GEELONG will lick their wounds and attempt to quickly move on from a missed chance to lock in a top-four berth in a shock loss to St Kilda on Saturday night.
The Cats let a 33-point half-time lead slip in Saturday night's loss to the Saints at Marvel Stadium, with a win to have guaranteed a double chance in September.
SAINTS v CATS Full match coverage and stats
Geelong sit fourth on 56 points behind Sydney (64), Port Adelaide (60) and GWS (60) and just ahead of Brisbane (54).
It means they must beat West Coast at GMHBA Stadium next Saturday to guarantee a top-four spot, while a home qualifying final appears unlikely.
Coach Chris Scott indicated he hadn't needed to spell out to his players just how costly the 16.11 (107) to 14.5 (89) defeat had been.
"Oh, they're not morons and the missed opportunity bit - clearly we're disappointed. We knew what was at stake," Scott said.
"So the question now is, how much do you dwell on that missed opportunity, as opposed to how much you focus on the opportunity that's in front of us? And that's very clear too now.
"So look, we know what we have to do.
"Everyone's had their moments in terms of missed opportunity. I don't know of a team in the comp that hasn't been ruing certain sections of the season.
"As much as anything, the challenge seems to be not allowing that to snowball. So that's what we'll be focusing on."
Scott insisted Geelong would quickly move on to the Eagles game, where any win would seal a top-four berth.
"We have a choice," he said.
"We can sort of accept that this is a huge blow to us, or we can move forward really quickly and reinforce what we can do, which I think is our likely course of action.
"Not many teams have a chance to be sitting here with one game to go in the season thinking 'if we win that, we're gonna finish top four'."
Geelong were overrun and made to look slow by St Kilda but Scott pointed to the first half as inspiring belief they too could play fast football.
He insisted his charges hadn't experienced a fadeout and labelled the Saints "Marvel specialists" after Geelong's only game at the Docklands venue this season.
"When we were able to go forward in that third quarter in particular, they just kept marking it. So that bit's a bit out of character for us," he said.
"And there were some other bits that were a bit out of character. But a lot of it was them being on fire and us not being able to quell it."
