WE’LL DO IT OUR WAY, SAYS DANGER
STAR DEFENDS CATS AFTER FINALS EXIT
STAR midfielder Patrick Dangerfield says he is confident Geelong can be competitive again in 2022 as it starts the process of responding to another preliminary final loss.
But having fallen at the penultimate stage again, Dangerfield has hit back at critics of the Cats list profile, saying the club just does things differently to others in the AFL. Geelong had 11 players aged 30 or older in the team that fell to Melbourne by 83 points on Friday and looks set to take most of that group into 2022.
Dangerfield (right) said while disappointed in their performance against the Demons, the Cats felt they were on the right path to have another shot at success next year.
“We are clearly disappointed but we have been in this situation before and the important thing is not to splinter or fracture, it is to look at ways to get better and we are determined to do that,” he said.
“It (the age demographic of Geelong’s list) has been spoken about since Chris (Scott) arrived and since I arrived, and that is 10-plus (years) for Chris and for me it has been 10 years.
“We just do it differently to other clubs and that is not to say it is right or wrong, it is just how we set up our list and bring in the players that we do and recruit the players that we do.
“So that is our way of doing things and we have been a very successful team for a long period of time and we have the fire there, we just didn’t quite execute the way that we would have liked to.
“Every team has their own recipe for how they build their list and compete and I would say ours has been pretty competitive for a long period of time.”
Dangerfield was quick to shut down any talk of the virus that hit several Cats players in
the days leading into their preliminary final against Melbourne as a reason for Geelong’s substandard performance.
“It (the virus) was real, but it is not the reason we lost the game, I will make that perfectly clear,” he said.
“We were outplayed in almost every facet of the game so the reality is it was real but it was not the reason we lost.
“It is certainly not the reason we lost, we were outplayed clear and simple, and it doesn’t really require a deeper dive than that because Melbourne was too good for us.”
Dangerfield was part of a group of Geelong players and staff that returned to Victoria on Sunday after being away from their families since the end of the home-and-away season.
He is likely to have surgery later this week on the hand that plagued him during finals.