Speaking after the 86-point thumping, Thompson disagreed with the theory that successful sides need an occasional loss to keep them grounded.
“I don’t think there’s any good time to have a loss. I would have preferred to win the game. It happened so easily for Collingwood and we just caved in. To lose by 86 points was a bit of a surprise,” Thompson said.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve lost a game and a long time since we’ve lost by 86 points. It gives us a chance to work on a few things. We’ve got the Blues in eight days and we’ll go after them as hard as we can.”
After the narrow win over the Magpies in last year’s preliminary final and the thumping on Friday night, Thompson conceded Collingwood was one of few teams in the competition to have Geelong’s measure.
“Some teams play certain styles against others that work and Collingwood seems to be the team that plays well against us. That said, I think we were at fault as much as Collingwood deserve the credit,” he said.
“We didn’t have enough winners and it was almost a waste of time trying things. You almost knew nothing was going to work. A night to remember.”
Collingwood had 85 tackles to Geelong’s 49 and the Cats coach said his team had to learn to deal with the extra physical attention they were receiving.
“Sides have done it the last three or four weeks. They come at us, they tackle us, they bore in at us and try to unsettle us and we let teams do it...sides will continue to do it all year and I’m not sure we can take it all year. It gets to a point where we’ve got to give it back,” he said.
