‘REGGIE TIME’ ON GEELONG’S SIDE IN FLAG RUN
DURING the toughest moments of Geelong’s finals run, a saying Zach Tuohy named for himself got the Cats through.
Given the moniker ‘Reggie Time’, Geelong kept calm and turned the tide during times in games where the opposition would have momentum and put the Cats under pressure.
Being able to get through ‘Reggie Time’ and win the momentum back was seen as a key as the Cats broke through to win the premiership.
Universally known at the Cattery as ‘Reg’, Tuohy himself stood tall under that pressure in the nerve-racking qualifying final win over Collingwood, when he won a crucial contest in the final term that led to Gary Rohan’s final term iconic pack mark and goal.
Former Geelong rookie
Paul Tsapatolis revealed the crucial moments of the game as “whenever another team gets momentum and it is just recognising it and addressing it”.
It gave the Cats confidence they could weather any storm and get the game back on their terms.
“There didn’t seem like even in the finals there was any chance we would lose, even the Collingwood game. We had this thing called
‘Reggie Time’, Zach Tuohy named it after himself,” Tsapatolis said.
“It is just part of the game and don’t stress, we know our momentum will come.”
Having sat in team meetings as Geelong was building a 16-game winning streak that would culminate in a grand final triumph, Tsapatolis said the Cats’ focus was so strong they didn’t have a clue how many games they had won, with the group always focused on the next match.
“I don’t even know how many games we had won straight, it might have been 10 or 11 and we didn’t know until someone mentioned it in a meeting and Tom Stewart turned around and said ‘I didn’t even know we had won that many straight’,” he said.
“Chris Scott wasn’t even mentioning how many games we had won in a row, it was just always a focus on this week, focus on this week.
“Then the grand final came and obviously it is the biggest game but we just treated it like a another week and that was the mentality the whole year.”