Gibbs aiming to talk the talk
BRYCE Gibbs is still getting used to many things at West Lakes. The Crows’ three-colour jumper for a start.
“I won’t lie,” says Adelaide’s prize recruit from Carlton. “It does feel a bit weird. There’s navy blue [as on the Carlton guernsey], so it is not totally foreign.”
There is coach Don Pyke’s game plan and, as Pyke, put it “the language” the Crows use in setting up their plays.
There are the new teammates.
“That’s all important to me,” said Gibbs, who joined Adelaide after 231 AFL games at Carlton where he was the No. 1 draft pick in 2006.
“Chemistry [with teammates] is huge for me. I want it at a level where I know my teammates back-to-front, inside-out so in the heat of the moment we all know what we are going to do.
“To be all on the same page — and have that flow [naturally] — is super important for me.”
And there is one Crows player who gives Gibbs an instant reminder of Carlton — and it is not lead ruckman Sam Jacobs, another former Blue along with Eddie Betts, who has made it to the Adelaide Football Club list.
Gibbs leaned across — from the interchange bench at Strathalbyn Oval on Sunday during the JLT Community Series clash with Fremantle — to tell Pyke how much of a strong impression All-Austra- lian and Crows club champion Matt Crouch was making on him. Gibbs compares Crouch with Carlton young gun sensation Patrick Cripps, the Blues’ club champion in 2015, his second AFL season.
“There’s a lot of similarities in the way they have progressed in their early years,” Gibbs noted of Crouch and Cripps. “They are inside-mids, they get a lot of the hard ball, they are professional around the club in the way they train and the way they take their careers. Halfway through the second quarter, I leaned over to Don Pyke and said, ‘Gee, Matt Crouch can get the ball’.
“I knew that from how I’d watched — and admired — Matt Crouch from afar. But up close, it is impressive — and I look forward to playing a lot of games with him.”
Gibbs, 29, is to continue to make the most of this pre-season — and the most of Adelaide’s wish for flexibility from its players. “I’m happy to keep playing,” Gibbs said of his preseason program.