey and Logan McDonald aren’t, but is it worth a look at rookie Jack Buller if this year is indeed going to be one for rebuilding?
James Jordon’s switch to tagging the opposition’s best midfielder most weeks, as opposed to last year where he mostly sat on rebounding defenders, hasn’t worked either – Jordan Dawson treated his tag with disdain in the first half, and after that there was no point in trying to sit on any Crow.
Even in times of crisis, there is always a silver lining.
For Sydney, and for Cox, it might be the realisation that 2025, for which hope has faintly flickered for the last six weeks, is shot to ribbons at the midpoint, and the cavalry aren’t coming back soon enough to salvage it.
That can be liberating: it can mean opportunities for youngsters to make key spots their own, like the impressive Angus Sheldrick in the starting midfield, or Caleb Mitchell off a wing.
The Swans had their worst nightmare on Saturday night. But if this is rock bottom, then there’s nowhere left to go but up.
