Greater Western Sydney coach Leon Cameron predicts more moments of freakish skill from his star AFL forward Jeremy Cameron, but is equally thrilled by his spearhead’s physicality and appetite for hard work.
The Giants forward wowed the Canberra crowd and watching TV audience last Saturday, with a breathtaking acrobatic overhead kick which scored a point against Gold Coast and narrowly missed being a major, which would been hard to beat for goal of the season.
The hard running and physicality which helped Cameron, who has kicked 11 goals in four games, to win All-Australian honours in 2013 appear to be back after they were missing for parts of an injury-plagued 2014 season.
“You can see the benefits of a really good pre-season on the weekend with Jeremy, he ran a lot, his ability to spring and his second efforts were back,” Leon Cameron said.
“The thing about Jeremy is he plays the game tough and hard. I love the way he crashes packs and he hits hard.
“Then on the flip side, there’s some brilliant stuff that he can do.
“The good thing about Jeremy’s footy at the moment is he’s finding the right balance of hardness, contested footy, some very special things that he can do on the field, but also this hard running work rate that he’s actually starting to produce week in, week out.
“When you get that you get a very, very dangerous player, so it’s probably not the last time we’ll talk about some freakish things that he does on the footy field, but he knows that he builds his game on all the hard stuff.”
The Giants coach admitted to missing his namesake’s moment of athletic inspiration against the Suns.
“I blinked at the he time it happened and then the crowd roared,” Leon Cameron said.
“I actually didn’t know what happened (until) I looked at the replay.”
He felt his spearhead was also benefiting from the emergence and support of exciting young forwards Cam McCarthy and James Stewart, with the former already kicking 13 goals this season.
“There’s no doubt Jeremy looks freer, we’re probably not relying on him as much because Cam McCarthy has come along,” the coach said.
“But also I sensed last week that Jeremy did not have to be that player in the square, where James took a couple of good contested marks.”
One forward who won’t face West Coast in Perth on Saturday is Rhys Palmer, who will be out for five-to-six weeks after suffering a shoulder injury last weekend, in his 100th AFL appearance.
Will Hoskin-Elliott looms as his likely replacement, with Cameron declaring he had 30 players fighting for 22 spots, with Zac Williams, Matt Buntine, Curtly Hampton, Adam Kennedy and Jed Lamb among those performing well in the twos.
