An ugly, beautiful win
THIS might come as a shock to some of you.
But Sunday’s thrilling win over Fremantle would have been be more satisfying to most of the Geelong players than a 100-point margin.
Every team has a day where they are not at their best. And Geelong was nowhere near its best on Sunday. The game was horrendous. When you’re having a horrible day as a group you can hear the crowd getting into you every time there is a stuff up, bad kick, bad handball.
You can hear the murmur and the carry on.
To get over the line on the back of that, it really is one of the best feelings.
As a player you don’t realise how ugly the game is at the time. It’s only when you review it that you see it.
Speaking to Patrick Dangerfield, some of the first words that came out of his mouth was that it was an ugly win but sometimes that’s just how you have got to do it.
You can’t underestimate the importance of winning ugly.
Full credit to Fremantle, they were fantastic. But they will always keep you in the game because they are not a high-scoring team.
Even with three players down, including captain Joel Selwood, and playing poorly, Geelong would have felt all through that last quarter that it would be able to reel in the Dockers.
Those types of wins gives the young guys plenty of confidence and reminds everyone in the footy world that you can’t afford to take your foot off for a second.
The young guys get that feeling of what it’s like and what it takes to come back from that sort of margin playing terrible footy.
You don’t want to go into games thinking you will be OK being 34 points down, but it’s nice to have that confidence that the players can find a way to fight it out.
One of the young guys who will take heaps of confidence from the last quarter will be James Parsons.
He’s a young kid who stood up when the chips were down.
He booted two goals in a couple of minutes and didn’t get overawed by the situation. In fact, he embraced it.
And you love it when young kids embrace those situations because it shows they have got good character.
Parsons has an opportunity to cement himself in the team in the next few weeks.
Cory Gregson is out for the year, while Lincoln McCarthy, Nakia Cockatoo and Brandan Parfitt are all battling injury.
It leaves Geelong’s small forward stocks seriously depleted.
When those guys start to filter back into the team I’d like to see Geelong have Tom Hawkins surrounded by a fleet of small forwards.
We all know the forward line has been hit and miss this year and we have also seen they have had problems defending space at the MCG.
Richmond has done it to much success around Jack Riewoldt and I think it can work for Geelong, too.
It may not be until Round 22 against Collingwood that we will be able to see it, but I’d like to see Chris Scott roll the dice and give it a go.