NOT GOOD ENOUGH

WE UNDERACHIEVED, SAYS CATS PRESIDENT

GEELONG president Colin Carter has conceded the Cats did not meet their expectations in 2018, saying the team had underachieved.

Having scraped into the top eight following back-to-back top-four finishes, Geelong suffered yet another humiliating finals exit on Friday night at the hands of Melbourne.

But while Carter refused to label the year as a failure, he said it was hard not to call the season a disappointment.

“Failure is a hard word whenever you have a winning season and win more than you lose in an incredibly even competition,” he said.

“But we are disappointed.”

“We thought we would do better than we finished up, so in that sense we haven’t achieved what we wanted to achieve. That is pretty clear to us and the year wasn’t successful. I certainly wouldn’t call it a failure but we didn’t achieve what we felt we could have and should have.

“I thought we were in with some sort of reasonable chance and it obviously didn’t work out that way on Friday night. We tumbled into the finals by the skin of our teeth and I thought we had a lot of injuries through the year but the guys had come back so we went into finals with a bit of optimism but it wasn’t to be.

“That is disappointing and there is no point sugar-coating it, we thought we wanted it and felt we could do better and we didn’t so there is obviously some work to be done by a lot of us.”

Friday night was Geelong’s ninth finals loss from its previous 12 attempts and came just weeks after a contract extension for coach Chris Scott was announced, which will tie him to the club until at least the end of 2022.

There has been mixed commentary regarding the merits of that extension but Carter said he was comfortable with the direction of the team under Scott.

“I know that the keyboard warriors are out at the moment but I think if we take a long-term view we are very comfortable that those settings are right,” he said.

“What the average punter forgets is that clubs like Sydney and Geelong have been up there for ten or 12 years. Sydney has gone out like we have but the draft works against you and I think we have had one top ten draft pick in the last ten years, Nakia Cockatoo, and we have had a few guys out like Cockatoo and McCarthy.

“I don’t want to make excuses, we obviously have got some work to do, but our record, given we have rebuilt the team essentially from the premiership side, has been terrific. We didn’t get where we wanted to this year but that doesn’t mean next year we can’t take a step forward and we are pretty comfortable with our coaching structure. We don’t see any particular reason to want to change it or even question it.”