On Saturday night, Steve Johnson and his ladder-leading Giants take on the third-placed Cats, giving him another chance to mix it against a few of his old pals.
Stevie J is relishing the challenge, quite happily giving advice to Geelong captain Joel Selwood: “I think he should probably take a week off and definitely be right for the following week,” he joked.
On a more serious note, Johnson amped up the pressure for his team, saying, “We want to set a really strong example that we’re a competitive footy team that you don’t really want to come up against.
“We hope that this is a really hard contest, a finals-like game…”
While players often say they expect it to be a finals-type game, I’ve heard few say that they want it to be.
So why would Johnson want it to be a finals like game? Maybe he’s well aware that if it’s played like a hard finals game, his old team wouldn’t cope too well.
Geelong has won just two of eight finals in the last five years, which hands Chris Scott a 75 per cent losing record in the post-season over the last half decade. Again and again, when finals-like intensity is brought to a contest, Geelong go to water.
Earlier this season when it was announced Chris Scott had been re-signed, Brian Cook faced questions about his expectations of Scott over the next two years.
When asked by Mark Robinson whether it would be fair to say there was an internal expectation for Chris Scott to deliver a flag in the ninth year of the coach’s tenure, Cook replied there probably wasn’t.
This goes to the heart of Geelong’s finals failure in the last half decade; there seems to be no internal expectation of finals success and no communication outwardly from any at the club that finals performances are what’s really valued.
Following the re-signing of Chris Scott as the club’s coach until 2019, Cook has not made it at all clear what the expectations on Scott are. Does Scott have clauses in his contract regarding finals victories? Does the club CEO expect Geelong to win a flag or at least make a grand final by 2019?
It was a fair question to the CEO of a club that has seriously struggled in finals recently. Cook’s reply was extremely underwhelming.
For a club that’s clearly recruited for short-term success, Geelong members have a right to know what the criteria for success are.
Since 2011, Geelong ranks ninth in the league for finals won, and considering three of those seasons contained top four finishes, it’s a damning statistic.
Geelong’s hierarchy need to express their want and desire to succeed in finals. The team simply has to be better in such games if it’s to be taken seriously.
Despite the fact it’s not a final on Saturday night, the Geelong players and coach Scott have an opportunity to display how much they value such contests by stepping up under pressure to win. Stevie J wants Joel Selwood to miss the game and for the game to be played like a final because he thinks Geelong will lose.
Recent history suggests Johnson is right. I think he’s right and the wider footy world thinks he’s right. It’s the perfect opportunity for Geelong and Chris Scott to prove us all wrong.
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