Taylor Adams will begin life at his third AFL club as the senior member of an off-season recruiting quartet that shapes as Sydney’s best-credentialled in the past 40 years. And arguably ever.
The 206-game ex-GWS and Collingwood midfielder will join Brodie Grundy, James Jordon and Joel Hamling in taking to 274 the total number of players to join the Swans from opposition clubs since 1897. And he will bring to the SCG more experience than all but seven of them.
Only Paul Roos (269), Len Thompson (268), Peter Everitt (252), Daniel Bradshaw (222), Brett Allison (219), John Murphy (214) and Bill Picken (207) have joined the Swans for the first time with more games behind them.
Grundy, a 194-game veteran from Collingwood and Melbourne, will rank ninth among the top 20 most experienced imports, which also includes Dermott Brereton (189), Paul Williams (189), Richard Osborne (187), Wayne Schwass (184), John Scarlett (183), Tony Lockett (183), Scott Russell (182), Lance Franklin (182), Paul Callery (181), Gary Cowton (169) and Nick Daffy (165).
Hamling will bring to the SCG the experience of 91 games with the Western Bulldogs and Fremantle, and Jordon 65 games at Melbourne, making the 2024 quartet potentially the best-credentialled group of Swans imports in one year since the arrival of Greg Williams, Gerard Healy, Merv Neagle, Bernard Toohey, Jim Edmond, Glen Coleman and David Bolton in 1986.
Significantly, the new quartet have played a combined 28 finals. All four have played in a grand final, with the less-acclaimed pair of Hamling and Jordon having tasted premiership success.
As good as the Swans’ import group of 1986 was – and became – they had played only 16 finals between them before joining the club. And Neagle’s two grand finals and one flag with Essendon was the group’s only experience on the last day of the season.
Ruled out with injury to start the season, once he plays his first game for the Swans, Adams will join a small group of players to debut in red and white after their 30th birthday. Among 1448 players all-time to the end of 2023, there have been only 33.
The list is headed by 1923 debutant Billy Billett. He was 35 years 5 days in the first of three games for South Melbourne after 12 games at Fitzroy in 1918. The second-oldest Swans debutant was Craig Davis, father of 2005 Swans premiership hero Nick Davis. He was 33 years 185 days when in 1988 he played the first of nine Sydney games after 154 games at Carlton, North Melbourne and Collingwood from 1973-83.
The third-oldest was Peter Evertt at 32 years 332 days in 2007. He played 39 games for the Swans after 252 games with St Kilda and Hawthorn from 1993-2006.
Set to wear the #3 Sydney jumper worn famously by Jarrad McVeigh, Adams has had a hurried change of clubs after he stunned the football world last October, requesting a trade to the Swans after he missed Collingwood’s 2023 premiership through injury.
Eight years in the Collingwood leadership group and vice-captain of the 2023 premiers, he decided he needed a fresh start after 10 years in black and white highlighted in 2020 when he won All-Australian and the Collingwood best and fairest.
He was runner-up in the 2017 Collingwood best and fairest, had six top 10 finishes, and was runner-up to West Coast’s Luke Shuey for the Norm Smith in the 2018 grand final.
Adams’ move to Sydney is something of a home-coming for the ever-combative midfielder, who was born and raised in Mount Duneed, just outside the Victorian coastal town of Torquay, near Geelong, but began his career with Sydney’s cross-town rivals GWS.
Captain of the Geelong Falcons in the Victorian Under 18 competition in his draft year and a member of an All-Australian U18 side that included Grundy, he was always keen to play in the AFL outside Victoria, privately hoping to go with Brisbane while also linked pre-draft to Richmond.
He was claimed by the Giants with pick #13 in a hot 2011 draft after the Lions had overlooked him at #8, instead taking highly-rated but subsequently unproductive ruckman Billy Longer.
This was after GWS, armed with six of the first seven picks and 11 of the first 14, took Jon Patton (#1), Stephen Coniglio (#2), Dom Tyson (#3), Will Hoskin-Elliott (#4), Matt Buntine (#5) and Nick Haynes (#7), split only by Chad Wingard, who went to Port Adelaide at #6.
The Giants added Adam Tomlinson (#9), Liam Sumner (#10) and Toby Greene (#11), and after Brisbane took Sam Docherty (#12), claimed Adams (#13). Richmond took Brandon Ellis, now at Gold Coast, with pick #15, which had been earmarked for Adams if he was still available.
Adams, a self-confessed “book person”, played two years and 31 games in the Giants but was terribly homesick and was traded to Collingwood in a straight swap for the Pies’ Heath Shaw.
Having played 175 games at Collingwood for a career total of 206, Adams ranks eighth on the games list for the draft class of 2011 behind original GWS signing Jeremy Cameron (230), Brisbane draftee turned Collingwood star Jack Crisp (226) and Adelaide’s Rory Laird (218). Wingard, now at Hawthorn, is fourth at 218 games from Greene (215), Giants draftee turned Essendon midfielder Dylan Shiel (211) and retired St Kilda/Carlton utility Jack Newnes.
It was a draft from which only one Sydney pick is still at the club – Harry Cunningham. And he was the club’s fifth and last selection at #93 in the rookie draft – one of the value-plus selections all-time.
Earlier the Swans had taken father/son Tom Mitchell (now at Collingwood) at #21, followed by Jordan Lockyer from West Perth at #43, Alex Brown from the Oakleigh Chargers at #61 and the Bendigo Bombers’ Shane Biggs with rookie pick #13.
Lockyer and Brown didn’t play a game, while Biggs played six games in red and white before a move to the Western Bulldogs, where he added 57 games and was a member of the Dogs’ 2016 grand final win against Sydney. He retired at 26.
Averaging 24.03 possessions a game over his career, Adams is the No.3 possession-winner from the Class of 2011 behind only Shiel and Crisp. He’s had 43 games of 30 possessions or more – only three short of Luke Parker’s 46 in 78 fewer games.
At a time in which Australia is engulfed by Taylor Swift fever, Adams will be the first player with the Christian name Taylor to play for the Swans.
There have been nine players with the surname Taylor, but only 1953-57 club champion Jim Taylor, who played 153 games from 1949-61, played more than 36 games in red and white.
Oddly, in 12 years and 206 games in the AFL, Adams has played only eight times against Sydney for a 4-4 split and only four times at the SCG, where he has a 1-3 record.
But his six Brownlow Medal votes against the Swans is an equal career-best. He polled three votes against Sydney at the SCG in a one-point Collingwood win in 2017, when he had 31 possessions and 11 tackles, and in the 2020 Covid season, when he had 29 possessions and a goal in a nine-point Collingwood win at the Gabba.
