AFL 2022: Cats coach Chris Scott’s greatest strength is his willingness to change based on personnel

Chris Scott’s greatest attribute is his willingness to change his approach based on personnel. Read how he protected some of his prized assets and pulled off some winning moves to get here.

The staff had gathered for lunch in the upstairs dining room to welcome new coach Chris Scott.

He’d come with an impressive CV, most notably his success as a player during the mighty Brisbane Lions dynasty under legendary coach Leigh Matthews.

There was a level of anxiousness in the room because Geelong was at the crossroads.

Two premierships in the Mark Thompson era had been amazing but they had just been thrashed in the 2010 preliminary final by Collingwood and their best player, Gary Ablett, had just walked out.

There was a sense of things unravelling, but chief executive Brian Cook and the club’s board had moved quickly with the surprise choice of the Fremantle assistant.

Scott had a presence about him and those in the room were quickly hanging off every word.

It wasn’t until near the end of his welcome speech that the new coach referred to his playing days.

“I’m never going to talk a lot about Brisbane,” he stated.

“What I will say is that what happened there is not going to happen here.”

The Lions had won three premierships in a row and then finished runner-up in 2004.

They then fell off the cliff, finishing outside the finals in the next four years before Matthews quit.

A surge to sixth under new coach, former skipper Michael Voss, was short-lived in 2009, with Brisbane then spending nine years in the wilderness, anchored at the bottom of the ladder — which included the 2017 wooden spoon.

The message from Scott was clear. He was a coach with an eye to sustained success, to be contending every year and he would lead a football department that lived those values.

He has been a man of his word.

In his first season Geelong defied the critics — that has sort of become its thing over the past decade — and won its third premiership in five years.

Internally he was lauded by the players for not coming in and trying to change everything. He tinkered with the right things, pulled the right levers and got the ultimate result.

There was a sense Scott was keen to play down his role in 2011.

It was almost like he felt like it wasn’t his team, so he’s been reluctant to attend reunions and claim any glory from what was an extraordinary achievement as a rookie coach.

On Saturday at 2.30pm, a team in the blue and white hoops will go searching for their next premiership and this one is very much Chris Scott’s team.

Cats coach Chris Scott and Steve Hocking. Picture: Peter Ristevski

That Brisbane cliff never happened at Kardinia Park for a variety of reasons.

Scott has the best winning strike rate of any coach in history and on top of the 2011 flag, the Cats have been runner-up in 2020 and also played in five more preliminary finals.

Clearly there are so many other factors that combine for eras of success.

A stable management and board goes a long way and Geelong has been the envy of every club in that sense.

Having the best recruiter in the business, Stephen Wells, has ensured the right talent comes through the door and is then introduced to an elite development system that has churned out one superstar after another.

But despite all the success, Scott has been on the nose with Cats fans for years.

One insider pinpoints the moment the “lunatic fringe” turned on the coach.

It was the 2016 preliminary final against Sydney when the Cats were like deer in headlights as the Swans piled on seven goals to zip in the first quarter.

The Cats had gone and got prized free agent Patrick Dangerfield from Adelaide to get them over the hump, but instead it had fallen apart at the second-last hurdle again.

Since then, many have thought Scott was too dogmatic, backing in his style that continued to be enough to get to September, but then not delivering when it mattered most.

There were stories of him being aloof, of not spending time with young draftees and only seeking counsel of the team’s megastars like captain Joel Selwood, Dangerfield and Tom Hawkins.

Steve Hocking had heard all the talk when he arrived to replace veteran CEO Brian Cook, who had been at the club for 23 years, at the end of last year.

Despite all his success, Chris Scott has been on the nose with Cats fans for years.

Hocking, who had been the AFL football operations boss, was Thompson’s right-hand man during the ’07 and ’09 premiership run.

He knew the lay of the land and set about a “big reset” of the club he used to play for. Included in that was some strong heart-to-heart conversations with Scott with the mutual respect between the pair meaning it was anything but lip service.

Scott’s coaching panel was overhauled, not by design more by circumstances.

Club legend Matthew Scarlett had grown tired — the two years of Covid hubs took a toll on many — in the role as defensive coach and wanted a change. He didn’t have an ugly fallout with Scott, which was widely reported.

His best mate Corey Enright, too, went to St Kilda because he knew he needed to try another environment if he had designs in the future to be a senior coach.

Former Essendon coach Matthew Knights had been a victim of the Covid soft cap cuts and was offered a much more enticing financial package to join West Coast.

