Slow ball movement hurting Cats, says club great Jimmy Bartel

AFL great Jimmy Bartel says Geelong needs to speed up its ball movement to regain its winning mojo.

The Cats’ minor premiership hopes are in doubt after slumping to a shock 34-point loss to Fremantle on Saturday.

Geelong has lost four of its past seven matches and is now no guarantee to finish in to the top two despite still clinging on to top spot. They mustered only 43 inside 50s against the Dockers — a statistic that worried coach Chris Scott.

Geelong forward Tom Hawkins looked ready to tear the game apart when he kicked three goals in the first term.

But supply dried up after that and he failed to kick another goal for the match.

Bartel, who won three premierships and a Brownlow Medal during his decorated 305-game career with the Cats, said Geelong needed to move the ball quicker.

“Their ball movement has been a big problem,” Bartel told Game Day.

“They only played on 9 per cent of the time from marks and free kicks, which is a pretty difficult thing to do.

“You almost accidentally get called play on that amount of time. Their ball movement is slow, which is really surprising.

“Because if you watch recent weeks, even though the side’s form has fluctuated, Tom Hawkins has been in great form, so you want to get it in there quicker.

“Even their skipper highlighted it as being boring football. That’s a way to describe it.

“They need to play with a bit more speed and give their forwards a greater opportunity.”

Geelong was based in Perth for a week in the build-up to Saturday’s game and players made the most of the conditions to explore the sites of Western Australia when they had free time.

Scott said it would be “superficial and cheap analysis” to blame their latest defeat on the decision to be based in Perth, and Bartel agreed.

“How dare they spend some down time with family and try something new,” he said sarcastically. “We don’t want players having fun or living a life. We want them to play on the weekend, we want to put them back in their padded cell and then release them on weekends. Isn’t that what we want?”