GIANTS recruiter and award-winning journalist Emma Quayle reveals how the GIANTS snared Sam Taylor and Brent Daniels in the 2017 NAB AFL Draft. The duo have have played a key role in the club's push to its maiden Grand Final.

This time two years ago the recruiting team was out on the road. Two days after the GIANTS lost the preliminary final to Richmond we got in the car outside our Melbourne office early in the morning and headed off to meet a handful of draft prospects in Swan Hill and Albury.

The second stop we made on that trip was at Brent Daniels’ house. We had already been to see Binga one afternoon at Geelong Grammar, where he went to school, but he was tough to get much out of in that initial meeting, friendly but on the quiet side. The best story he told us was that he had volunteered to get up early every day to ring the bell in the boarding house. It was all to make sure he got the best room.

There was a lot to still play out, when we pulled into the Daniels’ place at 5.30pm on Brownlow Medal night. Like every club we spend a lot of time every year talking to boys that we end up with no chance to pick; on that trip we met a kid who was chosen very high, one who wound up a rookie and two who were taken not long after we chose Brent and Sam Taylor. It wasn’t until Matthew Kennedy and Devon Smith left during the trade period that we ended up with 27 and 28. Had we accepted 30 from Carlton for Kennedy rather than 28, we might not even have Sam Taylor running around in our backline.

What we did know by then was that we wanted and needed to  draft a small forward or two. We had been watching as many of them as we could all season – they’re all a little bit different –to work out which of them would be the best fit for us. What we really knew was that we loved Binga and what we thought he could bring our team: some speed, some agility, some skill and a tough, dogged nature too.

We could see a spot for him in our side, and everything we found out about him told us he would slot well into our club, too. He knew he had to move from home to play for an AFL team, and had already shifted from Swan Hill to school. People told us how hardnosed and competitive he was; he wanted to win no matter who he was playing for. He turned up each week despite playing in just four wins for his whole draft year.

There were other things. He loved and cared for his teammates, while also expecting a level of commitment from them; in a year that can encourage the individual more than the team, Binga was all about the team. He had shown a bit of leadership: if Binga says something is OK, the rest of the boys think it’s OK, one coach told us. And he gave his teams lots of energy. The more we got to know him, the more he opened up; I’m pretty sure he knew we wanted to pick him in the end. To meet his family that night made us think we’d love to get them in, too. When you draft so many kids from interstate, that’s important.

Sam Taylor was a little different. At the start of 2017 we weren’t necessarily on the lookout for a young key defender. But as the season unfolded two things happened: we started to think it might be good to get started on developing someone, so that they were ready to go in a few years. And Sam just kept growing on us, week by week. We loved how competitive he was. He did his job with courage, and not much fuss. We used to send around text messages with clips of his bravest marks and most desperate efforts. And we thought he had the athleticism to do the things he had been doing at a higher level.

When we met Sam for the last time before the draft – about a month out - we drove to his home about an hour north of Perth. There was a naivete and innocence about Sam that still comes through in the honest way that he plays; one of the better stories about his draft year was that when West Australian coach Peter Sumich asked what had been the best part of the AFL Academy’s high performance camp in the USA at the start of his draft year, Sam’s immediate answer was “Disneyland.”

Sam has five brothers and a little sister, and we talked a lot about how he might handle moving so far away from his family. We knew it would be a big deal, but we had also had a sense that he handled the things that came his way with wide eyes and a really open approach. There wasn’t too much that seemed to worry or unsettle him. From talking to Sam and to other people about him, we formed a feeling he might really like the move, and thrive in a big city like Sydney.

From there, we needed to try to get them. Without any live pick trading, that meant a long wait and some luck. Our first pick that year was at No. 11; obviously, we needed to group and rank a much larger bunch of players for 27 and 28, with a bit of information about which other clubs might like Brent and Sam but no way of really knowing if they would snapped up by someone else before we had the chance to get them. Had we had pick 30 rather than 28 – and had to decide which might make it past pick 29 – there would have been some nerves.

We knew we liked them, we knew how much we liked them and we were sure they could both help us. When we sat down as a recruiting team the night before the draft and wrote up a spreadsheet listing all the scenarios we could think of for every one of our picks – how we ranked them; what we would do if certain kids were gone by each pick - they were the pair we were hoping hardest for at those picks. 

So far, so good. We’re lucky they were there for us.