BACKS TO THE FORE
Cats primed for slick Dee-fence
GEELONG will look to break down a “confident” Melbourne defence on Sunday as it aims to record its third consecutive win.
The Demons are one of only two teams to have conceded fewer than 200 points in the opening three rounds of the year, and Cats forward coach Corey Enright said his group of players would be up for the challenge of creating enough opportunities to kick a winning score.
“Across the board looking at their team, they seem to be pretty consistent with the personnel they have had for the first three weeks and it looks like they have a fair bit of confidence with their defensive structure,” Enright said of the Demons.
“They obviously have (Steven) May and (Jake) Lever and (Adam) Tomlinson taking the key posts and doing a really good job, and their high backs can get in the game and attack and support.
“So they will be hard to play against and hard to score against, but on the flip side you have to be careful of them on the rebound.
“They seem to be pretty confident with the way they are going about it and look like they will be hard to break down defensively, so how we move the ball and create opportunities in our front half will go a long way to us winning the game.”
Young forward Brad Close looms as the most likely replacement for the injured Francis Evans, while Sam Menegola is all but set to return after an AC injury.
Enright said while the everchanging look of Geelong’s forward mix was far from ideal, he was confident the Cats had the right structures in place to allow anyone to come in and play their role for the team.
“It is clearly not ideal after training a lot of your pre-season with the personnel you were hoping to be there and then they aren’t there,” he said.
“But for us at the moment it is about trying to structure up and give the guys that are there the best chance to impact and play the footy we would like to.
“So we are trying to manufacture something a little bit and it is not our ideal structure but the guys we have got available we have full confidence in.
“We are confident with the guys we have got coming in but at the moment we are changing faces a lot in the front half and that has been out of our control so we just deal with what is in front of us.
“All the guys understand how we want to play though and we had great success last year bringing people into the team who could fill the spot and do the job, and that is what we are asking again.”
GEELONG wingman Isaac Smith has been fined $1500 for kneeing former Hawthorn teammate Daniel Howe in the Easter Monday game.
The two were involved in a heated clash in the first quarter when Howe delivered a forceful bump on Smith.
Unhappy with the treatment, he retaliated by dropping his knees into the Hawthorn tagger.
Smith challenged the misconduct fine but the tribunal upheld the verdict on Friday.
Smith told News Corp he had agonised leaving Hawthorn to join Geelong.
“Hawthorn will always be important to me,” he said.
“I have got a lot of friends there, not only in the playing group, but also in different levels around the club, and for a time it felt like you were going behind their back.
“But ultimately it fell to this (Geelong) and it just felt right.”
Sydney youngster Nick Blakey escaped with a $2000 fine for rough conduct against Essendon’s Zac Merrett in Thursday’s threepoint win at the SCG.
Match review officer Michael Christian ruled Blakey’s offence was careless conduct, low impact and body contact.
Essendon’s Kyle Langford was also fined $2000 for rough conduct against Chad Warner.