Still time to escape rut
IT has long been observed that people in the football industry who exist outside the bubble of ‘club land’ have the tendency to get carried away with single performances.
It is why you hear football clubs say so often that things are never quite as bad as they seem, nor are they are ever quite as good.
But if that is true, and if you cannot judge a team, a player or a coach on one effort alone, then just what is an appropriate amount of time to form a view on a subject?
Just how long are commentators required to wait to fairly lay claim to having a body of work that they can measure?
The nature of the game is that week-to-week assessments are commonplace, but when looking at Geelong, it would not be unfair to split its season into two quite distinct periods.
Clearly the 12 weeks before the bye were vastly different to what has been dished up since.
The Cats averaged 99.3 points for in the first half of the season and were conceding just 65.7.
Their 11-1 winning record had them placed two games and percentage clear on top of the ladder.
Since then Geelong has averaged 74.3 points for and 74.9 against, and has registered three wins from seven matches.
It now holds first position by percentage only, but its standing at the top of the table belies its current levels of inconsistency.
The fall has been swift and while Geelong has not dropped consecutive games all season, neither has it managed to put together two straight wins since the start of June.
In the wake of the loss to Hawthorn two weeks ago, Chris Scott conceded the Cats were playing a boring brand of footy.
But it is not just how Geelong has looked to its fans that has played such a large part in causing it so many headaches during the past two months.
Quite simply it is not in the team’s DNA to be as indirect and as timid when it has the ball as it has been following the mid-season break.
Geelong sides have for so long been exciting to watch because they have been adventurous and bold with the footy and prepared to take the game on.
They have hunted opposition teams and have been relentless whenever they smell blood, and while admittedly they have generally maintained a balance between attack and defence, that balance has swung so far away from the former in the direction of the latter that the Cats look almost unrecognisable from where they were two months ago.
How has it got to this point, and is the situation fixable?
The answer to the first question is far more detailed than the one-word response to the second — yes — but not so complicated that it will take any great amount of time to recognise a solution and subsequently implement the necessary changes.
If Geelong gets back to winning contested footy — not just talking about it, but doing it — it will help immensely, but it must then be direct with its ball use, smarter when going inside-50 and more efficient in front of goal.
It needs to start limiting the turnover of personnel within the team in order to find some cohesion, and it requires several of its more experienced players who have dropped off to get back to the form they displayed in the first half of the year.
The 11-1 record and 151.3 percentage after 12 matches is a thing of the past, and as the saying goes, perhaps things were not quite as a good as they seemed.
Losses to four teams outside the eight in seven weeks, while recording just three wins — two at home — with a percentage of 99.2 suggests Geelong is in a slump or, even worse, a rut.
But just as things are never quite as good as they seem, nor are they ever as bad, and the Cats now have three weeks to adjust, reset and return to the dynamic style of football they displayed before the bye.
That is the Geelong way, and it proved a success in opening three months of the season — even if things were not quite as good as they seemed.