Geelong still the team to beat in 2016

Relax, Geelong fans. You’re going to be fine.

Round 14 looked to be a ho-hum type of round once the Adelaide versus North Melbourne clash was dispensed with on Thursday night. So it had been progressing with an awful game of football between Collingwood and Fremantle on Friday, one that wasn’t much better on Saturday with Richmond beating Brisbane, and GWS never being extended against Carlton.

But, the bye rounds do have a habit of throwing up funny results, at least anecdotally if not statistically. The different psychologies of going into a bye or resuming from one are on display, in a way that few can predict.

Geelong, heading into the bye, and St Kilda, coming off their break, turned in an underdog classic at Etihad on Saturday night, to produce a result no-one saw coming.

Some teams appear to set themselves for a big game before their week off, particularly as underdog, to leave everything out there before their break as Adelaide and the Saints did against West Coast and Carlton respectively in Round 12.

Others seem to have one eye on the break already, and either don’t turn up or fall away badly late in matches like we saw from Port against Fremantle and Melbourne against Sydney in Round 13, or in the case of the appalling Dockers on Friday night.

Coming off a bye can be equally challenging. Some teams come back sharp and hungry, as we saw from St Kilda and Collingwood this week. Others are flat and fumbly, which Richmond was early on Saturday and the Crows were in stages on Thursday night.

The potential for compromised results is further enhanced with teams unevenly matched with breaks through the bye period.

North Melbourne were up against it as it was with injuries and a tough draw over the last month or so, but that’s football. They didn’t then need to get lumped with travelling off back-to-back six day breaks to take on an opponent coming off the bye. That’s just not cricket.

It’s an easily sortable mess that AFL will surely fix next year. Teams coming off the bye play each other. Simple.

But we digress. Back to Geelong.

Upset results are a part of football, and certainly a part of bye rounds. Roar editor Josh Elliott calls them the full moons of football. The Cats have been the popular premiership favourites over the last month, after wins over fellow contenders GWS, North Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs, each victory more impressive than the last.

It was only human nature that they would relax coming up against a lesser side after getting through such a tough run unscathed.

We expect our sportspeople and the teams we follow to be on their sharpest competitive edge every time they take the field, but it’s simply not possible. Are you at your absolute best every minute of every day in your chosen profession?

It’s often noted in AFL, and no doubt all sports, how much faster finals are, how much harder, how much more intense. There’s less time and space, and physicality often carries more weight than a pretty move.

If we accept this to be the case, then we must also acknowledge that the pendulum has to swing the other way too. If every team and game was played at finals-like intensity, then there would actually be no such thing. As Syndrome said in The Incredibles, if everyone is super, then no-one is.

Of course, the problem for Geelong is they’ve now lost three of these type of games, to go with earlier losses to Collingwood in Round 9 and Carlton in Round 10. It’s far from ideal, and a good team needs to be more professional than dropping too many of them.

The losses themselves, while extremely unsatisfying for fans and a poor reflection on the players and coaches, aren’t a big deal in terms of rating how good the Cats are. Better to rate the best against the best.

Four of Hawthorn’s six home-and-away losses last year were against non-finalists. Thinking back to Carlton in 1995, they only lost two matches for the year, frightful back-to-back thumpings, and both to bottom sides.

Many is the year when the eventual premier loses one or two games against sides that are taking holidays in September, leaving those players to rue what might have been as they lie on a beach in Bali or trek through Nepal.

Where these losses could prove costly for Geelong is in the fight for top two and top-four spots, in a season of evenness that we’ve possibly never seen before. There is a strong chance that six teams could be on ten wins at the end of Round 15, with Hawthorn on 11 and West Coast on nine.

My personal projections, allowing for unexpected results, indicate the realistic potential for six sides to end up on either 16 or 17 wins for the season. Perhaps Geelong will have given up more games to non-finalists than any other side in the top eight.

Having tipped over to three losses against poor sides rather than two could very well cost a home final, and may mean two trips to Sydney in September, rather than not leaving Victoria at all.

But, here’s the question.

What position would you rather be in? Geelong, who appears to have a mental weakness against lower sides, but hasn’t lost to a fellow finalist since Round 2, having beaten five of them in a row since then? Or Hawthorn and North Melbourne, who have only lost three and four games respectively, but have repeatedly failed tests against their fellow contenders, with all losses against fellow finalists?

Give me the Cats, in that scenario.

Geelong still has to play Sydney, as well as Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs again in the run home, with all three matches to be played down at Simonds Stadium. Their other five games, including the last four of the home-and-away rounds, are against bottom ten sides.

If they win all eight matches, and they’ll start favourite in all of them, then they will have locked up a top two spot. The funny thing is they’ll probably also finish in the top two if they only lose one game, as long as it’s to a non-finalist.

If they are going to suffer a loss ‘they have to have’ in the run home, which is often prescribed to teams on long winning runs heading into September, then their Achilles heel may actually help them. Richmond at the MCG or Melbourne, who beat them at Simonds last year, loom as likely prospects.

Everyone involved with the Cats would rather have beaten St Kilda on Saturday night, but it didn’t happen. Regardless, they’re still the team to beat.