Ablett set team-first approach

GEELONG coach Chris Scott will not be expecting miracles when Gary Ablett squares off against his former Gold Coast teammates for the first time tomorrow.

The Suns return to Metricon Stadium — after the venue was used for the Commonwealth Games — to host a Cats side featuring their departed skipper.

Turf has been relaid at the venue and the Cats will inspect the surface today when they arrive on the Gold Coast.

Ablett, 34, has averaged a team-high 29 possessions in six matches in his second coming as a Cat, without threatening to scale the previous heights of a career including two Brownlow Medals and six best and fairest awards for the Cats and Suns.

“We expect him to keep building his form, keep building his match fitness and working his way into the season,” Scott said yesterday.

“We don’t expect him, and I don’t think we really need him, to go out there and get a whole lot of the ball and be best on ground necessarily.

“In fact, he could be best on ground with 20 touches instead of 40 if he plays the way he can play and uses the ball really well and helps our team on both sides of the ball.

“I know he has been a 40possession plus player who just accumulates, and I think he’ll have games like that, but we’re not trying to set the game up for that to be the case.”

The sixth-placed Cats are coming off a dour 28-point home win over bottom team Carlton in a spectacle labelled by Scott as “horrible”.

He is expecting a tough, contested affair against a Suns outfit that has won three of their opening nine matches — all on the road — under firstyear coach Stuart Dew, who did his coaching apprenticeship at Sydney with John Longmire.

“I wouldn’t be so disrespectful to just say Stuart Dew has taken what he helped build at Sydney and tried to replicate it at the Gold Coast,” Scott said.

“But some of the things that industry insiders like about the Swans — a hard contested team, really good transitioning team, high work rate team — we’re seeing at the Suns as well.”