Leon Cameron

But that's been the end result, hasn't it, of the 23 that have been out there? Absolutely, and it's a

credit to them, those players, and it's also a credit to Dean Cox and his coaches and Leon Cameron, I guess, and the whole footy department who managed to get them to this situation.

You can't help but dips your lid to what they've achieved with the personnel that they had unavailable.

We so often focus on Brisbane and Geelong and Hawthorne, given the premierships they've won since the turn of the century.

And did you give it back? So we had an argument.

I said, does Leon Cameron know you're playing? You're on half a million bucks, mate, and you're chasing balls around here at Burnley Park.

In the end, we had a laugh about it.

So that's Toby Green for you, playing cricket at Glen Iris.

...

in the way they played, and then they had, uh, on this, having worked the game and spoke to Leon Cameron before the last game, they had a few days off, and then they really geared up into the Brisbane final, and they, they came out in the Brisbane final with as much en- energy and intent and focused on defensive pressure and, and how they could dismantle Brisbane.

They then had another two weeks off.

So th- so it's that, that fine balance of giving your players enough time to rest and recuperate, to be able to kinda get over the emotional win, but then be able to really ramp up and get enough training, enough loading.

The big man, Kevin Sheedy.

He was obviously the inaugural coach of the Giants.

And we've got a clip ready to go.

We want to play his first pump-up speech, that very first one, round one.

And that was awesome for the, you know, fundamental blocks of the footy club and setting up what it is today.

But yeah.

coming here and driving to like black town we'll set up a black town at that point and um everything was out of like demandables and we just thought this is afl footy we're loving it we're on the m4 for those in probably the busiest road in australia and driving kind of like an hour and a half in the morning to get to training you finish do a full day come back an hour an hour and a bit um stuck in traffic but we're just thinking how good living the dream which it was and so know we're at bucktown for a little bit before i think you know the club realized you know we need it need it stronger and and bigger base and kind of we moved to sydney olympic park but those early times was a mixture of getting smashed losing by like 100 points monday and tuesdays were hard because like it was just like you're just trying to get over that work yeah incredibly like hard working kind of players that we drafted so trying to like still work hard and sift out the ones that don't work hard but then you know it quickly kind of you know changed that second year it was like we're going to get better and then we won one game you know we've gone from winning two in our first year to one in our second year and everyone was kind of like where's the club going this isn't part of the plan um but you know there's some really key people um Dave Matthews our CEO Craig Lambert head of welfare obviously our coaching staff that were you know Graham Allen our GM who was stick to the process we're going to be really good soon and you know 2016 we obviously reached the preliminary final home preliminary final and things kind of escalated really quickly and you could see the talent and the hard work on show.

And it quickly became a destination club within four or five years.