’GIVE MACKIE ANOTHER YEAR’
Mooney urges Cats to reward vintage form
IF the All-Australian selectors sat down mid-season and released a 40-man squad, Andrew Mackie would be in it — or, if not, extremely close. The veteran’s strong form should give the Cats the confidence to offer him another contract and allow him the chance to become a 300-game player.
IF the All-Australian selectors sat down mid-season and released a 40-man squad, Andrew Mackie would be in it. Or, if not, extremely close. That’s the type of year he is having across halfback and it is refreshing to see someone of Mackie’s age and experience still reaching vintage levels of performance.
I’ve no doubt that most footy people, perhaps even Mackie himself, would have assumed that 2017 would be his final season at the club.
That’s how the script has gone at the club for players of his age in past years — Jimmy Bartel, Paul Chapman, Joel Corey, James Kelly and so on.
But Mackie is in much better form than last year — he has actually seen the cliff and gone the other way — and his durability still stacks up, even after 268 games, which should provide the club with confidence he deserves another season.
Geelong was prepared for Corey Enright to play on this season at 35 years of age, purely because Enright’s form last year was so good. Enright is a special case but it shows the Cats aren’t solely locked into a view for the whole season.
Mackie’s start to the year might be forcing Chris Scott, Steve Hocking and Stephen Wells to have a similar rethink.
If you look at Geelong’s backline, I feel it will still need the older head of Mackie for another season.
Tom Stewart, Jake Kolodjashnij, Jed Bews, Tom Ruggles, and eventually Ryan Gardner, are young.
Tom Lonergan will probably retire at season’s end and Harry Taylor swings from end to end. Even Zach Tuohy, who has masterfully filled Enright’s role, still has a couple of years to go before being a bona fide veteran.
I interviewed Mackie last week at a club function and two things were abundantly clear — he still loves playing and his burning desire to compete is still cranked up at 100 per cent.
If you start to wane in those areas, it’s time to give it away.
Mackie might look like the cool and calm customer, but deep down he is still highly motivated. He has seen most of his premiership teammates get nudged into retirement and has probably learnt to detect the cues for when his time looms.
How good would it be to see Mackie get within striking distance of the 300-game milestone? He deserves that chance.
Lonergan is still in Geelong’s best team and, to be honest, I felt the commentary about him a month ago was unfair, unjustified and a bit superficial.
When the club went through a three-game losing streak — actually a threegame “let’s play without pressure” streak — Lonergan was a sitting duck in defence.
It doesn’t matter if you’re Tom Lonergan, Matthew Scarlett, Stephen Silvagni or a reserves scrapper on the local footy ground, if you’re one-out and the ball is getting bombed in without an ounce of midfield pressure, no one is stopping the forward.
The Gold Coast match is hung up as an example of where it all went horribly wrong.
“For Lonergan to be playing on (Tom Lynch) without a lot of pressure on the ball, with that many entries, it makes it very, very difficult,” Taylor said on SEN radio.
“Unfortunately as teammates, we let Tom Lonergan down on the weekend by not helping him enough.”
Lonergan is 33 and the oldest player on the list but he proved last week against Adelaide he still holds a vital role locking down on the game’s best big forwards.
Of course, all of this must be read in the context of here and now.
Footy can change quickly. With older players, you can feel a million bucks at the bye and then horrible by Round 20. So there’s a long way to go.
But no doubt the Cats might just be reassessing some of the views they took into the season.