Critical match or the Cats could be Gawn

Youngsters must bring their best to support senior players

SATURDAY night’s game against Melbourne looms as one of Geelong’s most important for the year.

A loss this week to the Cats will put so much pressure on the football club and so much pressure on the team.

Melbourne has come into some pretty good form and has won its past two games, so Saturday night is a big game.

Tom Hawkins is in career-best form and no Jack Viney for the Demons is going to help the Cats enormously.

This is the biggest game for the season for Rhys Stanley, who has been in some pretty good form recently as well.

Stanley and Zac Smith have been under pressure both internally and externally, but he is coming up against a player who is being discussed as a Brownlow Medal favourite in Max Gawn.

At the very least, Stanley has to nullify him, which is a job in itself, and make sure he is not getting any easy hitouts.

That alone will help the Cats’ midfield, because if Gawn gets another 40-plus hitouts that will put enormous pressure on a group whose clearance work at centre bounces has not been great.

Their general clearance numbers have been OK because they can get more numbers around the ball, and they showed against Adelaide that they can get their hands on the ball, but there is still a lot of work to do in that midfield.

All year Geelong has not really known what its best side looks like because of its injuries, and it looks like we won’t see Nakia Cockatoo again this year.

There have been games where it seems like they have found their best midfield mix, but against the Crows all their best on-ballers had huge numbers and they were still beaten.

If you had said Patrick Dangerfield, Gary Ablett, Joel Selwood, Tim Kelly and Mitch Duncan were going to average almost 30 possessions you would have said Geelong by how much, but it shows there is still something not right.

You can look to the forward line and some of the tackle numbers and the pressure that might have been down, but this is a direct result of the fact the team is so young.

Young players are going to have great games, like the one against Sydney, and they are going to have matches where they are just not quite as switched on mentally, as appeared to be the case against Adelaide.

The great Denis Pagan always told me the game is played 10 per cent below the shoulders and 90 per cent above, and that is the I AM loving where Majak Daw is at at the moment. He has been a long term project and I’ve always thought that with anyone coming into the game as a late developer the best way to teach them is to play them down back so they get taken to the ball and they learn from playing on forwards where to run, when to run, how to use your body and all of those sorts of things. Playing down back also sometimes teaches you desperation, which you mightn’t have at the start of your career as a forward. It just feels like it is starting to click for Daw and I can’t wait to watch him on Saturday. WHEN the game is under the pump and there are so many people talking about how we need new rules to fix it, and there is plenty of debate on the other side saying to leave it alone, it is frustrating when you get a game that gives you 109 points in total. The Fremantle and Port Adelaide game was just tough to watch. Sometimes those scores can be due to coaching or the conditions, but with so much discussion on the state of the game, that is not how you want to promote our sport.