Geelong big winner of AFL lockdown, Hawthorn faces ‘very ugly’ review
Looking back, we should have seen the clues. After being thrashed by Gold Coast in the pre-season it looked like it would take three months for the Cats to hit top gear. Well, guess what?
Hawthorn
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Geelong is the AFL’s biggest winner from the COVID-19 shutdown.
Cats coach Chris Scott conceded in March that his team’s Round 1 preparation was far from ideal.
Scott was alarmed when his team conceded 72 inside-50s against Gold Coast in a pre-season game the Cats lost by 58 points. A full dress rehearsal against Essendon two weeks later in Colac ended in another defeat.
“It wasn’t a bad lead-in, but there were a few of us who didn’t quite have the lead-in we would have liked,” midfielder Sam Menegola said.
The concerns largely traced back to so many surgeries last November.
MATCH REPORT: GEELONG THUMPS HAWKS IN DANGER’S 250TH
Captain Joel Selwood, Tom Stewart, Mitch Duncan, Jake Kolodjashnij, Jack Steven, Lachie Fogarty, Nakia Cockatoo and Menegola all missed huge chunks of pre-season and scrambled to make the start line.
It was expected it would take the Cats until about Round 8 to hit top gear. Yet here we are at Round 2 and the Cats have made a statement.
Just about the only thing players could do in eight weeks of isolation was get kilometres into the legs, and that’s exactly what the injured cluster of Cats required.
They literally ran themselves back into contention, and then ran rampant against Hawthorn on Friday night.
The second half of the 61-point hiding wasn’t far from perfection.
Geelong won 75 more disposals, 31 more contested possessions, 14 more clearances and, in shortened quarters, outscored the Hawks by 55 points.
Remember, this was a Hawthorn team with a strut after seven wins from its previous nine games.
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Perhaps we should have picked up on the clues.
Since the shutdown it has been hard to fault Geelong. Scott selflessly sacrificed his fat salary to help support his assistants.
Irishman Mark O’Connor, fresh from promotion into Selwood’s leadership group, declined an air ticket home so he could stay and work on his game.
Fearing for a brief moment that Round 1 could’ve been their final games, Gary Ablett and Harry Taylor became hungrier than birds in winter in isolation.
The positives peeled off the page against the Hawks.
Brandan Parfitt forced his way into the best 22 with a brilliant stretch of training sessions and carried that straight into Round 2. The Cats have long been bullish about Parfitt and it appears he is ready to morph into a game-changing star that will be hard to shut down.
Gryan Miers, taken at pick No.57 in the 2017 draft, kicked three goals as he continues to make AFL football look almost as easy as he found the TAC Cup.
Essendon great Jobe Watson rated Selwood best-afield on Friday night, because Selwood landed blows on Hawthorn in the big moments.
How satisfying must that be for Cats fans?
Selwood laboured at times in 2019, albeit impressed insiders as he transitioned from the centre square onto a wing.
Round 2 was a night celebration for the three players who deserved to party.
Rhys Stanley, blessed by the arrival of baby daughter Sloane last week, pushed forward early and pushed understudy Darcy Fort further from the 22.
Stanley was dropped in September last year, but when he plays like that there is simply no ruck debate at the Cats.
Patrick Dangerfield, in his 250th game, exploded in the second half with 17 disposals, nine contested possessions, four clearances, four score involvements and 64 SuperCoach points … in two shortened quarters.
And then there was birthday boy Harry Taylor, who turned 34 on a night where the Cats backline let in just seven points in the second half.
Taylor famously keeps a notebook, and a glance at it on Friday morning revealed the defender had sweated through 152 training days for just one game (Round 1).
“I’m creaking a fair bit more these days,” he said on Channel 7.
There’s no time to creak in this team, with healthy selection pressure on every line.
Defenders Kolodjashnij and Jordan Clark were unlucky to miss selection, Steven should make his Geelong debut next week, and a fit Josh Jenkins will ensure Esava Ratugolea has to play well to keep playing.
