Having played in two grand finals in a row in 2005 and 2006, I know it’s harder to start the season in fine form and with your best players out on the paddock when you’ve played deep into the previous year’s finals series.
Delayed starts to the pre-season led to pretty bad starts to the real thing. We were carrying blokes with injuries in the early part and that’s just not the way you want to go in a new year.
This time round, we haven’t had those feelings. We haven’t had blokes to carry into the season, and that’s made it a lot easier for us to come out and beat a team like Hawthorn as we did on Saturday night.
I think the public underestimates the impact that a late start to pre-season training can have on a side.
You look at teams like Melbourne, or any team that didn’t play in the finals – they’ve got a significant advantage with the extra time for training and development of their younger players.
Obviously you need football ability to win games, but all that extra training makes it easier for fitness and match fitness.
And you can see the opposite impact on last year’s grand finalists at the moment.
Hawthorn looks like it's a little bit vulnerable at the moment because the Hawks have got so many injuries, but I don’t think that’s going to mean they’re going to have a bad season. They’re just going to have a slower start to this year than they did to the last.
And even though Geelong has started with two wins, the Cats' form hasn’t been fantastic.
The competition is getting a little bit more even, but they are still definitely the two best teams going around. It’s way too early to say the Hawks and the Cats have fallen back to the field.
You’ll get a true mark of how everyone’s really going by about round 10, when the hardened, gritty teams really keep winning even when they’re not in good form.
By that stage, you’ll see some teams drop off and the other teams just really grind out the rest of the season with their form and their game plan.
Up in Sydney, we’re very sheltered from public opinion and what the experts are saying. We don’t have football in our faces all the time, so we are a little bit isolated from it.
However, you can definitely get your football fix up here if you go searching for it – you’ve got the websites and the like.
After round one, we were embarrassed as a football club and as a team that people were writing us off so early, having performed like we did against St Kilda.
Last weekend was more about our playing group getting back a little bit of respect – and there is no better way to do it than playing against and beating the reigning premier.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
