No time to waste with Gaz, says Scott

GEELONG will play Gary Ablett in Round 18 off only one or two training sessions as he prepares to enter hub life with training partner Andrew Mackie on Tuesday.

Ablett and his good mate will fly up to the Gold Coast Mercure on Tuesday afternoon for a 14-day quarantine period after a huge training block in Geelong.

Coach Chris Scott admitted the club had to see how Ablett pulled up but said yesterday his plan was to throw his star into the action in his only warm-up game before finals.

The Gold Coast Mercure has a grass field about 50m wide and 80m long, easily big enough for Richmond’s Bachar Houli to complete fitness and football sessions during his quarantine period.

The Tigers chose to rest Houli for the first game he was available so he could get more training under his belt but the Cats have no such luxuries.

Ablett would come out of quarantine on the Tuesday night before a Round 18 clash against Sydney with the date set to be locked in this week.

That game will be his first contest in nine weeks after returning to Geelong to take care of son Levi with wife Jordan.

“It’s a long way out so we would need to wait a little bit on how he’s going and how the team is going but at face value we would probably play him. It’s fair to say that’s the plan at the moment,” Scott told Nine.

Essendon legend Matthew Lloyd said on 3AW radio Ablett was not an automatic selection for the Cats first-up given their forward line’s impressive form.

And while Patrick Dangerfield acknowledged the challenge in integrating Ablett, he said there was a reason he was the greatest of all time.

“I dare say it’s a conversation we will have at some stage,” he said. “The competition is hard enough when you are well prepared versus coming in off no games.

“That will be the challenge for us at the moment, to make sure he is as match fit as he can be without playing games and it’s a really difficult one because the only way to do it is to play and that being said he’s the ‘GOAT’ for a reason.”

Ablett has been completing monster sessions with Mackie in Geelong and is confident he can hit the ground running.