And then there was Gary Ablett. Boy, “Gazza’s” farewell tour might just be what we need in the year 2020.
Geelong plays Carlton at home next week, then Melbourne, and then Gold Coast at home in what should be Selwood’s 300th and Ablett’s 350th.
Keep the party going, because it looks like there’s more celebrations to come.
HUMBLED HAWKS FACE ‘UGLY REVIEW’
It will be “an ugly review” for the Hawks.
In an 89-point turnaround from Round 1 – albeit almost 12 weeks prior – Hawthorn travelled down the highway for the first time in 14 years and left wondering where it got lost along the way.
The second half was simply brutal. Ten goals to one and with Hawthorn’s midfielders left to look “third or fourth rate”, according to coach Alastair Clarkson.
They were “smacked” around the ball and the criticisms will come – he knows that.
But the numbers didn’t lie.
Second half disposals? Plus 75 to the Cats.
Clearances? Plus 14.
Contested possessions? Thirty-one to the positive for the home side.
“They’ve got a strong midfield, but our midfield lowered their colours tonight,” Clarkson said.
“They won inside the contest and then smacked us on the outside.
“When you lose in both facets of the game it’s hard to come back from and to their credit, they played outstanding footy and made us look, I couldn’t even say second-rate, maybe third or fourth-rate.
“We ran out of space and because we ran out of space, we ended up not running anywhere near to the intensity or the effort of the Geelong side.
“When you get smacked around the ball like we did tonight, you’ll find all sorts of reasons – too slow, too tall, too old, they’ll all come our way, we know that.”
Jaeger O’Meara will likely be back next week after his facial fracture – he was missed, Clarkson admitted.
St Kilda great Nick Riewoldt could only describe it as “un-Hawthorn like”.
“Which path do you think Alastair Clarkson will go down for the review after a very long break?,” he said on Fox Footy.
“Because it could have the potential to be a very ugly review for Hawthorn.
“Some of the goals they conceded, their intensity in the tackling – it was un-Hawthorn like what we saw in the second half.”
CATS’ TALL ORDER
Geelong’s small forwards ran rampant over a Hawthorn defence, but Clarkson has backed the model to withstand the talk.
With the likes of skipper Ben Stratton, Ben McEvoy, James Frawley, Sam Frost, James Sicily and Blake Hardwick holding down the fort, speedy Cats Gryan Miers, Tom Atkins and Luke Dahlhaus all delivered a pair of goals each.
Riewoldt declared the Hawks’ set up too tall, while Brownlow medallist Adam Cooney was brave enough to suggest that Clarkson had perhaps pulled the wrong rein.
“He (Clarkson) doesn’t get it wrong often, but the tall defence of Hawthorn got done cold,” he said.
But Clarkson said his players had an ability to “play tall and small” and were simply outdone by stellar supply.
“We’ve played that type of defence for a long period of time and even in our stronger era, it was the same,” he said.
“By and large, we play a team defence, and most clubs do. When the ball supply’s coming in like it came in tonight … we lost contested ball, got smacked in the first 15 minutes of the game, and we worked really hard to get ourselves back into that facet of the game by half time and we evened it up by half time … and the scoreboard up by that time, too.
“Then the second half we lose it by 31 or thereabouts. You’re not going to win games of footy like that.
“We’ve just got to get better and stronger and we got a fair old whack on the chin.”
IF IT AIN’T BROKE …
Geelong coach Chris Scott has called for calm over the dire predictions about the state of the game after the Collingwood-Richmond draw.
“Last night, if we are using that as the example after a 12-week stoppage in play, a slippery night between two really good teams who defend really well, I think I would at least prefer to see a little bit more footy before I would rush to judgment,” he said.
