Friday Night Forecast: Cats-Pies finally a game for the neutrals!

The Pies host the Cats in this week’s Friday night football, and it’s shaping up as a beauty.

I told you we’d persist, and look where we are now. A genuine, meaningful Friday night showdown between two sides looking to scrape their way into this year’s final eight.

It’ll be the fifth week out of six that we’ve seen the Pies or Blues open the round, which is an interesting, if not particularly meaningful, wrinkle.

First up, how did we go with last week’s forecast?

Prediction: Collingwood def. Carlton by 24 points
Actual: Collingwood def. Carlton by 75 points

A lot of inches have been dedicated to psychoanalysis of Carlton’s player this week, after they again defied the laws of nature by turning into pointy orange objects for most of last week’s match up. If you can’t get up for your coach in his 70-odd year record breaking game, well, when can you?

The Pies, meanwhile, are doing their pressure thing, and got a nice lift in their kicking efficiency by virtue of their opponent’s lack of ticker.

Here’s this week’s Friday Night Forecast.

Geelong Cats @ Collingwood Magpies
Friday, 8 May
Bouncedown: 7:50PM (EST)
MCG, Melbourne, Victoria

Yee hah! A Friday night game that genuine neutrals can get excited about!

It’s the first match up of teams coming off wins (that weren’t against the clear 18th placed team in another country) the previous week!

Another crazy fact! In 2008, the Cats went 21-1 in the regular season, blowing out everyone by ten goals or more. Who was the one loss? Collingwood. On a Friday night. Meaningful? Probably not. Awesome stat? Hell yeah.

Alright, calm down. It’s forecast time.

Collingwood are confounding pre-season expectations, and in starting 4-1 are building a compelling case for a top eight spot come the second week of September. I for one expected them to be towards the bottom end of the ladder, given the quality of the players that have exited in recent years and the inexperience that replaced them.

Coach Nathan Buckley and President Eddie McGuire threw the F word out before the season – and no, Eddie wasn’t referring to that F’ing equalisation or F’ing COLA or those F’ing state academies – a statement which was ridiculed as pandering to the fan base.

Let’s not get too carried away, though. The Pies have beaten Brisbane, St Kilda and Carlton thus far, with a win against Essendon in the wet their sole scalp in the year to date. Would beating Geelong, who finished third on the ladder last season, count as scalp number two?

The Cats are unravelling, having been sucked into the growth and decay cycle they had managed to avoid for close to a decade. A few years ago, you could point to close to a dozen players down at Geelong and say they’d be first choice in any side in the competition.

Now? Maybe Joel Selwood, Tom Hawkins and Harry Taylor. That’s it, no?

Both sides have negative disposal differentials on the season to date (-7.2 PG for Collingwood, -25.8 for Geelong), while the Pies have tended to play more on the inside of the contest relative to the Cats. It will be an interesting match up from a tactical standpoint, and who can play their style of footy will likely be the victor.

Either way, I reckon this one’s a beauty, and will be close for much of the night. But the Pies will improve to 3-0 on Fridays to start the season, with Collingwood to win by 12 points.

That’s my Friday Night Forecast. What’s yours?