Selecting the trio was an “exhausting” process,GWS head of football Jason McCartney said,which began a month ago with a detailed survey of players and staff crafted by the club’s high-performance and sports psychology unit - the results of which overwhelmingly determined that Greene,Coniglio and Kelly were the obvious candidates to lead the club,together.
The tricky part was parsing the results of the survey with Greene’s reputation as a firebrand,and the six-game ban he was hit with after making contact with umpire Matt Stevic in their elimination final win over the Sydney Swans,which some AFL pundits believed should have ruled him out of being a captaincy contender.
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It means Greene won’t get the opportunity to lead the Giants in his new capacity as co-captain until round six,when they host St Kilda at Manuka Oval - one of home four matches the Giants will play in Canberra next season.
“There’s a lot of conversations around this one ... this is the information,this is how we feel about him,but then there’s that moment. And that moment doesn’t go away,” McCartney said.
“We just kept coming back to,in the end,once again,the action of madness - we can’t condone that. But there’s so much[else] that he gives and is good about Toby. The punishment,to be honest - it was there when it happened and post. He’s got to live with that. It punished us as a group and it will for five games. I’m not sure that doing any more than that[helps].
“He’s got a bit of work still to do off-field to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And the indications through our survey were with our group,too - our group loves him,but they don’t condone what happened either,and that came out. We’ve had plenty of chats with Toby,we’ll share some of that information. He’s just got to work through it. But we still landed in a position where co-captaincy and that model,he’s a big part of.”