SUNS midfielder Hugh Greenwood believes Gold Coast’s midfield brigade is fully stocked heading into Round 2 of the 2020 season.
Greenwood was one of a number of additions to the SUNS midfield in the off-season, alongside Brandon Ellis, Matt Rowell, Noah Anderson and Jeremy Sharp.
Their arrival to the club has seen some position shuffling from 2019’s core midfield group, which Greenwood says only strengthens Gold Coast’s line-up.
“There’s so much depth when you’ve got Bowes and Ainsworth playing back and forward which they can obviously play midfield (as well),” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of mids rotating through that group so there’s a healthy competition for spots and with the practice match tomorrow night there will be guys going pretty hard.
“Obviously we’ll miss Dave (Swallow) for Round 2 so that’s a huge hole to fill and I’m sure there’s a few boys wanting to put their hand up and take that spot.”
Greenwood has played just the one match for his new club since arriving from Adelaide.
The COVID shutdown-period had an effect on everyone, but Greenwood said it also restricted his ability to develop bonds with his new teammates and establish the rapport that naturally grows through playing games.
In his career to date, the 28-year-old has shown flexibility to play both midfield and forward, but is still uncertain how he will split his time in 2020 with quarters being reduced to 16 minutes.
He’s been training exclusively with the midfielders throughout the return to training period and could remain there for a large proportion of games due to the reduced game-time
“There’s a number of guys who can sort of rotate through different positions and that’s the way the game’s going; you’ve got to be able to play different positions,” he said.
“With a shorter game style I’m not so sure there will be the need for guys to rest forward.
“(They’ll) be able to rotate to the bench or play longer now knowing they’re shorter quarters and shorter games so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
The SUNS restart their season on June 13 against West Coast, and Greenwood said the playing group was hungry to make up for a Round 1 loss to Port Adelaide.
“It was a bit of a sour taste that Round 1,” he said.
“Usually if you have a bad week you can rock up the following week and make amends for it, but we’ve had to wait a couple of months to be able to do that.
“We’ll be hopefully tapping back into the form that we had during the pre-season and I think we’ve done that certainly over the last couple of weeks.
“Getting back to training we’ve been training at a high level so hopefully we can carry that over.”