“I watched the game last night, I thought it was OK, I thought it was a tight tussle and I thought Collingwood were really sharp early so in terms of where the game is at, I think we might have to see a few more games before we commit the game to an early grave.”
Cats superstar Patrick Dangerfield, who was among the best against the Hawks with 24 disposals and a goal in his 250th game, said a bigger sample size was required.
“There’s been plenty of commentary on it over the past 24 hours and I expect there still will be but let’s get a greater sample size until we really do it to death for the entire season,” he said.
“It is what it is for this year, it will go back to normal this year. There are plenty of great things we can talk about within the competition rather than continually drumming down on the length of the game.”
Scott also questioned the outcry about the shortened game time and the annual push for less interchange.
“The people who want the game to be harder for the players have no idea how hard the game is today,” he said.
“You can’t possibly be thinking, ‘Can we make this game harder and more relentless?’. I tend to think if we could make it a little bit easier for the players to recover week to week and perform at their best for longer periods of time the game would be better.
“I don’t quite follow the logic of let’s make this so hard that the best players are less than their best week after week.
“I just find it hard to believe that shortening the game is going to hurt it, I can only think of reasons why it would help it.”
MAGIC MASTERCLASS
At 36, Gary’s still got it.
Brownlow medallist Gerard Healy said that Ablett “doesn’t look as fit as he potentially has been over the years … but he doesn’t have to be”.
He described him as “clean” and “creative” in what was yet another blistering performance, with his 350th game looming in a few weeks’ time.
And when coronavirus gripped the game some 83 days ago, Chris Scott conceded that there would have been questions about his future.
“I think it is logical to say that the lockdown has helped those guys, if we could prescribe one thing for our older players at the end of every season is an extra three months to rest and rejuvenate,” Scott said.
“The risk is that those guys don’t have the same hunger, throw Harry Taylor into the same category, you sort of wonder when the lockdown started some of those guys were thinking, ‘have I played my last game?’. Probably.
“It would have been pretty easy to be demoralised but we didn’t see any of that mindset from those guys. It was hard because we couldn’t monitor them through that period but within the first week of getting them back, it was clear those guys had approached the individual training really well and their hunger was as bright as ever.”
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RUCKING GOOD NIGHT
Rhys Stanley’s omission from last year’s qualifying final against Collingwood still haunts Cats fans.
And when he plays like he did on Friday night, that anger rises its head again.
From the opening bounce Stanley was exceptional and he finished with 14 possessions, six clearances, six inside 50s, two goals and 26 hit-outs.
He wasn’t picked in Round 1 as Scott elected to play the inexperienced Darcy Fort against the GWS Giants.
“I was really happy for Rhys, he has worked really hard on his game and we are in the fortunate position that we’ve got two ruckmen at the moment who we really like,” the Cats coach said.
“Right at the moment we are choosing to play one because we really like (Esava) Ratugolea as a ruck/forward as well. Darcy Fort was a little bit stiff but I was really pleased for Rhys and I think he set the game up early.”
It was a big week for Stanley who along with his wife Kirsten welcomed their second child, Sloane, into the world on Wednesday.
JACK MIGHT BE BACK … BUT HOW?
Jack Steven is in Geelong’s best 22, it’s just a matter of finding an opening according to Scott.
The Cats came close to picking the former Saint on Friday night but were conservative given his interrupted preparation after last month’s stabbing incident.
But Scott is keen to hand Steven his Geelong debut sooner rather than later.
“He trained pretty well today (Friday) and has trained pretty well for the last three weeks,” Scott said.
“I think he’s a bit like (Brandan) Parfitt for me, it’s clear that he’s in our best team and we would like to play him, it’s just a matter of timing and trying to work out who goes out.
“That part of it is really hard but he’s a flexible player Jack and it looks like he’s embraced the way we want him to play which is important because whenever you bring in a new player it can upset the cohesion a little bit but we think we have got a few options with him.
“Put it this way if he doesn’t play (next week). it will be a conservative call.”