BLIGHT BRAINWAVE BEHIND COMEBACK
It was to be Geelong’s first finals appearance since 1981 and of the young side, only Neville Bruns, Mark Yeates and Mark Bos has played in finals before.
Cats defender Tim Darcy believes that inexperience contributed to the 76-point thumping at the MCG.
For the winners Michael Long kicked four goals from the midfield, Simon Madden dominated in the ruck and Paul Vander Haar booted five majors.
“That qualifying final was the only time outside a few games early in the year that we played poor and it was really poor,” Darcy said.
“They just dominated us and we were at sea and overawed.
“You can put the first game down to a lot of players playing like deer in the headlights.”
Bruns led his side with 23 disposals and said the result was an eye opener.
“We were caught napping and didn’t know what it took to win a final,” he recalled.
“(Essendon) had a day out and I think they did some magical things that worked out well for them. We were pretty embarrassed to get flogged like we did and I think what that did was make us dig deeper and harder.”
After the game, a steely Blight forecast what his players were in store for on the training track.
“There will be a fair bit of competition work involved,” he said post-match.
“Sunday was just a disappointing day for us. It’s a matter now of finding the necessary character to come back.”
At training in the lead up to a semi-final match-up with Melbourne, Darcy described the sessions as “pretty brutal”.
Blight sourced Demons jumpers and put half of his team in them for the bruising sessions, designed to prepare his charges to go at the red and blue jumpers.
“We swapped around and everyone got their turn,” Darcy said.
“(Blight) just physically prepared us at a level where what happened the week before just wasn’t going to happen again.
“Not that we were timid but we just lost the plot in that first game.
“He just took a tack to training to instil a steely resolve and ensure we were prepared vastly differently to what we had been the week before.”
The Cats coach swung a double surprise at the start of the semi-final, starting prime movers Paul Couch and Mark Bairstow on the bench.
In what started as a physical encounter, the two midfielders provided fresh legs and both collected 21 disposals as Geelong kicked 10 goals in the final term to win by 63 points.
It was Gary Ablett Sr who stole the show however, kicking 7.7 from 24 possessions and taking a monster pack mark on the shoulders of his opponents.
Facing the Bombers again in the preliminary final — this time fixtured at Waverley Park — Bruns felt his team had its form back.
“We came out of that Melbourne game really feeling like we had the mojo back and it had clicked,” he said.
“We really felt we were right back on our game and we were ready.
“We knew if we hit our straps we could kick seven or eight goals in a quarter and blow sides apart, probably due to one man. There were others as well of course, but there is no doubt having the Gary Ablett factor, he was quite capable of kicking eight or nine goals in a game.”
Having started his finals series with three goals against Essendon and backing it up with seven against Melbourne, Ablett was only getting better.
Both teams entered the preliminary final under clouds, as midfielder Garry Hocking faced the tribunal and avoided suspension for tripping Melbourne’s Peter Rhode and key Bombers Vander Haar, Paul Salmon (who didn’t play in the qualifying final) and Tim Watson faced fitness tests.
Key forwards Salmon and Vander Haar were ruled out, while the skipper Watson played under duress.
Dropped from the qualifying final team after kicking 63 goals for the year, Cats forward Gavin Exell made an audacious attempt to be fit to play in the Geelong reserves despite breaking his jaw in the reserves semi-final.
Darcy believed the mindset of the Cats had flipped around in the two weeks since the initial defeat.
“We had a very different mindset and a very positive mindset,” he said.
“Although it was only two weeks earlier we played them, we were in a much better space to prepare for the game.”
Geelong led from the start, as Couch, Bairstow and Hocking combined for 84 touches.
At halftime the margin was 50 points and it stretched to 94 by the final siren, completing a 170-point turnaround from two weeks before.
Again, it was all about Ablett, who this time kicked 8.5 from 23 disposals (22 of them kicks) in another masterclass.
“They talk about G. Ablett and his performance in the grand final (a week later) but I reckon his performance in the preliminary final is about as good as I have seen him play,” Darcy said.
After the match Blight declared that was the best the Geelong attack had been all year as Geelong set its sights on Hawthorn in the 1989 decider.
For Bruns, Ablett would go to an even higher level in that game and kick nine goals as his side fell six points short.
But that’s another story.