Pressure mounts on Geelong as Chris Scott’s detractors line up
James Button concluded his history of the Geelong Football Club with a comment from football manager Steve Hocking. “Don’t try to over-explain what happened here,” Hocking told him “There’s a mystery to it. Leave a bit of that mystery. Trying to explain it in words is like trying to catch the wind.”
The language emanating from football clubs these days is softer, almost mystical. The days of the autocratic, raving lunatic driving a team towards a premiership are thankfully long past. You’d lose your young players if you carried on like that now. You’d probably have the police at your door. These days, many of the senior coaches speak like yoga instructors. Along with their players, they’ve embraced mindfulness and meditation. The key words at football clubs are “connection” and “vulnerability”. It’s the antitheses of how the previous generations of Australian men were raised, taught and coached. It’s refreshing, and it clearly works.
The emphasis on “spirit” is also significant. All the recent premiers have tapped into it. In a competition ostensibly designed to be even, having a point of difference is crucial. Increasingly, that hook is cultural, some would say spiritual. It’s fitting that the book chronicling the Bulldogs’ premiership was titled A Wink from the Universe. Last year’s premiers had the mantra “Head, heart and gut”. Nathan Buckley, one of the most ruthless, driven footballers imaginable, has spoken of the shift away from being a “chest-beating club”.
Even the Geelong sides of the pre-Chris Scott era embraced it. In 2007, Max Rooke found an old flask made of animal hide in an African secondhand shop. He gathered his teammates and asked them to write down their dreams and goals. He then lit a candle, set the papers alight, tipped the ashes into the flask and waxed it shut. “It was our religion,” he said years later, echoing George Costanza in the Opposites episode. “It was something to believe in.” Rooke went and became a human wrecking ball. The Cats barely lost a game for five years.
Scott would probably think that’s a load of old rope. He’s blunt, guarded and very literal. He’s not one for esotericism. He doesn’t bear his soul to the footballing public. And nor should he have to. He’s a footy coach, not a shaman. But his detractors are starting to line up. To many, he’s a moaner, the architect of a stodgy game plan, a coach who haemorrhages talent. One ABC columnist recently made him out to be the most miserable sod since Andrew Bolt. His defence-first game style has never resonated with the fan base. His decision not to play Rhys Stanley last Friday night was pilloried. He answers every question on the back foot. His Krakatoa act in the box is widely mocked.
Those in his corner point out that his peers regularly rate him as the most difficult to coach against. They note that he has made do with virtually no high draft picks, yet manages to put his club in a position to contend nearly every year. Besides, they stress, it’s not his fault the Cats finished top and drew the fourth-placed team in front of their own rabid crowd. It’s not his fault that Gary Rohan missed a shot from 10 metres out. It’s not his fault that Tom Hawkins, the All Australian
full forward, kicked four behinds. It’s not his fault his experienced players spent the opening quarter tripping over one another.
Whatever your take, unlike the last four or five premiers, there has been no sense of destiny with this Geelong side. They’ve never been totally convincing, never really caught the wave, never really had a hook. For eight years, they’ve been the backdrop to some far more interesting footy stories. They’ve been like the movie star burned in Gordan Lightfoot’s three-way script. On Friday night, like never before in Chris Scott’s tenure, they stand revealed. What exactly is this side? Does Scott simply not have the cattle? Or do they, as one footy writer wrote last year, “need to feel the blade against their skin before finally getting themselves out of football bed”?
Scott described the immediate aftermath to last Friday’s game as “a period of mourning”. As always, everything is magnified when you lose a qualifying final. The sky hangs a little lower. The coach is a twit. The season is a waste. The elimination final winner looms as some sort of super opponent.
They’ve been here before. In 2017, after losing to Richmond in the qualifying final, the coach presented as a broken man at the press conference. He looked bereft of answers. He looked as exhausted as his players. Their bogey side the Swans were on the mother of all rolls and lay in wait the following week.
But Scott flipped the script. Dangerfield went to full forward and unleashed one of the games of his career. His teammates played with a vim, personified by Tom Stewart’s solo effort, that had been conspicuously absent the week before. It was one of those Geelong performances that provided a tantalising glimpse of what they’re capable of. The following week, they reverted to type – asleep at the post and routed by quarter-time.
Scott doesn’t need any African flasks tonight. He doesn’t need to pore over the weather charts. But he needs to shake things up. He needs to be more unpredictable. He needs to reconnect this side with its supporter base – a supporter base, mind you, that has had it too good for too long, but which is increasingly fed up with his ducks and drakes and his conservative approach. What he really needs, of course, is a win. He needs a win more than any time since 2011. The most competitive of men, the very thought of a straight-sets exit, the first by a ladder leader since 1983, would be eating him up inside.