Never surrender: GWS ready to enter MCG bear pit for AFL preliminary final
Kath Dell’Orefice has one of the toughest jobs in football this week. As president of the Giants’ cheer squad she will lead a small band of supporters into the MCG to face a riotous chorus of 85,000 Tigers supporters dressed in their raiments of yellow and black. And while the mismatch to a small patch of orange may appear cartoony, the Giants fans are not there for comic relief, not by a long shot. Nor are they any less committed.
“Our motto is, and we’ve been carrying this banner to every single game since we started, is WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER. And we won’t. The Giants will never surrender. We never say die. Like our song says, we will fight to the end and we are going to keep on fighting,” says Dell’Orefice.
Dell’Orefice and her husband Seb helped make the club’s the first ever run-through banner in 2012. Back then it had to be made in two lots, as the hall at Breakfast Point where they put it together was too small.
“We had Toby Greene, Adam Treloar and Will Hoskin-Elliot come down and help us make the banner, in between kicking the ball to our kids,” says Seb. “From day one it has felt like we’re a really close community, and people from the outside don’t get that – people think we’re corporate.”
The Dell’Orefices will again be working on the banner on Wednesday night, this time at Spotless Stadium, and Seb is hoping the club (which runs the cheer squad) will allow this Saturday’s banner to be made in crepe and that the Dell’Orefices can bring it with them as they drive down to Melbourne.
“There is a permanent banner made of fabric, like a parachute material,” says Seb, “but we like crepe – it’s more traditional and this is a final.”
Much has been made of Saturday night’s un-final-like crowd of 14,865 at Spotless Stadium, the lowest for a VFL/AFL final for more than 100 years. But Kath is quick to point out that the club was conceived less than 10 years ago and is having to establish a toehold in hostile territory – something she’ll be trying to do this Saturday.
In his post match media conference on Saturday night, Giants coach Leon Cameron said it didn’t matter whether there were 85,000 Richmond supporters and 10 or 15 Giants supporters, it had nothing to do with the result. He may have been a little under on the 10-15, and Kath believes the players will be grateful for the support.
“Being hopelessly outnumbered is not something we haven’t faced before,” says Kath. “We were at the Adelaide Oval for the qualifying final, and while it was a little over half the crowd they’re expecting this week, there was 52,000 of them and
probably about 20 of us and we gave it our all, we didn’t stop, we just kept cheering and cheering.”
So how many Giants supporters does she hope will turn up this Saturday? “Honestly, I’ll be stoked if we got 5,000,” says Kath.
“You’re getting waaaaay ahead of yourself,” interrupts Seb, who’s onto his third replay of the Giants win over the Eagles from the night before.
“Yeah, I might be a bit ahead of myself, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. If it’s a small handful, we’ll still be united and we’ll be cheering our guts out, and we won’t stop from the start of the game until the end of the game, no matter what the result is, just as we always have and we always will.”
Ironically, Kath’s sense of what she may be up against comes from her first ever experience of Australian rules football, when she saw Richmond in the Dreamtime game at the MCG.
“It just blew my mind wide open. I could not believe what the atmosphere and the passion were like. The noise of the crowd was vibrating up through my feet. I thought ‘my God this is just incredible’, and I fell in love with the game.”
Regardless of what you may think of the Giants, it is hard not to love the thought of watching Dylan Shiel, Josh Kelly, Lachie Whitfield and Stephen Conglio on the game’s biggest stage in a preliminary final, swarming and swerving through defences as though lubricated. And love or loath him Toby Greene is also compelling viewing. No less a judge than three-times premiership player Jonathan Brown says he looks born for the big occasion and the sort of character you could see standing on the dais wearing a Norm Smith medal.
Then there’s Steve Johnson, who was like a coal shoveler stoking a furnace every time the ball was in the Giants forward line on Saturday night. When the mood strikes, Johnson can do anything with a football except make it sing the anthem. It has been hinted that due to the 34year-old’s troublesome knee, Johnson is no certainty for the preliminary final. But after his six-goal performance against the Eagles, if Johnson can kick across his body without fainting, he’s playing.
One thing that is certain is that amid the yellow and black pandemonium of a packed MCG, they’ll have the support of at least a few hundred raucous and obsessive Giants fans.
“We know we’ll go as long and loud as we can. We just have to give it our best shot. That’s all we can say, really,” says Kath. “We say we’re the youngest club with the biggest heart and I think we kind of have to be.”