Three-time premiership hero James Kelly came back to the club after a stint at Essendon, Richmond premiership player Shaun Grigg had his role upgraded while Carlton and Adelaide great Eddie Betts joined on a part-time basis.

But there was more things at play behind-the-scenes with Hocking taking a big stick to the football department changing 16 of the 34 positions.

The push to get some favourite sons back had been hugely successful with Harry Taylor returning from WA to run the club‘s medical services, Matthew Egan took over development, Shannon Byrnes became the runner while Andrew Mackie’s role in the list management/recruiting department continued to evolve.

The one constant was Scott and his trusty lieutenant, former Brisbane Lions teammate Nigel Lappin.

From the opening day of pre-season, the players and staff were very aware that season 2022 was starting with a blank canvas.

An insider claims one of Chris Scott’s greatest strengths is that he changes his approach based on personnel.

The game plan that had been built on being the best defence in the competition needed some rejigging and this was where Scott stepped up.

“What a lot of people don’t realise is that one of Chris Scott’s greatest strengths is that he changes his approach based on personnel,” one insider said.

“He’s not set in his ways. He doesn’t stick to one philosophy.

“He looks at what he has to work with and then goes from there.”

As veteran midfielder Mitch Duncan says, it made sense for a change given Geelong had the two best forwards in the game in Hawkins and Jeremy Cameron.

“The two boys up forward, with the emergence of Tyson (Stengle), like why wouldn’t you try and get the ball in a little bit quicker?” Duncan said.

“It kind of made sense as long as we still defended the ground in a reasonable manner even with the tweaks going forward a bit faster.

“We have managed to be able to do that and that has obviously been really important.

“But the buy-in and the even contribution across the board has probably propelled us further than we may have thought.”

Gone were the days of the defenders only worried about being the best team in the competition according to the stats and beating their chests about it while being aggressively ignorant of what was happening further up the ground.

This year, it was all about how each line can help each other, a more collective approach about ball movement and defence.

There were also some tough calls made about how they handled some prized assets.

Selwood, 34, wouldn’t play every game to ensure he was peaking at the right time while Dangerfield, who had been banged up by the time he reached September in recent years, was really clamped down.

His calf injury mid-season was a blessing in a way as it forced him to go through an intensive training block with the Cats holding him back more and more.

That wouldn’t have happened in previous seasons and the results were there in the preliminary final with a fresh and fit Dangerfield best-on-ground against Brisbane.

The Brownlow medallist’s absence resulted in one of Scott’s best moves of the year, the shift of hard nut Tom Atkins from defence into the middle of the ground.

Geelong hasn’t lost a game since that happened in round 10.

That meant Duncan, who started as the sub in the 2011 grand final, moved to half-back permanently, which is something that had been muted in previous seasons.

“It has been in the pipeline probably a couple of times throughout the last couple of years,” Duncan said.

Chris Scott has made some key personnel moves this season which have all come off.

“I was probably just injured at the wrong time of the year, in the pre-season when you need to learn the craft and we haven’t been able to do it.

“I think we were getting stuck with our ball movement a little bit in the early periods of the season, so they sent me down there to try and create.

“I obviously wasn’t down there to defend although I have had to slowly try to work on my defensive craft, which I have actually found really refreshing myself working under Kell (Kelly).

“I’m learning a different side of the game and it’s been great for me.

“To see Tom Atkins go into the middle and do what he does I thought there was no way I am getting back in there so I have had to hone my new craft and work on other aspects of my game.”

Duncan says the development of youngsters Zach Guthrie, Sam De Koning, Max Holmes, Atkins and Stengle is behind the new Geelong of 2022.

“There is actually 25 per cent of the team different from last year and the year before that when we played the granny too,” he said.

“It’s super exciting for an older player like me to be a part of such a successful team.”

He has no doubt that a lot of the credit should go to Scott who he calls a “student of the game”.

“He is someone I love talking footy with because I really enjoy my footy, the system, the way teams play I often talk to him about,” Duncan said.

“He knows his footy, he’s got great help around him, he’s open to change and he goes to the players first.

“He believes players can see things out there that potentially the coaches can’t, that we can feel what the coaches can’t so he gets us in.

“If he is going to change something, he asks us first so we‘re right involved with that and I think that is a key element to him.”

When asked about what a premiership in 2022 would mean to this group, Duncan quickly singles out one person: “He (Scott) would be one of the people who I would be proudest of if we were able to come away with it.”