CATS COACH SEES RED AFTER BLUES DEBACLE
REPOR REPORTS, ANALYSIS, STATS
ON the evidence that has been presented so far, it is apparent that it is going to take some time to adjust our thinking in 2020 when it comes to the way teams perform from week to week.
Take West Coast as an example. The Eagles made light work of Melbourne in Round 1 but have become a shell of their former selves since moving to the Queensland hub. Who could blame them? Life away from friends and family was not what they signed up for, and Adam Simpson’s men cannot wait any longer to be back in Perth.
Essendon has started its season superbly but could be excused if it dishes up a belowpar effort when next it fronts up following the positive test result to coronavirus to player Conor McKenna.
Uncertainty is ever present in the post-COVID football landscape. But while those excuses may be granted for some, it is difficult to find what reasons Geelong might come up with for its lacklustre first three quarters on Saturday night.
From the outset it should be noted that this Carlton team is not the same as the one that struggled for so long under Brendon Bolton.
The Blues are a vastly different outfit, even if its opening half against Melbourne showed it had some maturing still to do. But their class was on display at GMHBA Stadium, the venue that every Tom, Dick and Harry believed was going to be Geelong’s saviour for the season, as if somehow being scheduled to play at a certain ground was all that it took to secure victory.
A glass-half-full Cats person might point out that Chris Scott lost Brandan Parfitt — one of his team’s best players against Hawthorn in Round 2 — before the game and was left without Luke Dahlhaus not long into it after he suffered a head knock early on.
They might also look at the final quarter and rightly say that at their best they are nearly unstoppable.
But a realist would quickly highlight that that is the crux of the issue. That the difference between Geelong’s best and its worst has become too great.
The gap has widened, but alarmingly it is not just from week to week that the disparities are on display — the Cats have now gone without consecutive wins for 12 months — it is within games themselves.
Sure, when they are on, they are on, but when they are not, the damning lack of consistency from one quarter to the next and the belief that they can flick a switch at a moment of their own choosing has hurt them before, and it was the case again on Saturday.
Look at the numbers: down on disposals (-14), inside-50s (-4), marks (-39), uncontested possessions (-24) and on the scoreboard (-35) for three quarters, Geelong then went bang and in 16 minutes nearly overcame a six-goal deficit.
The earlier differentials were even more stark, but in the final term the Cats had 40 more disposals, 10 more inside-50s, took double the marks Carlton did, had 49 uncontested possessions to 17 and kicked five goals to none.
Clearly they have the ability to score quickly, which is a major advantage considering the changed match conditions and length of games.
But what last week showed when Carlton nearly overran Melbourne after half-time and what Saturday night confirmed is that you just can’t give up big leads at the start of games in 2020.
Scott knows there are issues and conceded after the loss to the Blues that his team did not look like the same one as last week in the first three quarters.
“We know there is a difference between being really, really up for it and just being a little bit off and clearly that was us early in the game,” Scott said. “That was easy enough to see, and then (after) threequarter time, it was the same jumpers out there but it looked like a different team, so that is the question we are asking ourselves and we spent some time talking about … it is frustrating for us.
“We won’t sit back and say, ‘Hopefully that was just an aberration’. We’ve got to be a little bit harder on ourselves than that. But it was different. The last quarter and the first three quarters, come on. I don’t often talk to the players post-game, but I did (on Saturday night) and there were a lot of people talking in the room. There are no clear answers, I don’t think, except that we do have a problem.
“That is clear and it has been clear for a long time … we are getting inconsistent output and it has been happening over a long period of time.
“A big game in a final, a terrible performance, a great performance the next week, a pretty good performance for the next half. It is wrong for a coach to get defensive in the face of irrefutable evidence.”
The Cats now face a Melbourne team this Sunday that won’t have had a competitive hitout since its clash with Carlton on June 13 after the Demons and Bombers game was postponed.
Uncertainty may well be ever-present in the postCOVID football landscape, but for Geelong, fixing the uncertainty of its performance from one week to the next — as well as within matches — looms as its biggest challenge.