A BITTERLY disappointed Chris Scott believes Geelong must "go back to the start" after a demoralising 61-point preliminary final loss to Adelaide.
Scott resisted prompts to publicly delve into whether he considered elements of 2017 to be a success.
While he promised the club would waste no time in moving on from its second consecutive preliminary final loss, he conceded there were no guarantees the Cats would automatically take the next step in 2018.
"We will look forward really quickly, we'll do the requisite work in review and do everything we can to improve, but I hope that no one associated with Geelong falls into the trap of thinking that we were close again and just have to improve a little bit to go the next step," Scott said.
"The cold, hard reality is, we've got to go back to the start again, and there are some really good football teams with a lot of talent who didn't even make the eight this year who I suspect will get better.
"I wish we could just fast-forward to the prelim final next year, but we've got so much work in front of us to even make the finals before we even start talking about how we're going to improve at the pointy end of the series."
Five things we learned from the first preliminary final
Scott said he didn't want emotion to cloud immediate assessments of what went wrong, or where the Cats needed to improve in order to progress.
He pledged they would leave no stone unturned in their quest to give themselves another chance at a Grand Final after last playing in one in 2011.
"I'm happy to say there's no one more disappointed than our players and our coaching staff and Geelong people internally," he said.
Every Cat rated from the first preliminary final
"I know that everyone that supports us externally will be disappointed as well, but our job is not to let the emotion impact our decision making negatively.
"The most important thing is you give yourself a chance.
"We're bitterly disappointed we didn't take it, but we're going to fight tooth and nail to get ourselves to this position again."
Scott said the Cats' picked a terrible night to butcher the ball when facing the "team that punishes you the most on turnovers", with the Crows capitalising too often on their mistakes.
WATCH Chris Scott's full post-match press conference
When looking at their season as a whole, he did say the Cats' lack of continuity – compared to how the Crows possessed a forward line that has been "almost exactly the same every week" – hurt them when it counted.
"We probably thought that we had a few holes right throughout the course of the season that we were always battling to fill," he said.
"There was one stage there where we played three debutants and we had eight or nine for the year, and a lot of players used across our list.
"While it's a credit to our players that they were able to get us to finish second on the ladder … it would be much more preferable to be playing 25, 26 players across the season instead of 36, 37."
